Mental Health - “Prayer in the Night” with Tish Warren
Shownotes
God is not afraid of our exhaustion, grief, and pain. Honest prayers of lament draw us into deeper connection with God and help us cultivate a greater awareness of our needs. As a culture, however, we have withdrawn into numbing habits of distraction. Even the Church often serves as a place of escape rather than a comfortable place to bring our burdens. Where does God meet us in the empty space of deep sorrow and pain? How can we give ourselves more permission to grieve in our personal prayers?
In this episode, Chris and Eddie are joined by Tish Harrison Warren, author of Prayer in the Night. When Warren found herself at a place filled with too many questions to bear, she began to write about the empty space of night and how we can present the weariness of our souls to God. Warren discusses prayer as communion with the presence of God, a practice that shapes who we are, how we believe, and our vision of the world. We hope this episode moves you toward peace and comfort as Warren illustrates ways to draw near to God in the midst of uncertainty and fear.
Series Info:
All too often, Christians who experience mental illness or adverse mental health conditions are not given proper care and consideration within the Church. Well-meaning pastors and congregation members often bypass the seriousness of these issues with suggestions to pray harder or dig deeper into scripture. Many Christians fight silent battles within the Church walls, facing heaps of shame that keep them from seeking the help they desperately need. How can the Church create a safe space for raw honesty and vulnerability in the midst of suffering and trauma? How can Christians shift their language around mental health and wellbeing to wrap loving arms around those who feel silenced by the stigma of defective faith?
In this series, we will engage with authors, priests, and theologians who understand the complexities of mental health issues from their own experiences and research. Throughout these conversations, our guests equip listeners with freedom and the hope that God is not afraid of our struggles, thought patterns, or fears. Join us as we seek to normalize the intersection of mental health and faith with empathy and hope.
Resources:
Follow Tish Warren on the web:
https://tishharrisonwarren.com
Check out Tish Warren’s book “Prayer in the Night” here:
https://tishharrisonwarren.com/prayer-in-the-night
Follow Tish Warren on social media:
https://www.facebook.com/TishHarrisonWarrenAuthor
Full Transcript:
Eddie Rester 0:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:01
I'm Chris McAlily. Welcome to The Weight podcast.
Eddie Rester 0:04
We're thankful that you're with us. Today we have Tish Warren. Tish Warren, a few years ago, wrote a great book, "The Liturgy of the Ordinary," helping us connect life and practice kind of practical parts of life. But she's written a new book that I think is an amazing gift to this moment that we're in.
Chris McAlilly 0:22
If you don't know Tish'ss work, she's a priest in the Anglican Church of North America. She's a Writer in Residence at the Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She's written all kinds of things. I think this book, though, dives into a kind of crisis of faith that it's not just there for pastors or priests, but I think it's something that a lot of folks face, whether they're a part of the church or not.
Eddie Rester 0:46
Right. The book is called "Prayer in the Night for Those Who Work or Watch or Weep." In it, she tackles the weariness, the exhaustion, of grief and pain and loss. It comes out of a moment in her own life, a year of overwhelming loss and pain, but also her journey into a deeper life of faith and the role that prayer and the practices of the ancient church played in discovering a deeper, richer faith.
Chris McAlilly 1:18
I think we've all come to moments in life where we don't have words to conjure up, to give, to meet the realities that we're facing, particularly the difficult realities of life, especially when loss compounds or grief upon grief upon grief.
Eddie Rester 1:34
I think that's been the story of the last year. It's just things have compounded through the pandemic and politics and the things have piled on, and we don't know what to do with them.
Chris McAlilly 1:46
Yeah, I think if you struggled with whether God is to be trusted with some of the things that you've dealt with in your life, or whether the church has anything left to say to our culture, Tish is just a bright light. She's got a just a sweet spirit and a deep, rich intellect. And she's written a great book about how to pray as a craft learned from the wisdom tradition of the ancient church. So we hope that you enjoy the podcast today. This is an episode, as we've said before, worth sharing with others. So if you wouldn't mind, thinking of a friend as you're listening, maybe somebody that you know in your family that would benefit from this conversation. We appreciate it. If you can help folks find the podcast, like it, subscribe, and leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. We appreciate your listening.
Chris McAlilly 2:41
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 2:48
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 2:51
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 2:58
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:10
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:26
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:28
Well, we're so excited today to have Tish Warren on the podcast. Tish, thanks so much for joining us.
Tish Warren 3:36
Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Eddie Rester 3:38
I just want to say that your book from a couple years ago, "Liturgy of the Ordinary," was so refreshing a way to look at life and encounters with with God along the way. Thank you for that book a couple years ago. I feel like I need to say that out loud before we talk about the new book that's coming out
Chris McAlilly 3:58
The new book entitled "Prayer in the Night." We want to get to that. It's a heavy book in some ways about pain and grief and loss. But the question that I wanted to ask you about somebody was telling me that they heard a conversation with you recently. And you were a character in Dazed and Confused, is that right?
Tish Warren 4:19
[LAUGHS] I can't believe we're starting with this question. That's funny. Yeah, this just came like to light and now this may be the start of every podcast, I do this for the next three months. "Character" is a little strong. I was in the movie. I was an extra. I had no speaking part. So I don't know if I could be considered a character but I, you know, I hadn't seen the movie and even though... I mean, it came out when I was like 14, and it was like, I think it was overrated, like, I didn't see it.
Tish Warren 4:55
But after I said it on this podcast, he was sort of asking me about my life, and this came up in the context of explaining that I sort of inhabited multiple different communities. Because I was in this kind of, you know, conservative church, but I was in Austin, which is, like, a very blue city, and I was into theater, and I was in this movie. And so...
Chris McAlilly 5:19
I'm sorry to start there. That was funny, it was funny.
Tish Warren 5:22
It came up. And so I mentioned it, and then someone on the wonders of the internet, someone went and found the scene. And so I had never seen it. And so this week, I like saw myself as a 14-year-old. And I'm, like, totally in it. Like, I'm in multiple scenes. You can see me in the background. And so it was so cool. So I showed it to my family. And they, it was really great. They freaked out appropriately. Like I was a little worried that my kids and husband would be like, "eh," but they were like, "Oh, my God! That's you!" It was very... I was like, "Yes."
Eddie Rester 5:57
It's a classic. You are in one of the, you know, the classics as much as it can be a classic. I mean, it's kind of
Tish Warren 6:03
I'm in a cult movie. It's true. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 6:06
So the book is not about that. The book is about...
Tish Warren 6:11
That'll be my next one, my being an extra on "Dazed and Confused."
Eddie Rester 6:16
Before we dive into the book, tell us just a little bit about you,, your background and where you are, what you're up to these days.
Tish Warren 6:23
Besides the fact that I was in "Dazed and Confused?"
Eddie Rester 6:25
Besides that. I'm still getting money from that, right? They're still sending you a monthly check.
Tish Warren 6:31
Yeah, I remember, actually, they paid... It was like, because I was 14, like I said, so and it was a low budget film, but I worked for, like, nine hours, and I had to run the whole time. And I got, they had to pay me extra overtime because I was a kid. So I think I got like $100. And I remember being like, "I'm rich." Like, it was such a big deal to me.
Tish Warren 6:56
Anyway, um, so my background--I'm from Austin, Texas, as I stated before, and, I mean, what do you want to know? I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church and was a Christian kid. And somewhere along the way, I grew up knowing and loving Jesus but not knowing much about grace or sin. The only thing I knew about sin is not to do it. That was it. And so I didn't know much about sort of myself as a sinner. It was mostly a theoretical idea. Because I didn't do kind of the big sins that were on the "no" list, so. And I was a good kid, and I got good grades, and I was pretty obedient. So.
Tish Warren 7:53
So I didn't know much about sin, and therefore I didn't know much about grace. I didn't really understand grace, really, at all. I mean, grace is a mystery. And it's not understandable, but I didn't. I really besides "Amazing Grace," I didn't know much about what that was about. So in college, I, through a lot of questions, through a lot of theological questions and a lot of personal failure, or struggle, at least, I sort of, I mean, it's almost like a second conversion. I don't want to talk about it like that, because I don't really believe in second conversion, but it was my whole view of God and myself in the world changed through learning about grace.
Tish Warren 8:42
And I ended up becoming a Presbyterian, was in the PCA church for about 12 years, and then ended up eventually becoming an Anglican, through encountering church history. And, well, that's a long story, but through encountering liturgy, and then, and I, I'm ordained now as an Anglican priest, and I'm a writer. I have three children. So I'm a mom. And that's a little bit about me.
Eddie Rester 9:16
That's great.
Tish Warren 9:16
I don't know what else you want to know.
Chris McAlilly 9:17
You're talking in the book, "Prayer in the Night," about a year that just seemed awful. A few years back where you wrote a lot about losses and really that's where the book begins: with a miscarriage, the loss of your father, another miscarriage, kind of losing one home in Houston and moving to Pittsburgh.
Tish Warren 9:20
In Austin. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 9:22
Yeah, you're in Austin and moved to Pittsburgh. And it just, kind of the book really begins with loss and pain and grief, and kind of the way in which that, I don't know... that it collapses a certain way of putting the world together. But I think a lot of people can connect to maybe particularly at this moment in history, in American history, in 2021, on the other side of, you know, a lot of loss in the pandemic and everything else. I wonder, kind of, could you talk a little bit about kind of the place that you got to. One thing that you say about that year is you got to a place where you were a priest who couldn't pray. Talk about that.
Tish Warren 10:28
Yeah. So like you said, it was a hard year. And at the end of that year, not even at the end, it was sort of more towards the middle, I was exhausted. I was exhausted about... I was full of grief. And I just, I felt like prayer became difficult for me for two reasons. One was just there were too many questions. There were so many things that I wanted to know from God that I knew that I couldn't have answers for. And, but also, I think, even more profoundly, I didn't know if I trusted God, and I didn't know how to keep walking this way of faith, if I wasn't sure I could trust God.
Tish Warren 11:29
And so a lot of questions that came up were questions of what theologians would call theodicy, which is not the book "The Odyssey," it's theodicy, but it's, you guys know this, but for listeners, every time I've said that. People are like, "The Odyssey?" Like, "The Iliad?"
Eddie Rester 11:52
The old book?
Tish Warren 11:54
It's the question of how can God be good, totally good and completely powerful, and bad things still happen in the world. So that was sort of the part of the question, but I think fundamentally, underneath that was a question of, can God be trusted? And I had wrestled through that question before. I had a seminary degree. I had addressed it. I had read things on it. I had addressed it with other people, but I think something about hitting pain in the time I did, in the place I did, I didn't know how to bring my questions before God and I didn't know how to keep praying, when not only did my words fail me, which they did.
Tish Warren 12:54
I mean, I'm wordy. I'm a writer. I talk a lot. But there weren't words to voice what I was experiencing. And also I was, like I said, tired. I was exhausted. I was just, I was worn out from grief, I was soul weary. So not only did words fail me, but I think I didn't know how to keep walking in the way of Jesus with these questions about trust, and with these questions about God's goodness. And, you know, is God there? And he's just not responding to me or that he feels distant? Or is he not there at all? Well, I think I was wrestling with all of that in that year, and I sort of started the book in that place of questioning and uncertainty and yeah. So.
Chris McAlilly 14:00
Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple different, you know, things that come to mind. I mean, I think the losses that you describe, you know, I think they threw... I think they will throw readers back on their own losses. And in one of the places you go with it is just the way in which loss, all the kinds of losses that we experienced, and then the cumulative effect of loss upon loss upon loss or grief upon grief upon grief, kind of throw us into a place where we're exposed, and we kind of come to a recognition of just how vulnerable and fragile we are.
Chris McAlilly 14:41
And, you know, at one place, you mentioned the term "vulnerable" and that's one of those words that kind of is found its way into the culture through folks like Brene Brown and others, that it comes from a Latin word that means "to wound." We are woundable. And a lot of the book, it seems like, is coming to terms with that vulnerability. And then the you know, I think what's interesting is you kind of frame that in terms of this long Christian tradition of thinking about the dark night of the soul. Could you for folks who don't know, kind of, about that tradition, or kind of how you deploy it in the book? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tish Warren 15:23
Yeah, so I draw on the idea of night as a symbol. And there's two reasons for that. One, is because for me, during that time, nights themselves became really hard. This was part, I think, of prayer being hard for me is that it was hard for me to have empty space. Like, the vulnerability of sitting and being alone, it's often attributed to Pascal, Blaise Pascal, but I don't know if he actually said it. But something like, "all of the troubles of mankind come from the inability for a person to sit with their own thoughts silently in a room." And I couldn't. I felt like I couldn't do that. It was when I would slow down, grief and loss and questions and doubts would sort of be amplified. And I would, like, feel them. And I would start to cry or get angry and feel overwhelmed.
Tish Warren 16:25
And so I would just fill up that time. And this particularly came at night, because during the day, I could stay busy. But when evening came, and things would slow down, and I would put my kids to bed, there was this empty space. And I had to face that. The loss of my father, which happened at night. He died in the night. I had to face my own vulnerability. I had to face the reality that I couldn't perfectly protect my children. I couldn't keep... I didn't... I mean, this is part of the vulnerabilities: we don't know what's ahead. So I had experienced loss, and I couldn't guarantee there wasn't more coming. I just didn't know. And so sitting in night became a time of anxiety and fear and doubt, and also grief, which I think, honestly, grief is kind of the driver of anxiety in a lot of ways for a lot of us.
Chris McAlilly 17:33
And also to say more about that.
Tish Warren 17:35
We'll see, actually, CS Lewis said this, too, he said, in, I think it's in "A Grief Observed," he said, "I never knew how much grief felt like fear." I think that when we are in touch with the fact that the sad things, the bad things happen, and that God never, never guarantees that that they won't... I mean, you either go to some kind of warmed-over really prosperity gospel, which a lot of American church has, I think, even folks that aren't technically believers in the prosperity gospel. I think that we hold to an idea that, man if we just do our part, and if we, you know, can please God with our actions that he will keep any bad things from happening to us.
Chris McAlilly 18:30
Healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Tish Warren 18:32
Make our life work. Or we realize that God is completely unpredictable. And so he's good, but I think there can be a, I mean, I'll just speak for myself. In grief, I think there was the sense of, like, "not one more thing, Lord." like, "Can you just guarantee me that nothing else bad will happen?" And that, that's never a guarantee. And I think there's also, like, the good part of this is that grief humbles us. It shows us that we just are not in control of our lives. But unless we really believe that there's someone good who loves us, who sees us, who is in control of our lives, then man, there's a lot of, like, that's a place of anxiety. Realizing you're not in control of your life is an anxious place, can be an anxious place, if there's no one else that can be trusted, if there's no one guarding the door, as I say in the book.
Tish Warren 19:44
So I think that's part of it. And I do, like, one of the things that I bring out in my book is that I thought for a long time that grief was this sort of special experience of those who have profound catastrophic loss, right? So I never in a million years thought that I would write a book on grief or suffering because my life's been pretty good. Even 2017, it was a hard year, but all in all, I mean, I haven't, it was still quite... The grief that I suffered was ordinary, in some sense. It's what a lot of people walk through. I didn't, I wasn't, you know, widowed at an early age. I haven't experienced profound abuse. I didn't grow up in an abusive home. I haven't experienced poverty.
Tish Warren 20:44
But what I wanted to make space for, what I've sort of come to believe and realize, is that loss or grief or mourning is just, it's part of the human experience, from the best life to the worst. This is just part of living in a world that is broken. And we bump up against grief, in small ways, almost daily: broken relationships, things that we can't control, even in the world, you know, when we look at the news, but also in our own lives--sickness and loneliness, and difficulty in our marriage, or with our parent, with a relationship with our parents, or in our church. There's just loss and grief that's part of all of our lives. And if we don't make space for this, if we can't actually mourn those smaller losses more in these ways that we run into the fall, run into the brokenness of the world, that are in our everyday life, then we actually, I think it hollows us out emotionally, because it's only those, you know, the people that have it worse that are sort of able to grieve.
Tish Warren 22:14
And so we're not actually connecting with God around our grief. And so, when you said, folks kind of remember their own grief, I hope this book makes space for folks, for all of us, however, whether the life seems to be going really well or not to think about the ways that we taste brokenness, right, that we taste the bitterness and the sadness of life, because I really think every single human being does. We also all experience joy or goodness or beauty, and the book gets into that as well.
Eddie Rester 22:56
This is why this book is so significant for right now, because we've had this long season of loss and little griefs in some way the isolations, the celebrations that got postponed, the parts of life that we lost. I have a high school senior. And all she talks about is, "I want graduation, and I want a prom." She didn't get her prom this year. And you know, one of those little things that, you know, in the big picture, people might say, well, losing a prom, it's not big enough to grieve.
Eddie Rester 23:30
But it's, I think, a sign of how much and how it's worn us out. And one of the things you talk about in the book is that typically in the face of grief, often what we do is we chase after artificial lights. We have other things that we use to numb us, to distract us, Henry Nouwen, in his book, "The Way of the Heart," he talks about what you were talking about earlier that we have to learn to sit in silence. We have to learn to hear the voices that come to us in the silence.
Chris McAlilly 24:01
For me it's Ted Lasso.
Eddie Rester 24:03
Ted Lasso, that's your distraction?
Chris McAlilly 24:04
Yeah, binge watching Ted Lasso.
Eddie Rester 24:06
Man. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, though. We can do a whole podcast about that.
Tish Warren 24:10
But there is a place for it. Absolutely. All of this stuff, there's a place for. But we can go to it to be distracted, which is, I sort of got... I'm sorry, I got on a tangent and didn't answer your question, but that was part of why I brought up night. And also because night is a long symbol of chaos and darkness in the Christian tradition.
Eddie Rester 24:34
And I hear that over and over as a pastor that it's, you know, after supper is over, the kids go to bed. People stay up all night. And I wonder if some of our addiction to politics in this season, and the divisiveness of that, I wonder if... You know, I was reading an article this week. Our state, well, they sold more alcohol ainnd the state of Mississippi in 2020 by far than any other year, you know. All the ways that we... And I've heard that across from other states as well. I just wonder if we've lost the ability to allow grief to open doors for us, and instead we're numbing.
Chris McAlilly 25:17
I mean, I think part of the problem is the isolation, I mean, in dealing with these things kind of in non-communal way. I mean, I think I remember right at the beginning of the pandemic, having funerals without the ability to really honor the saints that had died. Or, you know, I just think it drives us into kind of isolation, or it takes us away from community. And I mean, the pandemic has done that in general, and the reality of our pain or grief takes us into that place as well.
Eddie Rester 25:47
So how did it... Go ahead. I'm sorry, No, go ahead.
Tish Warren 25:50
I just want to say, I think that's a great observation. It's such a good observation, like, I hope people are thinking about that when they open up this book, because I do think that we, as a culture, have developed habits of numbing and distraction. We, I mentioned this in the book, but America, the Chicago Tribune came out with a piece a while ago called something like "America Is a Nation of Addicts." And when you look at the addiction rates, for things like alcohol, but also pornography and food and work, it's unbelievable. It's astronomical. And it's, I think a lot of that is we don't know how to grieve. We don't know how to grieve together. We don't know how to recognize the losses that we have.
Tish Warren 26:39
And there's a, I think, a lot of historical reasons for that. And so we've developed habits of numbing out. And I think, especially during 2020, one of the things I talked about in the book is if we don't deal with grief, it often comes out as as rage, as outrage. And when you look at our culture and what's happened politically, I think a lot of this is deep grief that has been unable to be expressed because of isolation, because we've politicized our grief. Right? And so it's coming out as outrage.
Tish Warren 27:24
This is a total side note, not in the book. But I think this is partly why conspiracy theories have gotten such traction is that we're so isolated. We're very sad. And becoming part of this conspiracy community gives us an outlet for our grief, an outlet for our rage, someone to blame it on, and a sense of community, a sense of being part of something in our isolations.
Chris McAlilly 27:52
And also meaning, you know, I think it does, you know, even if it's distorted, meaning it's still giving some coherence, or it is a a pseudo-coherence or rationality to what you're seeing or experiencing. I think that I want to come back to that, because I think in, really, to the question of how do you pray, what is prayer? Because I feel like you know, that you say something that I've thought before, just that sometimes you just don't have the words to pray. And I think one of the places that might be interesting to explore a little bit is just some of the ways in which you see prayer, what, I mean, I guess the question, really, basically what is prayer? And then how does it get misunderstood both by the, you know, the Richard Dawkins, new atheist, you know, and then also by the Christian, you know, in terms of thinking of prayer, in terms of just self expression, rather than, as you describe it as a kind of craft. So, how do you think about prayer? What is prayer? How do we misunderstand it both, kind of, you know, beyond the church and within the church?
Tish Warren 29:00
Yeah. No one's asked me to just define prayer. But I'll take a whack at it. I mean, I think ultimately, prayer is communion with God. And I say that intentionally because it's, that's a nonverbal thing. And there have, it's, if we think about prayer as talking to God, or listening to God, there's still so much that doesn't make space for silent prayer and contemplation and meditation. And so I think, and prayer can be part of our work and so ultimately, I think it's communion. And that looks a lot of different ways.
Tish Warren 29:53
So I'm all for what would be considered like extemporaneous or freeform prayer. We kind of like talk to God about our feelings, thoughts, and requests. And I pray that way, a lot. But I also think prayer is a long communion, a long conversation between the church and Christ, the Trinity really--Father, Son and Spirit--that we can step into. I think of it often as a room that is bigger than me that I can sort of walk into and place my weight in. And that this has been communion and conversation between the people of God and the Lord for a long time before me and will continue long after me, and long after I'm gone. And so prayer is entering in to God's presence and work. I don't even like using that language because it's like, is there ever a time where we're not in God's presence? But I guess it's an intentional response to God's presence, participation in God's presence.
Tish Warren 31:21
And we can pray at all times, right? I mean, we're told to in Scripture, so obviously, if that's true, there are all kinds of nonverbal ways of prayer. But ultimately, I think prayer is something about participating in the presence of God in a way that works back on us. It shapes us. It shapes who we are. It shapes how we believe. It shapes what we see in the world, like our vision of the world. And so I get into different ways of seeing prayer in the book that you mentioned.
Tish Warren 32:04
I think that, I mean, Dawkins talks about prayer as sort of beckoning our sky fairy. So it's all about like, you know... It's like my kids with Santa, right? Like, it's like, we have this sky fairy that we hope will come down and make things go well for us or go right for us. Which is just, uh, well, honestly, some Christians see prayer the same way. So, I mean, maybe we say, "Thy will be done," and leave space for this sky fairy to say, "No." But it still ultimately is about sort of trying to get this deity to notice us, pay attention, respond to our needs.
Tish Warren 32:55
Or, you know, I think sometimes with with quiet times. Growing up, I grew up with the idea of quiet times a lot, which I'm all for. It's good to be quiet. It's good to pray, read Scripture. But I think in my mind, that became like putting a quarter in God so that he would work, right? Like, showing up and turning on the God machine and hoping it goes my way. And I think we can think of prayer like this, which, when you put that in context of the historic church, it just falls apart, right? Because thousands upon thousands of millions upon millions of Christians have... I mean, people were praying through the Black Plague, when a third of the world died. So people, all of us, every single Christian I know who's walked in faith long enough, have prayed for something, and it didn't happen. If I pray for healing for a friend who died, or a family member or divorce to not happen and it went through anyway.
Tish Warren 34:05
So I think, prayer can't primarily be about calling down our sky fairy, right? It's communion with a real God, a real being, who is unpredictable, who we don't control through prayer. Prayer is never a harness for God. Prayer has much more to do with us, with our participation in the presence of God, with our sort of showing up to God or noticing God's work. Then, of course, the Scriptures tell us to ask for the things we want. And that's great. We should do that. And God can use that. I mean, I have seen miracles. I've seen people get well in ways that make no medical sense. So I absolutely believe that happens. But I ultimately think that's just sort of one expression of what it means to walk with God. I didn't walk in the presence of God.
Chris McAlilly 35:14
You know, I think one of the experiences that I've had as a pastor that, I mean, it's still, at every time, I mean, I think initially, it was one of those places where I realized I was bumping up against realities that I didn't have language for as a 28, 29, 30-year-old. And it would really be at the end of life in the presence of the reality of death when a whole family or whole community was coming around the person that they were not going to be able to pray into any kind of health or, you know, longevity.
Chris McAlilly 35:47
You know, one of the things that you talked about is, "I was adrift in the current of my own doubt and grief, I think a place where many people find themselves and flailing. And if you ask my husband about 2017, coming back to that year, he'll simply say, what kept us alive was compline." So I wonder if you would turn towards, you know, prayer in your tradition, kind of, the Book of Common Prayer, and then specifically, what is compline for folks who don't know it? And how have you used it to kind of structure the book?
Tish Warren 36:20
Yeah. So compline is... Anglicanism has four prayer offices or times of prayer a day or prayer services: morning, noon, evening and night. Compline is the night service. It's the last service of the day, the last prayers. It has a long, long history, which I won't totally get into. It's in the book. But Christians have been praying in the middle of the night, since at least the third century, probably before then. But that's the first time we have like, people talking about it like evidence of, we have retained writings where Tertullian and others talk about getting up in the middle of the night, often at midnight, to pray. And so this was part of Christian practice for a long time. And it's certainly not mandatory.
Tish Warren 37:12
The book's not about like, "Hey, pray compline. You should pray compline." But I use a prayer in compline as kind of a framing device to get into these bigger questions in the book. And the reason I do that is because as I said, when it was difficult to pray, and when at night, I was going to everything else to numb me, mostly Netflix and political commentary. It was 2017. So Trump had just gotten into office, so everybody had something to say about it. So I read all of the things and would just sort of collapse into sleep after, like, being up all night with this stuff.
Tish Warren 38:00
So because nights were hard, and because prayer was hard, slowly, really slowly, over like, hundreds of tries and hundreds of nights, I sort of came back to this practice of night prayer, which I had done, on and off for years leading up to this. And it became really the only kind of way that I could pray during this. And when my husband Jonathan said, "What kept us alive is compline" he means, sort of, we were just, we were both struggling. We were pastors at the time. We were ministering, but felt completely empty. Marriage was really hard. Our relationship with God was hard. And this was kind of a way we could just throw ourselves on prayer. We didn't have to drum it up. We didn't have to come up with some kind of ardent belief or faith. We received these words from the church. And in the quiet of night, when things were really hard for me, we could pray these words that the church had given us.
Tish Warren 39:13
And in particularly why compline was important to me is that I needed prayer. I needed words from the church that acknowledge the brokenness in the world. I was, at the time, there was an online sort of Bible scripture exegesis by a pastor that I would listen to. I had to stop. It drove me crazy because it was so chipper. It was so like, "God's got this and everything's great! And isn't the Christian life just roses?" And I just was like, this is the last thing I need right now.
Tish Warren 39:51
And this prayer service, this really ancient prayer service, really... It's so... Because it's at night with all of the kind of innate vulnerability that comes from that, especially when you think about the history of the church before electricity. Night was such a hard time, you know, if your house caught on fire, there was no fire department to call. So, though it was such a time of vulnerability, and so you hear that in the prayers, you know, there's prayers about defending us from perils and dangers of the night, which just acknowledges perils and dangers that are there. And this prayer that I framed the book around the "keep watch your Lord" prayer talks about sickness, and dying, and suffering and affliction. And we say, repeated throughout the service, we say, "may we watch with Christ and rest in peace," right? The literal words from "rest in peace" is what we say when on Twitter when celebrities die, right?
Tish Warren 41:00
So the death and mortality and weakness are all through this, through the prayers of this and even the psalms we read are sort of our longing for protection in the night. And so, I needed prayers at the church that acknowledged the reality of suffering and the reality of human vulnerability. And I felt like this kind of threw me a lifeline. I wanted to walk in the way of Jesus. I did. It wasn't... I wanted to... I knew that he was life. And in a very, the part of the Gospels where Peter says, looks at Jesus and says, like, "Where else would we go?" Like, what else is there? I felt that.
Tish Warren 41:58
I felt like, I don't know how to pray. I'm struggling and wrestling with this, but where else can I go? I want to know God. But I didn't know how to. I couldn't. I couldn't like gin that up and myself. And so I needed the church to come in and sort of say, like, we gotcha. Like, put the church's sort of ancient arm around me and say, come on. Like, we've been like thousands and thousands of years, there's been hardness, the hard, hard nights. There's been sadness. And and here are some words to pray. So.
Eddie Rester 42:40
One of the things that you talk about is that through this, God began to, God spoke in ways that, I mean, you wrote you can you trust God, you trust the church. Well, you get to a place where you trust God, you trust the church. What would you say to people in a time where people struggle for a lot of reasons to trust God and definitely struggle to trust the church?
Tish Warren 43:06
Yeah. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, there's the quote, it does become a question of did Jesus rise from the dead? If he didn't, then really, like, walk away. If he did, you don't know. Or if you're unsure, I think that we can continue to seek God. I think, I mean, I bring up this in the book a lot, but the place of lament of how long I Lord, where are you? And even sharp words, anger towards God, is part of the Christian tradition. It's part of Christian practice, even. And so lament and sort of confusion and calling out God of, "Okay. You say this is true in Scripture, but I look at my life and how is this true? How long, O Lord?" That's part of what Christianity is. In fact, I think are very scriptures give us words for that.
Eddie Rester 44:24
"Why have you forsaken me?" From the psalms.
Tish Warren 44:27
Yes. Yeah, over and over again. Why are you distant? You know, how long O, Lord? Where are you in this? And so I think there's plenty of room in the Christian life for that. So that's the first thing I'd say. I mean, I'd also say it's difficult like this is almost when like, people really do need community and pastors and spiritual directors, because doubt or struggle comes from a lot of different places. So it could come from this deep place of lament, which I think is super important. It could also come from we went our own way, right? We are, we are sinful.
Tish Warren 45:15
And there is a sense of... I don't want to make all doubt this, like, pure and holy thing in all circumstances, because it's not. Doubt can be, but it's fallen, and our emotions are fallen. And so working through like, what is the root of that. And do we want to continue to walk in the way of Jesus? Because, if you kind of grew up in the faith, and you went out, you don't really believe this stuff, there's gonna be plenty of reasons to leave. But I think if you have encountered God, and believe that this is real, but are struggling to believe, I mean, that's just what the Christian life is about. That's just Christianity. And so I want to leave space for that. Think about the church. I mean, man, I certainly don't want to call people to some kind of deep trust in the church full stop. Because, um...
Chris McAlilly 46:23
Church is gonna let you down at some point.
Tish Warren 46:25
Yeah, absolutely.
Eddie Rester 46:25
Absolutely. .
Tish Warren 46:26
Absolutely. And the church is not our savior.
Eddie Rester 46:29
Amen.
Tish Warren 46:30
But the church is beloved of our Savior. And the church is the bride of Christ. So, but man, yeah, I mean, look at America now. It's like, the institutional church is a mess. And it's sort of always has been. I mean, we had slavery here, and Jim Crow, and the church was all wrapped up in that.
Eddie Rester 46:57
Participated, yeah.
Tish Warren 46:58
Parts of the church, parts of the white church, and not even all of the white church, but parts of the white church were wrapped up in that, and so I am not trying to deify the church in any way. But I mean, really, the only way that we know Jesus is, in part because of Jesus's work through the church. I mean, this in a very practical, literal sense, the reason that we have a scripture that we can open and read about the Gospels is because that's been handed down through human hands. Certainly, by the Holy Spirit, certainly led by the Spirit, but scriptures didn't drop down in a locked box for us.
Chris McAlilly 47:46
And so there's a wisdom tradition there. And I think that's one of the things about your approach to prayer that I've found to be very important in my own life. But I also think it's a resource there that doesn't get tapped into either, either by folks who have kind of come to a place where prayer got really difficult, because reality and life got really difficult. And that was the time where they walked away from God, or from prayer, from the church, or for folks within the church. I don't think that we've we've tapped into the the deep vein of wisdom that has been carried forward through the years, that can provide structure and give some shape, to contain and hold us in grief and in doubt. That doesn't answer all these questions, but that can be kind of a carrier for us forward as we make that journey towards Christ. "Now we know in part. One day we'll know face to face."
Eddie Rester 48:49
Yeah, just reminder of the longer thread of faith that so often we get caught up thinking that we have to figure it all out on our own. We have to know all the right words, all the right scriptures, and yet the people who have held the faith before us, that faith can hold us in the same way that our faith, in some ways, will hold the generations that can come after us.
Chris McAlilly 49:09
And those those words that are carried forward in the tradition, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer, you know, within that is just, that's just a means by which to meet the law. I mean, this is one of the things that you say. I mean, it's a means by which to come in contact with an encounter, the love of God, the love of Christ, the center of all things, where there is no darkness. The love of God not sickness, not weariness, not death, not suffering, not affliction, or joy is the center of our lives or of eternity. That's that's good news. And something that, I think, it gave me hope in reading the book and I think this is this is one that you're going to want to buy and really dive into. Probably not alone, maybe with a with a group of folks.
Eddie Rester 49:51
Yeah, important book. Tish, thank you for writing "Prayer in the Night." I think, as I said earlier, this is a book for the moment that we're in, so I hope listeners will pick up a copy and share it. Tish, thank you for your time today. Thank you for sharing your voice with us today.
Tish Warren 50:09
Yeah, thank you so much. And everything you guys just said was so beautiful. I totally agree. That was great.
Eddie Rester 50:14
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 50:20
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Eddie Rester 50:31
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]