See also "Awesome Experience — Confirmands Praying Around the Cross" by Kristine Carlson

Our author, a self-described “morning person,” finds distinct gifts in the church’s worship at night.

It's ironic that I am writing about night worship. People who know me well know me as a morning person. The family I grew up in is a “morning lark” family. We do our best work in the early hours of the day. Our family’s daily rhythm affects our sense of when worship should happen: in the morning, when you can bring your best to God and to the worshiping assembly. This sense is supported by the fact that morning seems to be a time when God does God’s best work. Witness the resurrection!

But then I met my husband. He and his entire family are the exact opposite; so, too, are the three sons eventually born to us. Night owls all! Totally outnumbered, I have gradually changed my rhythm. I have become more acquainted with the night.

And then we started to go to Holden Village, a year-round retreat community in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Holden Village worships throughout the day — Matins, noon prayer, Vespers — but the required worship, every day, for everyone in the Village, is Vespers. It was a new experience for me to go daily to worship after the sun had set.

In the twilight of this mountain valley, I was introduced to Holden Evening Prayer, written by Marty Haugen and the Holden winter community of 1985-1986. I was moved to sing, in the waning light, of Jesus Christ, the light of the world; to pray as night was falling — with words from Luke’s Road to Emmaus story — Stay with us now, for it is evening, and the day is almost over; to walk out into the dark and its dangers repeating words from Psalm 141 that we had just sung: “My eyes are turned to you, O God, in you I take refuge. Strip me not of my life.”

Contemplative Worship
Holden also introduced me to contemplative night worship, with the service of Prayer Around the Cross at every Friday Vespers, in remembrance of Good Friday. The community gathers in darkness, around a very large Guatemalan cross laid on the floor. At stations around the cross are floor pillows and wooden boxes of sand, with a candle burning in each. Scripture is read, Taize chants are sung, there is silence. Then the invitation is extended to all to come and kneel and pray around the cross; to light a candle and place it in one of the boxes; to receive the laying on of hands and anointing with oil. There is no “end” to the worship: people may stay as long as they wish, around the candles, in the dark, with one another, in silence. When I am away from Holden, this is the worship I yearn for the most.

In the discipline of night worship, I have grown to recognize that I am, to some extent, a different person coming to worship at the end of the day than in the morning. I am tired. I have a heightened sense of vulnerability and of mortality. I am aware of how little I can control. Scattered, and often frustrated by the interactions of the day, I yearn to be put back together again, restored to God and to the community. More conscious of the brokenness of the whole world — after a day spent absorbing the news and reality of it — I long for God’s shalom for the human community and the whole creation.

The liturgy of night worship names such realities of our human existence. I experience this naming as a gift, each time: I feel deeply known; the whole world feels deeply known. And it speaks to our night state with fitting metaphors for God — life in our dying, light in our darkness, love for a broken world, a trusted resting place. Being named, being known, we are brought, in night worship, to a place where we can hear with new ears the promises of God’s peace and presence in the hardest stuff of life. In night worship we experience the community of God’s people who gather in the dark and are bound to one another as they bear witness to the light.

Night Prayer Compline
In the congregations I have served, I have sought to extend opportunities for such night worship. Currently, we offer midweek night worship during Advent and Lent. Using “Night Prayer Compline” in ELW, we gather in our chapel, on chairs facing each other, with lights dimmed and candles winding their way down a low table in our midst.

We begin with a reading, a reflection, and silence, marked by the striking of a brass bowl. Then, out of the silence, come these sung words, “Almighty God grant us a quiet night and peace at the last. Amen.” Beginning with this prayer for peace and all that it evokes — peace now; in our dying; and for eternity — we make our way through this ancient liturgy. With the last words — “Now in peace I will lie down and sleep; you alone, O God, make me secure” — we sing of God’s certain grace and our utter dependence upon it, and of God’s promise of peace in the dark, in the night. We claim this promise as we greet one another with the peace of Christ. Over and over again, I find myself departing with a calm, strengthened spirit and a renewed sense of community that sustains in the face of the mysteries of death and life.

I still love the morning: I got up early to write this article. And I am grateful — as I have been my whole life — for morning worship. But in these last years, I am particularly grateful for night worship and for these gifts that it brings.

Kristine Carlson is lead pastor at Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis, Minnesota.