Foreward to "Night Owl Prayers" by Rob Lee [January 4, 2024]

            So much of life happens at night.

            We Christians who have inherited the great traditions of the Protestant Reformation have also internalized some unfortunate habits of thought. The Reformers thought of God as light, and they routinely pictured growing knowledge of God as illumination, being filled with light. In our hymns, sermons, and prayers night and darkness became synonymous with sin and death. Our tradition proposed that the life-giving time for work and purpose was the day.

            In the wider and longer Christian tradition there have been other ways of figuring our encounter with God. For earlier theologians and mystics, God was perhaps most clearly to be found in the dark, in the mystery of human suffering and struggle. One of the constant modes of talking about God has been the apophatic way—describing God negatively by what we cannot say. 

“All I know is a door into the dark.” That is how poet Seamus Heaney begins “The Forge”, a poem overtly about a blacksmith but more deeply about the process of self-discovery and making art. The sparks that fly off the anvil are only visible to us because they emerge from near-total darkness. Like the theologians and mystics who preceded him, Heaney spent a lot of time in the dark and emerged with a compelling vision of life and its possibilities.

Luckily for us, Rob Lee has spent a lot of time there, too. Uniquely for a preacher and writer, Rob’s “night job” has allowed him time to pursue his ministerial and scholarly vocations during the day. But he has been keenly observant during those hours, and the result is the gem-like prayers on offer in this prayerbook for night owls. He has seen life in all its nighttime manifestations, and his empathic imagination has allowed him to enter into the hearts and minds of those who, in the words of my church’s prayer book, “work or watch or weep” at night. The result is a collection of prayers which at once give voice to our own nighttime needs and open us up to what other people are going through as well. These prayers both speak for us and speak for others to us.

I recently had the opportunity to see a museum exhibit which put two contrasting Renaissance paintings in the same room. One pictured a saint receiving divine illumination from the sun. The other showed a philosopher looking intently into the dark. The spiritual life is like that. There is not only one way to encounter the divine. So the Reformers weren’t wrong: God is light. But God is something else, too. Sometimes the light can overwhelm the things we are trying to see. The mystics weren’t wrong, either: God is unknowable, and is often revealed in what we cannot (or would not) take in. 

Of all the thoughtful, prayerful people I know, Rob Lee is uniquely qualified to conceive and write a book like this. His life and ministry have led him into engagement with a range of people many of us in ministry only read and hear about. Rob is at once theologically learned, pastorally sensitive, and committed to an inclusive vision of God’s liberating justice. The prayers on offer here reflect his personal authenticity and active compassion. Using them in the spirit in which they are given will help each of us grow more fully into what Thomas Merton called our “authentic selves”.

“All I know is a door into the dark.” Rob Lee’s prayers are little doorways into the dark of a night where both God and human need are revealed. They are keenly observed, compassionately expressed, and artfully written. This book is a gift from one who lives and works in that time of night of which most of us are unaware. God is up to something at night and up to something in this beautiful book. Receive it as the gift it is, and use it as your own doorway into the ways in which God is working in the nights and days of your life. As we faithfully persevere in praying Rob’s prayers you, I, and the world will be healed.