The Vigil

David wrote this in a dry and thirsty land, hunted, far from the sanctuary he loved, and out of that hard place he tells us what he does with his nights. When I remember thee upon my bed, he says, and meditate on thee in the night watches. He does not merely sleep through the dark. He keeps a vigil in it. The long hours that most men give wholly to unconsciousness, or to tossing and worry, he gives to the remembrance of God. The night, for David, is not dead time. It is a place of prayer.

The ancients divided the night into watches, the set periods by which the hours of darkness were kept and measured, and the phrase carried the memory of a sentry awake while others slept. To meditate in the night watches is to keep such a watch inwardly, to be awake to God in the very hours when the world has gone dark and silent. And there is no silence deeper than the night. The business of the day is stilled, the voices are quiet, the distractions that filled every waking hour have withdrawn, and the soul is left alone with two things only, itself and its God. This is why the night has always been precious to those who pray.

THE GIFT OF WAKEFULNESS

We treat wakefulness in the night as an affliction, and often it is a wearying one. But consider that the very hours we resent, lying open-eyed in the dark unable to sleep, may be a gift we have refused to open. Instead of anxious tossing, the vigil. Instead of counting the hours till dawn in frustration, giving them to God. The psalmist made this exchange without complaint. I have remembered thy name, O LORD, in the night, he sang, and have kept thy law. And again, at midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee. What we call insomnia the saints called opportunity, the quiet hours no one else wanted, handed back to God as an offering.

Our Lord himself kept such vigils. Before he chose the twelve, Luke tells us, he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. A whole night, alone on a mountain, given to the Father. And Paul and Silas, beaten and chained in the inner prison, did not spend the midnight in groaning. At midnight, the account says, they prayed, and sang praises unto God, and the prisoners heard them. The darkest hour, in the darkest place, became a place of song. The night does not silence the man who has learned to pray in it. It gives him a stillness the day never offered.

THE BATTLE IN THE DARK

Yet let no one pretend the night is only sweet, for it is also the hour when fear rises. The things we hold at bay by daylight and busyness come back in the dark, the old griefs, the accusing thoughts, the dread that has no name. The psalmist knew the terror by night and did not deny it, but he answered it with God. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, the next psalm says, and it says so not because the terror never comes but because the one who dwells in the secret place of the most High has a refuge from it. The night is a battlefield, and the weapon is remembrance. When the fear rises, the soul that has learned the vigil does not lie there and let it grow. It remembers God, it meditates, it sings if it must, and so it drives the dark back.

For the promise stands over every night that the darkness will not have the last word. Weeping may endure for a night, the psalm says, but joy cometh in the morning. The night is real, and its weeping is real, and God does not pretend otherwise. But it is a night, not an endless dark, and it has a morning appointed to it as surely as any night that ever fell. The vigil is kept in that hope, the sure hope of dawn, and even in the deepest watch the believer can say with David, in the night his song shall be with me. There is a song for the night, and the God who gives it is himself the morning toward which the whole vigil leans.

WAITING FOR THE MORNING

This is the heart of the vigil, that it is a watchful waiting and not a restless one. My soul waiteth for the Lord, the psalmist cries, more than they that watch for the morning, and he says it twice, more than they that watch for the morning, as though once were not enough to carry the longing. Think of the watchman on the wall through the last cold hours, straining toward the east, certain the light will come and aching for it. That is how the waiting soul keeps its vigil, not idly, not despairing, but leaning toward a dawn it cannot see yet and does not doubt. With my soul have I desired thee in the night, Isaiah says, and that desire, kept awake through the dark, is itself a kind of prayer.

OIL FOR THE LAMP

There is another night watch in the Lord’s teaching, the watch of the ten virgins who took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. Five were wise and took oil in their vessels, and five were foolish and took none, and while the bridegroom tarried they all slumbered and slept. The point is not that they slept, for all of them did, but that the wise had oil against the long dark and the foolish had none, and when the cry came at midnight, behold, the bridegroom cometh, only those with oil could trim their lamps and go in with him to the feast.

The vigil, then, is not only a matter of staying awake but of being provisioned for the wait, of keeping oil in the lamp against a night that may run longer than we hoped. And what is that oil, held quietly in reserve, but the settled habits of a life with God, the prayer and the word and the remembrance laid up in the days of light and ready to burn in the dark. The soul that has stored no oil finds, when the midnight cry comes and the fear rises, that it has nothing to burn, and goes stumbling off to buy in a hurry what cannot be bought in a hurry. Lay up the oil now, in the day, so the lamp will burn steadily through whatever night is coming.

THE GOD WHO NEITHER SLUMBERS

Here is the deepest comfort of the vigil, that while we keep our poor and drowsy watch, there is One whose watch never fails. Behold, the psalmist sings, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. Our watching is fitful; we nod at our posts, we lose the hours to sleep and to fear, we keep a broken vigil at best. But over our broken watch keeps a tireless One, the Keeper who never for a moment closes his eyes upon his own. The whole reason we may rest at all in the dark is that he does not rest from watching us.

So the vigil is not, in the end, a lonely straining of the soul to hold itself awake by its own strength through a God-empty dark. It is the keeping of company, through the night, with the One who was already awake and watching before we stirred, and who will still be watching when we finally sleep. We wake to him because he is awake to us. We remember him in the night because he has not for one instant forgotten us. This is why the night, for the saints, became not a thing to dread but almost a thing to love, the quiet appointed hour of a friendship the loud day would not allow.

And when we fail at it, as we will, when the flesh proves weak and we sleep through the watch we meant to keep, let us not despair, for the disciples slept in the garden and were not cast off. The Lord who found them sleeping woke them without contempt and went on loving them to the very end. He does not require of us a flawless vigil. He asks only that we keep turning our nights toward him, and he supplies out of his own unsleeping watch whatever our drowsy one lacks.

And there is a grace peculiar to the night, that God gives songs in it. Where is God my maker, Elihu asked, who giveth songs in the night, and the question assumes what the saints have always found, that the darkest hours carry a music the daylight does not. Asaph, unable to sleep and sorely troubled, turned the sleepless night to account: I call to remembrance my song in the night, he wrote, I commune with mine own heart, and my spirit made diligent search. The night drove him inward and upward, to remembrance and to searching, and out of that midnight communing came some of the deepest psalms we have. The vigil is not barren ground. It is the very soil of the night song, and the God who gives that song gives it to no one who sleeps through the dark he meant to fill with music.

So do not waste your nights. When you wake in the small hours, before you reach for anything to fill or distract the time, remember his name. Meditate on him. Let the bed become an altar and the sleepless hour a watch. Give him the last thought before sleep and the first thought when you wake in the dark, and when the fear comes, as it will, answer it not with more fear but with remembrance, and with the song he gives for the night. Because thou hast been my help, the psalmist says, and there is the ground of it all, the remembered help of God, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. Keep the vigil there, in the shadow of his wings, and wait, more than they that watch for the morning, for the morning that will surely come.