Sarah Arthur - Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide

Between Midnight and Dawn Praise for Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Maybe its not right to think of feasting during the somewhat penitential season of Advent, but that is what this book is: a rich feast.LAUREN F. WINNER, author of Girl Meets God and Still In our individual darknesses we long for more light. Sarah Arthur understands this, and, as if pulling together scores of candles with burning wicks, she illuminates our whole year with the gift of flaming words. A treasure of enlightenment.LUCI SHAW, poet and author of Breath for the Bones and Adventure of Ascent An elegant and accessible gem for the literature lover to focus, meditate, and celebrate this time of year, providing a fresh view of what the birth of Christ means to a shattered and fragile world. JILL PELEZ BAUMGAERTNER, poet; Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies, Wheaton College A beautifully navigated journey through a treasury of literary wisdoma book to cherish.JEREMY BEGBIE, Professor of Theology and director of Duke University Initiatives in Theology and the Arts Arthurs curation is sensitive and inviting to epiphany in short: both spiritual succor and pure pleasure. Image journal It will quiet your heart and bring balm to your soul in the midst of a ridiculously busy time of the year.

JOHANNAH REARDON for Christianity Today Part of the joy of Light Upon Light is discovering the texts Arthur has chosen to be in conversation with one another, and with scripture readings. NATHANIEL LEE HANSEN for The CressetLight Upon Light is for all lovers of a word well spoken. It is for the pilgrim, the sojourner; for those who desire to journey toward Bethlehem rather than to march. And who believe, like Sarah Arthur, that there is eternal power in great literature, power to pierce the darkness with its Spirit-infused light. Shari Dragovich for The Englewood Review of BooksBetween Midnight and Dawn A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide COMPILED BY SARAH ARTHUR PARACLETE PRESS BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS 2016 First printing Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide Copyright 2016 by Sarah Arthur ISBN 978-1-61261-663-6 Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Arthur, Sarah. Between midnight and dawn : a literary guide to prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide / compiled by Sarah Arthur. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61261-663-6 1. 2. 2.

EastertidePrayers and devotions. I. Title. BV85.A78 2015 242.34dc232015032228 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, The future futureless, before the morning watchWhen time stops and time is never ending;And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning, ClangsThe bell. T. S. S.

ELIOT, from The Dry Salvages in Four Quartets CONTENTS INTRODUCTION W ELCOME TO THIS LITERARY GUIDE TO PRAYER FOR THE SEASONS OF LENT, HOLY WEEK, AND EASTERTIDE. With this book we have completed the liturgical year, which began (rather backwards) with At the Still Point: A Literary Guide to Prayer in Ordinary Time, a collection of poetry and fiction for the longest liturgical season, running from Pentecost to Advent. We followed that with Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, which includes readings to accompany our journey through the wintry darkness. If you already have encountered one or both of the other collections, you will recognize the same format and spirit here. If not, no worries: each collection stands alone, with its own unique curation of voices and themes. In any case, you have entered what you might think of as a quiet library: a company of books, of readers, of writers, welcoming you in.

Make yourself at home. With this book we arrive at Lent, those forty days (not including Sundays) leading up to Easter. Its that time when the churchand the soulfaces the tomb, aware of its own mortality, seeking the promise of light on the other side. Its a journey we make alone, yet not alone, surrounded as we are by those who have caught a glimpse of sunrise. And we need them. Whoever has lain awake during moonless hours between midnight and dawn knows this: the darkness is final.

It owns the earth utterly. It takes hold in the tick of the clock and the stillness of the woods and the shallow breath of your own mute body. Anyone taking notes during those hours would be convinced there is nothing more: no further turning of the earth, no future flourishing of existence under a warm star, no life recalled from the tomb. It is the last and definitive night. But then, by some magic that cannot be quantified, it is not. The earth stirs, inhales, stretches.

A bird pipes in a forsythia, as if talking in its sleep, startled awake by its own daring. Light, where there was no light, makes visible: first the outline of a window, then the edge of the bed, your own hand, a book open on the covers. Theres no saying precisely when the turn happens. But it does. Every morning. From the beginning of the world.

Its the same miracle of awakening that happens when winter changes to spring. The earth, frozen in a silence that will not break, the days brief and brutal, our own cold selves making their grim way through the dark and then and then something shifts. Light in the east, earlier than we remembered; a lift in the air, like a warm updraft; a patch of mud that grows and grows as the snow recedes. Its the same turning as when the church, emptied of vestments and cold as a crypt, lights one candle. When the community finds itself, against all odds, redeemed. Lenten sorrow makes way for Easter joy, and nothingnothingwill quench the dawn.

And its the same shift that happens when the soul, alone in grief or guilt or illness or isolation, finds company in the life-giving words of another. During the midnight hours we shelter our guttering faith, and by its light we read poetry and prose that transcend centuries, hemispheres. Words from poets whose battles with God do not lead to victory but to a kind of grumpy determination. Stories from novelists who have tumbled into the abyss of their own undoingof everyones undoingand found Someone there already, holding the bottom rung of the rescue ladder. Raise your eyes, these voices say. Look to the east.

Do you not see it? There. The dawn. In this collection you will find such voices. And their words are not always easy. Lent is, after all, the season of repentance, of soul-searching, of Christs lonely journey to the Cross. We start in darkness together, naming its various shades, uncertain, even, that morning will come.