background on The Night

Eventually, God sends all who truly seek to know him into a spiritual wilderness. That’s why St. John of the Cross calls this dark night, this desert of ours, a “happy night.” The night is happy becau...

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is...

In his celebrated book The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman tells a story about a husband and wife struggling to relate. When the husband asked his wife, “On a scale of zero to ten, how’s your love t...

One night I went to church. They had a mass meeting. And I went to church, and they talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote. They were talking about [how] we could vote out ...

In the midst of an experiment to become more attuned to darkness, author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor decided to spend time outside as dark sets in: According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, eve...

Ambiguity may keep people up nights, but anyone seeking exquisite simplicity in his or her career ought to look for a non-leadership position. Leaders, by definition, have followers. Followers need di...

In C.S. Lewis’ famous “children’s story,” The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , Susan and Lucy mourn the death of the great lion king Aslan, who sacrificed his life for the kingdom of Narnia. The...

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh:a star shall come out of jacob. Numbers 24:17 KSV No star is visible except at night, Until the sun goes down, no accurate north. Da...

An elderly man had horrible nightmares, the same event happening over and over in his dreams. He would dream that an enormous green dragon was chasing him, and he would become frantic. Then, just abou...

During bombing raids of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But ma...

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. Every time a man bethinks himself that he is not walking in the light, that he has been forgetting himself, and must repent; th...

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

Every now and then it shows through the clouds that are moving across its face. One moment it looks like the eye of a hawk in profile. The next it looks like the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dol...

Many of us assume that our spiritual heroes do not have to experience the same inner-wrestling that we do. Mother Teresa, beloved across the world is one such figure we might “assume” didn’t have to d...

In the deeply moving novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, the protagonist, a young Jesuit priest named Sebastião Rodrigues describes in horror what it is like to watch two of his disciples, Japanese nationa...

“They will look toward the earth and see only distress, darkness, and the gloom of affliction, and they will be driven into thick darkness.” (Isa. 8:22) In The Two Towers , the second novel in Tolki...

The angel said there would be no end to his kingdom.  So for three hundred days I carried rivers and cedars and mountains.  Stars spilled in my belly when he turned. Now I can’t stop touching hi...

I’ve always loved the story about Robert Louis Stevenson growing up in Scotland. In those days, streetlamps didn’t just come on automatically; people were hired to light each one individually. One eve...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...

J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...

When I was six years old, my dad let me stay up late with the rest of the family and watch the movie The Wolf Man. Boy, did he regret that decision. The film left me convinced that the wolf man spent ...

The rural country roads where I now live are very different from the roads I grew up around in the suburbs. When I lived in the suburbs, the roads I traveled between my house and a friend’s, or the st...

The watchman was a very common theme in Old Testament days. In Biblical days, the Jews had vineyards with grapevines. On that farm with acres of grapes, the Jews built a tall tower called a watchtower...

On June 22, 2007, a hit-and-run incident left Daniel McConchie paralyzed from the waist down. McConchie states, “God has not healed my affliction, but he has taught me the power of lamenting to him ab...

In many Christian lands Epiphany is the most important feast of Christmas. Especially in Latin countries the arrival of the Wise Men, the Three Kings, looms large in the imagination. My native city, N...

In The Lost World of Genesis One , John Walton points out that the creation of light and the division of day and night is profoundly puzzling if we understand light in the modern way, as a material o...

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

A man named Jack was driving on a dark country road one night when he got a flat tire. He saw a cabin in the woods and began to walk towards it. He told himself that the person who answered the door w...