The Silence Between Mercy and Confession: Notes Toward a Reformed Examen for Night Prayer

The Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer places a small mystery near the beginning of Night Prayer. After the office addresses each person of the Trinity with the petition for mercy, a rubric appears. “There is a brief period of silence for self-examination. Then one of the following or another prayer of confession appropriate to the season or day is said.” The rubric asks for self-examination, yet it does not offer guidance about what self-examination entails. The Roman Catholic compline is similarly reticent. The Liturgy of the Hours pauses at the same point in the evening and (in the Universalis application, at least) remarks only that this is an excellent moment for an examination of conscience. Both resources assume the worshiper knows what to do with the silence. I suspect that many of us, Presbyterians especially, do not.

I want to propose an answer, and I want to argue that the Reformed tradition already contains one. It has been sitting in our liturgical books for nearly five centuries, waiting between the confession and the assurance. Recovering it requires a detour through what Calvin destroyed. A Reformed examen is intelligible only in the ruins of the practice it (thankfully) replaced.

The slaughterhouse of conscience

In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin takes apart the medieval sacrament of penance piece by piece. The system he inherited required the annual enumeration of sins in the ear of a priest, and behind that requirement stood a whole scholastic architecture of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Calvin’s objection to all of this was primarily pastoral. The demand to recall and recite every mortal sin is unfulfillable in principle. He reached for Psalm 19 and concluded that a practice built on completeness can produce only despair in the honest and complacency in everyone else.

“But who can detect one’s own errors? Clear me from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from the insolent; do not let them have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.”
– Ps. 19:12-13 (NRSVue)

Calvin’s name for the effect is the carnificina, the slaughterhouse of conscience. He watched the machinery torture souls with misgivings, immerse them in anxiety, and then heal the wounds it had made with a light sprinkling of ceremonies.

Calvin, however, did keep a few things. He retained confession to God as the substance of repentance, he commended the mutual confession of believers to one another, and he preserved a voluntary confession to one’s pastor for the burdened conscience seeking counsel. What he abolished was the tribunal, the compulsory audit with its impossible completeness norm. Confession as medicine survived the Reformation. Confession as inventory did not survive it, and it was killed on purpose. Thank goodness.

Where did the practice of self-examination go after the confessional closed? It went into the liturgy and from the liturgy into the household. Calvin wrote a general confession of sin for Geneva’s Sunday service, a prayer that acknowledges us as poor sinners, conceived and born in iniquity, prone to evil, endlessly transgressing, and then flees at once to mercy in Christ. Elsie McKee’s collection of Calvin’s pastoral writings preserves a devotional compilation assembled by the Genevan printer Jean Rivery, and there the same confession appears again, transplanted whole into a cycle of family prayers. The congregation’s confession became the household’s confession. In Calvin’s Geneva, one examined themselves the way the church examined itself, in one prayer, said together, terminating in the promise.

The purpose of the silence

The rubric’s silence receives an open question. Several traditions offer to answer it, and each deserves a fair description. The Ignatian examen reviews the day’s interior movements, its consolations and its desolations, as material for discerning where God has been leading. It presupposes that the affections are legible, that the heart’s weather can be read for direction. The Puritans developed a different discipline. Their diaries scanned the examined life for marks of grace, evidences from which the anxious believer might infer election. Their practice presupposes that assurance is a conclusion, something the self can furnish premises for. The medieval penitent, whom Calvin knew best, filled the examination with enumeration, preparing the complete account the tribunal required. Each of these fills the silence with the self, and, in each case, the examined life becomes a text and the worshiper becomes its reader.

Calvin, for his part, points the gaze elsewhere. His metaphor for the law is a mirror. We look into the commandment and the commandment shows us ourselves, which means the direction of movement runs from the Word toward the self. This answers what the silence is for: it is the moment in which one word of Scripture is permitted to interrogate one day. The believer holds up a single commandment and lets it show whatever it is that it shows. Whatever surfaces gets carried into the confession that follows and, importantly, is left there. The rubric’s brevity turns out to have been theology all along. The silence is brief because completeness was closed to us at the Reformation, and closed as a mercy.

Nothing discovered in the silence may be weighed as evidence of one’s standing before God. That standing was settled at our baptism, announced in the kyrie moments earlier, and will be spoken again before the office ends. Barth saw this with a clarity I keep returning to: our situation before God becomes legible in Jesus Christ alone, in the one who is both the electing God and the elected human, which means introspection can only ever come back with ambiguity, and the ambiguity is, in fact, fine, because the verdict was never going to be found there. The second conviction follows from the first. Nothing may be inventoried for its own sake. One answer per question is the limit, and an empty answer is acceptable. Paul distinguishes the sorrow that accords with God from every other sorrow, and the mark of the distinction is hope (2 Cor. 7:10). A silence that ends in dejection has failed. A silence that ends in satisfaction with one’s condition has failed the same way, because in both cases the gaze came to rest on the self.

The practice

Here is the shape I have settled on, built for the sixty to ninety seconds the rubric ostensibly imagines. Calvin defended set prayers on this ground. The mind stays on the path when the path is short and marked with words.

Begin with one breath of gratitude. Name the first benefit of the day that comes to mind, in a fixed form,

“For ___, thanks be to God.”

Take the first benefit, whatever it is. For Calvin, the knowledge of God’s fatherly generosity precedes and frames the knowledge of sin, so the examination happens inside adoption. One benefit, one breath, and the frame is set.

Then, say the appointed commandment inwardly, once, slowly, without applying it yet (see below). The commandment is the fixed point of the exercise. If the mind wanders later, return to the text.

Then, put the night’s first question to the day, and wait. Take the first concrete moment that surfaces, a face you saw or a sentence you said. Do not search the day chronologically. Searching is how the audit begins, and it is also how you get lost. A chronological review has no natural stopping point. What the question brings up unbidden is tonight’s answer, and there is justification for trusting this. The exercise is penultimate, i.e., the Spirit’s conviction does not require any interior excavation at all. Describe what surfaced in a single sentence,

“Today I ___,”

with no explanation attached. If nothing surfaces within about ten seconds, say

“Search me, O God,”

which hands the searching over to the only one competent to do it, and move on. Put the second question the same way.

Then say,

“This I carry to confession,”

and begin the appointed prayer of confession immediately, in whatever state the silence is in. This line is the practice’s most important piece of engineering. It may be said early, from any point, whenever you notice yourself explaining what surfaced, or extending the inventory, or wondering what the pattern says about you. Every exit leads to the same door. A derailed silence therefore costs nothing. A single diagnostic covers nearly every failure. Any thought that has taken the shape of a paragraph has overstayed its welcome.

The questions come from a ten-night cycle through the commandments, using the Reformed numbering, two questions per night.

The first question generally works the commandment’s prohibition and the second works its positive duty, following the old catechetical rule that each commandment forbids a vice and enjoins its contrary.

On the night of the first commandment, the questions ask where I awaited my good and my security from something other than God’s blessing, and what I feared more than I feared God.

On the night of the sixth, they ask where anger or contempt diminished a neighbor in my heart or in my words, and whose welfare I had the power to nourish. A silence under the sixth commandment might run like this. One breath, the phone call with a friend, thanks be to God. The commandment, once. The first question, and what surfaces unbidden is a sarcastic reply in a meeting and the look on a colleague’s face. “Today I spoke to J. with contempt.” The second question surfaces nothing. “Search me, O God.” Then the handoff, then the confession. Forty-five seconds, two sentences, and it’s done. The meeting was never replayed. The apology, which may well be owed, waits for daylight, where planning belongs.

Depart in peace

The office finishes the work that the silence introduced. The confession is said in the plural (even when I pray alone), which places my particular day inside the whole church’s prayer and guards against the privatizing turn. The assurance is received as spoken to me. The sentences from the silence are now spent, and retrieving them for further review would be the audit returning by the back door. Then comes the Nunc Dimittis, and the canticle explains the whole evening: Simeon saw the salvation of God, saw it outside himself, in his arms, and he asked to be dismissed in peace. Calvin’s own bedtime prayer moves the same way, from the day’s faults to the mercy of God to sleep, and it treats sleep as a small rehearsal of death that will, we hope in confidence, resolve into resurrection.

The examined day ends where every day ends for the baptized, in a promise that was made about us before we could examine anything.

This is what I now do in the rubric’s silence. The confessional closed five hundred years ago, but the mirror remained. Held up for a minute at the end of the day, one commandment at a time, it turns out to be enough, which is another way of saying that the whole of the Christian life, down to its last waking minute, is life under the Word.

The ten nights

Each night gives the commandment in a short scriptural form, a brief note on its scope, and the two questions. The notes follow the classic Reformed rule of exposition (Westminster Larger Catechism 99): each commandment forbids a vice and enjoins the opposite duty, reaches the heart as well as the hand, and binds us for our neighbor as well as ourselves. The first question of each night generally works the prohibition; the second works the duty.

Night One. The First Commandment

I am the LORD your God; you shall have no other gods before me.

This commandment governs trust and fear. Whatever you await your good from, and whatever you fear losing above all, functions as your god, whether or not you would name it one.

• Where today did I await my good and my security from something other than God’s blessing?
• What did I fear today more than I feared God?

Night Two. The Second Commandment

You shall not make for yourself an idol.

Where the first commandment governs whom we worship, the second governs how. Idolatry here includes remaking God into something more convenient, and serving the work of one’s own hands, a category that comfortably includes projects (and, yes, screens).

• Where today did I refashion God into something more convenient to me?
• What work of my own hands claimed my devotion today?

Night Three. The Third Commandment

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God.

This commandment covers all speech about God and all conduct carried out under God’s name, including careless piety and God-talk deployed for one’s own advantage. Its positive duty is reverent, truthful use of the name we bear.

• Where was my speech about God careless today, or made to serve my own purposes?
• Did I bear God’s name today in a way that honored it before others?

Night Four. The Fourth Commandment

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.

In Reformed exposition the commandment concerns rest as an act of trust, i.e., a refusal to believe that provision depends finally on our labor. It also binds us outward: the rest is owed to everyone within our gates, which now means everyone whose time we influence.

• Where today did I refuse the rest God gives, trusting my labor instead of God’s provision?
• Did I allow those under my influence the rest that is owed to them?

Night Five. The Fifth Commandment

Honor your father and your mother.

The Reformed tradition reads this commandment as governing every relation of authority and care, in both directions: how we treat those set over us, and how we treat those given into our charge or supervision.

• How did I treat those whom God set in authority over me today?
• How did I treat those who were given into my care or instruction today?

Night Six. The Sixth Commandment

You shall not murder.

Following Matthew 5, the commandment reaches anger and contempt, the murder of the heart and the tongue. Its positive duty is the preservation and nourishing of the neighbor’s life and welfare wherever it lies in our power.

• Where did anger or contempt diminish a neighbor in my heart or in my words today?
• Whose life or welfare did I have the power to nourish today, and did I?

Night Seven. The Seventh Commandment

You shall not commit adultery.

The commandment governs chastity of heart and fidelity in every bond, and its deepest prohibition is the treatment of a person as a means. Its positive duty is the keeping of faith with all to whom we are bound.

• Where did desire treat a person as a means today?
• Did I keep faith today with those to whom I am bound?

Night Eight. The Eighth Commandment

You shall not steal.

Theft in Reformed exposition includes withholding whatever is owed, so wages, credit, attention, and time all fall within it. The positive duty is justice joined to generosity in every dealing.

• What did I take or withhold today that belongs to another, whether wages, credit, or time?
• Where did my dealings today fall short of justice and generosity?

Night Nine. The Ninth Commandment

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

This commandment covers truth in all speech concerning others, and the Reformed expositions give unusual weight to its positive duty: the guarding of the neighbor’s good name, which can be damaged as easily by silence and insinuation as by lies.

• Where did my words bend the truth about another person today?
• Did I guard or damage a neighbor’s good name today?

Night Ten. The Tenth Commandment

You shall not covet.

The tenth commandment moves wholly inward and shows that all the others do too. It governs contentment, and it names resentment of another’s goods as the root register of sin, prior to any act.

• What did I resent another person for having today?
• Where did discontent with what God has given control my thoughts or actions today?

A Shorter Form, for Any Night

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matt. 22:37–39)

A rule that cannot bend on a bad night will be abandoned. When weariness or the season calls for it, the summary of the law serves in place of the appointed commandment, with the same protocol throughout.

• Where today did my love fail God?
• Where today did my love fail my neighbor?