Sleeping with Bread

Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life by Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn, and Dennis Linn on Powell's

Sleeping with bread—tucking yourself in at the end of the day with whatever's basic to your survival and overall health. With graceful pastel watercolor illustrations by Francisco Miranda, this giftable paperback provides simple instructions and compelling rationales for anyone of any age doing an Ignatian examen on a regular basis. Can you name your greatest consolation, your most stinging desolation from today? Oh, those Jesuits and their reputation for being so good with discernment! Because they are!

I especially appreciate the authors' counsel that making an examen can be wise and helpful not only at the end of a day, week, month, or year (I'm so ready for 31 December 2020 and 01 January 2021) but also after a meeting at work or anywhere, a conversation, a class as student or instructor, a meal. Can you name the best part? The worst part? What brought life? What caused death? Making an examen as an individual or with other(s) each day over as short a period as a calendar month may help confidently guide you into that critical "what now-what's next" in your own vocational or recreational pursuits, or as a family. You probably remember Howard Thurman, the late and great preacher to Boston University telling us: Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you alive, because the world needs people who are fully alive.

My Good Reads review: Discovering Life