Sleeping with Bread

Think of a nice warm sweater, or a beautifully hand-knit blanket. Consider that they are made of knots, lots and lots of knots. Lent is not a time of undoing all that makes us who we are, of wiping out our memories and starting clean. That would make no more sense than un-knotting that sweater, or that blanket. We have been woven by life into the human fabric that we are by a combination of desire and will.

Lent is literally about new life, not about death. "Ashes to Ashes" is not want Lent is about. That’s just Ash Wednesday, meant as a shock to get our attention. Webster’s New World dictionary unlocks this true meaning for us: Middle English lenten comes from the Old English lengten, meaning "the spring", with its lengthening of the days.

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. It is a way of emerging, like the shoots of the spring, from the dark places where we are cramped and compressed, unfolding and stretching into the light and warmth that draws us yet further, to blossom, to increase, and to provide.

Will and desire. Oh, what a frustrating combination they are; what an odd couple, so often struggling with each other, each becoming an ugly caricature of itself in war paint of effort. “Giving things up for Lent” is a common way, like New Year’s Resolutions, to conform our will to our intentional desires. But if you are like me, desires fit the hand like a glove, but will fits the hand like sand. Our efforts seem to run through our fingers, and we are left with a sense of failure.

Sleeping with Bread is a way of describing a technique that forms the will when it sleeps, when desire is most active in us. The book (click for a link) uses a Holocaust story to introduce a nightly exercise of consciousness to help us unbind our will, to put it at the service of our deepest desire.

There were families in the camps, the story tells, parents who were interned with their small children. To help the children bear the horrors and maintain a sense of hope, the parents would hide in their pockets a morsel of bread from their meager dinner. Their ritual of going to sleep included placing hose morsels of bread into the hands of their children, so that they might sleep in the comfort of food for the next day, so they might be blessed with dreams of a future. The parents trusted the gift of sleep, the blessing of timeless time when desire danced and stretched without the encumbrance of painful memory or weak will.

This little book describes a simple process that I hope you’ll try these next forty days.

Here is a link to it (click for a link), called the Examen.  It invites us to a ritual of going to sleep with a morsel of the day – something that fed us, that evoked the best in us. It invites us to sleep dancing with our truest desire, unencumbered by painful memory or weakness of will.