Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep...
Revisiting a childhood prayer
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Links
The Betrothed: A Novel by Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael F. Moore
Passage quoted in today’s Morning Journal, about The Nameless One’s conversion and memory of a childhood prayer:
In a deep recess of his mind, he rediscovered the prayers that he had learned as a child. He started to say them, and those words, which had remained tangled in a ball for so long, started to come one after the other, as if they were unraveling. He was filled with a combination of undefinable sentiments: a certain tenderness in the physical return to the habits of innocence, sharper pangs at the thought of the abyss he had placed between that time and this, a yearning to attain, through acts of atonement, a clearer conscience, a state closer to the innocence to which he could not return, and a gratitude toward and trust in the mercy that could lead him to that condition, and that had already given him so many signs of willingness. He then got up off his knees, went to bed, and fell asleep immediately.
Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed: A Novel (p. 409). (Function). Kindle Edition.
“Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” (Wikipedia)
The New-England Primer (1777)