I recommend keeping Good Night beside your bed. It offers evocative questions to help us reflect on the day’s experiences, encouraging us to notice how love was present and where we might have resisted grace-filled opportunities. Remembering and reflecting on our experiences helps us to “settle the day” with greater receptivity to the divine presence in our daily lives. The book contains lessons, affirmations, and prayers for each night, wisdom from Quaker writers as well as from many other spiritual traditions, quotations that help us focus our minds and hearts on eternal truths as we prepare for sleep. This beautiful book invites us to rest in God all through the night and receive the blessings and spiritual guidance which are always available to us.

After an annoying and frustrating day, as I was getting ready for sleep, I opened Good Night and looked up the section on Anger. The exercise of Settling the Day let me look carefully at why I was annoyed. The Lesson loosened the frustration in my heart. The Affirmation and Intention enabled me to let my irritation go. The prayer connected me with Divine Love. I slept well, resting in the Presence, and rose in the morning free to experience the blessings of a new day. I now use this book on any day, not only when I have a special need.

Through Good Night, Shulamith has provided daily practices for deeper connection to the Source and better days.

As a Muslim who has encountered other faith traditions with an open heart due to being raised with an interfaith psyche, it is always a pleasure to meet a traveler on a similar path like Shulamith Clearbridge. Her book, Good Night: Interfaith Prayers and Meditations Before Sleep, is an offering that such explorers dream of to share the heart-warming journey of not only self-discovery, but the realization of how much we are connected in our spirituality despite our apparent differences.

Shulamith has trodden her own personal trail to the Truth. It does appear that like most of us in such journeys, she has discarded, accepted, or rediscovered meanings of the sacred through a transformed lens. Her introduction covers significant bases for those who may have yet to venture that way, while serving as an orientation to those who are getting initiated into this journey. I do believe the book to be relatable to a diverse group of people who are inclined to such exploration.

Like other publications in this genre, Shulamith has given directions as to how to use the structured night prayers for “settling the day.” However, unlike most of those, she has also suggested self-directed options for flexibility in how one chooses to go about it as per their needs. I, for example, choose to be random.

On a final note, the appeal of these prayers lie in in the book’s attempt to “help your heart open to understand it on multiple levels.” I pray that it does so.

Shulamith Clearbridge offers a feast for the soul in this rich collection of readings and prayers meant to help us “settle the day.” Good Night: Interfaith Prayers & Meditations Before Sleep transposes the Christian spiritual practices of evening prayer and the examen into a refreshingly new key: By sourcing readings from many faiths and rendering them in gender-neutral language, Clearbridge makes these meditations accessible and inviting to a much wider audience. Providing forty days of readings and prayers on eleven different themes (such as Gratitude, Forgiving Oneself, Help and Hope), Good Night covers a wide territory of the spirit that will leave you centered, settled, and ready for peaceful slumber and a fresh new day.

This book has become a css indirect children style selector?trusted companion in my evening journaling practice. It’s creatively structured in a way that’s immensely helpful to this reader. Coming from a liberal Quaker background, I crave structure in my spiritual life and often have trouble finding it. Shulamith Clearbridge’s expert pairings of settling queries, lessons, affirmations/intentions and prayers, allows me to sink into the words and the solace they bring.

It’s been lovely to find inspiration in such a wide array of thinkers and mystics, and I’ve enjoyed sitting with these quotes from both familiar and unfamiliar names. It’s clear that Clearbridge searched far and wide for the wisdom in this book, and knit it together with much thought and gentleness. In addition to the content, I was grateful for the different ways to read and use the book that Clearbridge offers in the introduction, and I have found myself returning to it for guidance often, and enjoy experimenting with the different methods based on what I need in the moment. So grateful for this book! I’ve been especially grateful for the queries.

What a treasure! My deep bow of gratitude to and for Shulamith for guiding us into this wealth of spirited and spiritual world readings. For how she gathers us to evening, rest and sleep. For connecting us to the traditions of prayer and song. And listening to Divine Song: the Earthly Poetry Inside Our Hearts.

Throughout the centuries, Friends have often turned to the written word for comfort, instruction, inspiration, and prayer. In this spirit, Shulamith Clearbridge brings a new offering, weaving Quaker quotations and prayers with a treasury of spiritual wisdom from many traditions.

For forty nights, you are invited to a spiritual practice of putting the day to rest. Shulamith provides a four-part practice: a reading or questions for reflection, a lesson, an intention or affirmation, and a prayer. The readings offer time to breathe and be present, time to process and sanctify the day, and an opportunity to rest in God.

Sections on fear and worry, forgiveness, mourning, anger, and many more, allow the reader to choose the subject they most need to pray on; or, if they work straight through the book for forty nights, to address many aspects of the human condition. Reading with the heart rather than the mind lets the words bring us closer to God. Among the lessons, prayers, and affirmations of a cloud of witnesses to the Divine, Shulamith offers some of her own.

With this book, Shulamith offers us a spiritual practice that people from all backgrounds and beliefs can benefit by. The words of our Quaker forebears especially will speak to Friends. Shulamith provides updated language of passages from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries alongside the original words, seeking to be more accessible to all who pray. The modern language can more directly speak across the centuries to our present-day condition.

If you have ever come across a quote that stopped you in your tracks, a poem that painted truth with a capital “T,” or a prayer that brought you to a deep place, this book is for you. Let Shulamith and these pages be a spiritual guide.

How does one enter a night of rest? For years, it's been my journal and the current fiction I'm reading. This book, though, is giving me another idea: an intention of gently laying down the day, by reflecting, reading and considering where my spirit might be inspired, mended… settled. This collection of writings from many faith traditions includes a roadmap of sorts—of emotional and experiential frames to consider, should there be a need to focus on one, as one seeks to settle the day. I am surprised at the welcome I feel—invited in. The inclusion of gender and God considerations in some of the adjusted language, even as the original is also included, feels warmly respectful and opening.

This feels like a gift I never knew I needed.