Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. Second edition. Plough Books, 2026. $26.00. 408 pp.
Perhaps because I am an adult convert to Christianity, I love reading conversion narratives. But sometimes I think that people who write conversion memoirs soon after their conversion are making a mistake. Wait a while—at least a handful of years! Then tell the story with the benefit of at least a few years’ hindsight about what the conversion really achieved in your life—the true, the surprising, the emotionally fraught sloughing-off of the old, and the sometimes no-less-laborious putting on of the new, as in the following reflection:
“Five years ago I came to believe in Christ’s teachings, and my life suddenly changed; I ceased to desire what I had previously desired, and began to desire what I formerly did not want. What had previously seemed to me good seemed evil, and what seemed evil seemed good. It happened to me as it happens to a man who goes out on some business and suddenly decides that the business is unnecessary and returns home… I, like that thief on the cross, have believed Christ’s teaching and been saved.”
So wrote the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy of his conversion, movingly detailing his realization of the changed disposition and life this conversion brought. Instead of mocking the thief on the cross in his own mind, he came to regard himself as his kindred spirit. The initial conversion came as Tolstoy finished writing Anna Karenina. Perhaps imagining his most famous protagonist’s own tortured life, which led to despair and suicide, led him to re-examine his own inner state. What are we here for? What is the meaning of our lives, small creatures that we are, here today and gone tomorrow? Tolstoy concludes his reflection: “But suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.” While his conversion did not make a saint out of Tolstoy, it certainly made him want to be one.
In thinking of Tolstoy’s conversion and the new hope against despair that it gave him, I am reminded of Pope John Paul II’s famous declaration a century after Tolstoy in response to a world still filled with despair, as it has always been, it seems: “We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song.” Easter is all about the destruction of despair, because Christ is risen. So it is appropriate to find Tolstoy’s reflection, quoted above, included in Plough Books’ beautiful collection, Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, now out in an expanded second edition of 96 daily readings, taking readers from the beginning of Lent through Pentecost. If we are an “Easter People,” filled with hope and a joy the rest of this weary heavy-laden world cannot comprehend, then preparing our hearts for Easter over the 40 days of Lent, and then looking forward to Pentecost for another 50 days, is appropriate. Additional glimpses of beauty come from the poems that open each of the seven sections of the book into which the readings are grouped—Invitation, Temptation, Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, New Life, Pentecost.
But first, perhaps it is appropriate to ask: Why would anyone even need a collection of Lent and Easter readings? Isn’t it enough to simply continue reading the Bible daily through this season, as in all other times of the year? The answer, the collection suggests, is that in addition to the Bible, our brothers and sisters in Christ span two millennia—a magnificent cloud of witnesses, including in their mix such strange converts as Tolstoy, but also many other writers, saints, martyrs, poets, apologists, and more. And so, the book includes (to name just a few) Clement of Rome, Tertullian, Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Day, Christina Rosetti, Jürgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, G.K. Chesterton, Sojourner Truth, and the personal patron saint of some readers of Mere Orthodoxy—Wendell Berry.
Their voices, while not part of holy, inerrant, and infallible Scripture, have much to offer to us in encouraging our spirits and souls to flourish as true “Easter people.” Reading along with these voices of other saints should never replace our Bible reading but can deeply enrich our spiritual life in the Lenten season, giving us additional encouragement and glimpses of beauty. Indeed, even John Paul II’s quotation above is not strictly speaking his own but is a paraphrase from Augustine’s “Exposition on Psalm 148.”
As “Easter people,” we live on the other side of the Cross. And yet, Tish Harrison Warren’s opening reading in the book reminds that we are “Not All Right.” We are weary and broken, and we live in a weary and broken world. But then, Christians since the earliest days had known this. Reading 83 comes from the anonymous second-century “Letter to Diognetus,” but it could have been written yesterday. The author reflects, in encouraging a believer friend: “Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humankind by country, or by speech, or by customs. For they do not dwell in cities of their own, or use a different language, or practice a peculiar life.” But, the letter reflects, while they live in this world, they are certainly not of it—“In a word, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. The soul is spread through all the members of the body; so are Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, and yet it is not of the body; so Christians dwell in the world, and yet they are not of the world.”
“Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god,” reflects Dorothy Sayers in “The Greatest Drama,” the reading for Day 52. But what is different is how that original story ended. The course of historical events that our annual celebration of Easter commemorates, culminate with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. And this is a sequence of events in which God himself plays a surprising role. “Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that.”
And this, perhaps, is the most valuable reminder that voices like Sayers’ can give us in the Lenten season. As a convert, I am still in awe of Christ, but with each year, the repetition of the sequence of holidays, from Christmas to Easter, the joy becomes just a little bit familiar. I am not alone in finding disquiet in this familiarity. A seasoned Christian in my church said in preparing for Advent a little over a year ago that the typical Christmas Bible readings that always are read in the season of Advent, year after year, were beginning to feel stale to him and some others. Could we bring more wonder into the familiar verses and stories all Christians know perhaps the best of all in the Bible? The solution we decided on was to incorporate more dramatic readings of the familiar passages, bringing them to life in a new way in worship. The Bible is a drama, and the story of Christ the greatest drama of all, Sayers resolutely declares.
I was reminded of this conversation as I was reading Bread and Wine. Familiar is good, but in the season of Lent and Easter, no less than Christmas, we can all use a jolt of amazement that comes from remembering how gloriously shocking everything about Christianity really is—and was to its earliest witnesses.