A Book Review: Still by Lauren Winner

I read Lauren Winner’s new book, Still, last week. I finished it in two days and picked it up again later in the week to meditate on some of the vignettes.

Still is a book about living in the middle of the spiritual life.  It is only coincidence that Winner picks up the motif of the middle, especially since it has been on my mind over the past six months.  For Winner, the middle is a wilderness—it is not a good place to be, but it is not particularly bad, either. It is definitely a hard place to be. It’s a place where the things no longer make sense the way that they used to. The novelty and enthusiasm of conversion has slowly worn off and the faith that was once exciting and fresh has unexpectedly become stale.   Still tracks the baby steps taken when the Jesus butterflies have left your stomach.

Spirituality is not easy in the middle—and God, if not absent, is hiding. In the preface Winner notes,

“Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless; prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

Still is a journey that moves from a full-fledged faith crisis to a place of consolation—a place where glimpses of the holy are enough. The text does not follow any linear narrative and offers little in the form of a conclusion.  It is simply notes during a time of spiritual gloom. Still is structured in three parts: “Wall”—a place where God is completely absent; “Movement”—a place of exploration; and “Presence”—a place where God is intangible but where the glimpses of holy are consolation enough.

Along the way, the book delves into Winner’s personal life—her marriage is coming to and end and she is still coming to terms with her mother’s premature death. The book does not dwell extensively on the crises; they are background images that co-exist in her spiritual desert.  Still, they are fitting to the telling of her story.  She is brutally honest and her imperfections invite her readers to feel at home.

The story moves from desperate and frantic attempts at finding God through new books and music, to seeking advice from friends, and to finally receiving glimpses of God through the liturgical practices of the Church.  They are the practices that she once chose when she converted from Judaism to Christianity, but now they are choosing her. Winner describes a moment she meets God in the midst of Holy Communion. At the service Winner serves communion to an elderly couple and she watches as the woman eats the bread and wine for her husband, whose physical condition restricts him from eating. She writes,

“There at the Communion rail, I don’t know what illness lies behind this gesture, I know only the couple’s hands and mouths, and that I am seeing one flesh. I have read about this, heard sermons about a man and woman becoming one flesh; and here at the altar, I see that perhaps this is the way I come to know such intimacy myself: as part of the body of Christ, this body that numbers among its cells and sinews an octogenarian husband and wife who are Communion.”

God may have been hiding from Winner, but she made God present to the rest of us with her prose and illustrations. I recommend this book to anyone that is in the middle of their faith journey, anyone who is serious about spirituality, and anyone who is bold enough to admit that God sometimes feels absent.  

Winner tells a story of a young girl who was about to be confirmed in the Church, but started having second thoughts.  She didn’t know if she could really believe her whole life, so she went to her father.  Her father, who was also the pastor, told her.  “What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.” 

 Somehow, the wrestling leads Winner (and all of us) to a deeper place and to find God once again. God might look different from the middle, and the middle might last a really long time, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.