Still

Still: Notes on a mid-faith crisis

Lauren F. Winner (Harper Collins, 2012)

    In 2003, Lauren Winner published a well-received memoir, Girl Meets God, about becoming a Christian. The conversion narrative is a well-established form, which has a natural narrative shape. What happens afterward may be a little harder to fit into a story line. In Winner's case, the glory road she set out on has headed into a desert; she's wondering what this blank wall is in her path, and whether she should turn back. Still is a memoir, in part, but also a series of meditations on being stuck and being still. The chapters are shorter than traditional essays, in a loose weave that makes poetic connections easier to see.

    In the years after Winner's earlier book, her mother died of cancer, and she entered a marriage that ended after five years. The troubles in her marriage separated her from her previous easy practice of prayer, for reasons she's not proud of. Ending it seemed like a shameful failure, even as it seemed like an utter necessity. Doubting her marriage, she also doubted herself, and her relationship with God. "My faith bristled; it brittled; it snapped, like a bone, like a pot too long in the kiln." 

 

    With her faith in pieces like so many dry bones, Winner finds some consolation in the poetry of W. S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, and Emily Dickinson, who speak to her about the gaps in the world. Sometimes you can't tell whether God is in those places, or not anywhere at all. Being stuck, being still, means really having to face the latter possibility. 

 

    Winner sometimes fills the gaps with bouts of anxiety, and sometimes with overthinking, naturally enough. Most pernicious, perhaps, is a feeling of boredom with the whole Christian project. It's a shocking thought, after she's occupied so much of her adult life with religion. "Even to my own ear, my complaint of boredom sounds tinny and childish. The complaint seems to partake of the very banality boredom tries to name. Boredom sounds petulant: a demand to be entertained, to be amused."

    Yet–still–she goes to church. It seems, if nothing else, a good place to contemplate God's absence as the serious matter it is. The Eucharist and the laying on of hands are still real gifts of hospitality and healing. From the soothing dullness of the Psalms, a flash of prayer breaks through: "'Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted,' and the words still me–there at Morning Prayer, those words are my words; they are the most straightforward expression of anything I might ever have to say to God, or to myself." It's only a flash, not repeatable the next morning, but it's a hopeful promise.

    This is a lovely thing about church, the way it admits doubt and desolation as a part of life worth mentioning on a regular basis. Nothing human is alien to the Psalter, or to the church year. Winner marks the path back to trusting in God within the church's path through Lent. In the fullness of time, faithfulness becomes a path to faith. After Winner's struggle with loss, failure, and restlessness, this sounds like a triumph: "On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see."

Amen, and hallelujah.