Lauren Winner on Practice and Belief

I have long held a deep fascination with Lauren Winner.  If you have never encountered her writing or had the opportunity to hear her speak, I would encourage you to do so.  I have actually spent more time listening to her speak than I have reading her books.  Her works include Mudhouse Sabbath, Girl Meets God, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Christianity, and, most recently, Still.  Winner is absolutely brilliant.  When she walks into a room, you understand immediately that her level of intelligence far surpasses yours or that of anyone around you.  Her signature style includes cat-eye glasses.  Her voice is deep and textured like gravel.  She has tattoos.  I know this because she wore a shawl when I saw her speak last year.  It was not entirely cooperative and fell several times, revealing the ink on her upper arms.  None of this is particularly important to what I want to share with you, except that these things make her all the more fascinating to me. 

As I said, I have seen her speak more than I have actually read her work.  I read Still last year.  I highly recommend it for anyone, but especially for those who have been mucking through life's hard stuff and whose faith is suffering.  It isn't that this book will cure what ails you, or that it will make your doubt dissipate.  Rather, Dr. Winner's voice whispers in your ear, giving you reassurance and providing a companion for your loneliness and uncertainty. 

I am finally reading Mudhouse Sabbath.  It is a slight book, written in part at Mudhouse, a familiar-to-me coffee shop in Charlottesville.  In the volume, Winner considers the shift that took place in her spiritual practices when she left Judaism and become a Christian.  Several years into her new found faith, Winner discovered that she missed the intentionality of Jewish life.  She explores eleven practices that she found important and considers how they might be applicable in the life of a Christian. 

While reading the introduction, I was struck by this:

Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity.  That is not to say that Judaism doesn't have dogma or doctrine.  It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action.  Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver. (Indeed, Judaism suggests that the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter's faith will return.)  This is perhaps best explained by a midrash (a rabbinic commentary on a biblical text).  This midrash explains a curious turn of phrase in the Book of Exodus: "Na'aseh v'nishma," which means "we will do and we will hear" or "we will do and we will understand," a phrase drawn from Exodus 24, in which the people of Israel proclaim "All the words that God has spoken we will do and we will hear."  The word order, the rabbis have observed, doesn't seem to make any sense: How can a person obey God's commandment before they hear it?  But the counterintuitive lesson, the midrash continues, is precisely that one acts out God's commands, one does things unto God, and eventually, through the doing, one will come to hear and understand and believe.

 Upon reading Still, one sees this practice come alive in Winner's life.  Through doubt and heartache and even rejection, Dr. Winner continues to attend church, to participate in liturgy, to pray (or, when she could not, to have others pray for her).  She does this though she does not necessarily believe. 

I have been in this place.  I stayed in the realm of doubt and uncertainty for some time.  Strangely, I always felt most comforted when speaking the words of the Confession with my church family.  Many weeks, I did not honestly believe the words, but I felt secure resting in the arms of those who did believe. 

I still have a lot of doubt to confront.  I believe that I will always live with this tension.  Yet, I am determined to continue practicing.  By God's mercy, may I learn to believe in the deepest part of my being.

Practicing Resurrection for Lent

In the last few years, I have come to hold dear the season of Lent.  This is not because I have maintained any serious practices or held any season long fasts, but because I find it to be a meaningful time of reflection.  I find myself thinking more often of Jesus, of faith, of the beauty around me.  Beginning Lent with the imposition of ashes is especially meaningful to me.  The reminder that I am dust, and that to dust I shall return, evokes paradoxical feelings of trepidation and utter peace.  The ashes remind me that I am but a fleeting whirl of dust; they remind me that God can make even dust beautiful and valuable, that God, in some unknowable way, is spilling out of the cracks and is making all things new.

I received a pack of Lenten devotionals from the local church where Jordan and I have twice attended an Ash Wednesday service.  I flipped through the pages and discovered that a poem by Wendell Berry had been included.  I have been reading Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front over and over.  I had been contemplating what practice I would assume for the duration of Lent.  I hadn't landed on anything specific, only that I wanted to be intentional about having daily practices that connected me to God and to the beauty that is around me and is me.  As I came to the last line of Berry's poem, I paused, struck by the simple wisdom of his directive:

"Practice resurrection."

This has become my Lenten journey, to practice resurrection.  I suppose I should say instead that it is my journey to discover, as far as I can, what it means for me to do this.  Thus far, it has meant fighting anxiety with deep breaths and reminders of God's faithfulness.  It has meant positioning myself to be available to people.  It has meant setting aside work in exchange for time with a friend or a walk.

I wonder, what would life be like if one actually believed in the practical applicability of the resurrection in her everyday life?  Does the mundane become beautiful, enchanting?  Does, as my friend Anne Paulus has phrased it, the "ordinary glow?"  I hope so.