Summer Reading: Post 5 - Still

"...the whole bookstore is a self-help section to me.  When something needs to be fixed. When I need something to change, my first and abiding instinct is to read.  I think I can read my way to a solution.  Or at least an evasion." - - Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

Lauren Winner's Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (Source)

I picked up Lauren Winner's newest book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis from the library last week, planning to read it between breaks with Iris Murdock's Nuns and Soldiers, which I'm reading with a couple of my girlfriends. Scott introduced me to Winner by giving me Mudhouse Sabbath for Christmas, which I love, so I thought I'd read this one next (she also has one called Girl Meets God which is more about her journey into Christianity).  Winner was raised Jewish but became a Christian in college, and she now teaches at the Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.  Her writing has an easy, conversational flow, and I oftentimes find myself taking notes (or highlighting) when I read her.  I seem to really relate to her self-deprecations, her honesty and humor in admitting that she's not perfect by any means, but that admitting it and working towards positive change is the first step.  And ironically, though I wasn't raised Jewish I seem to relate to her more than other contemporary Christian writers I've tried.  I also enjoyed this book in particular because its structure and format reminded me somewhat of blog posts since many of her chapters were short and seemed like brief (but profound) reflections on daily activities.

In her own words, Winner describes Still as "a book about entering the middle, about being in the middle of the spiritual life . . . Once upon a time, I thought I had arrived.  Now I have arrived at a middle.  If life is long, I am still at the beginning of the middle.  Once I would have said, 'Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.'  From here, I say with the poet, 'O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.'  This books represents a few miles of the climb.  I share it in the hope that you might find it good company for your own climbing" (Preface).

In the 'author q and a' section at the back of the book she describes it further: "I wanted to emphasize the subtle but hugely significant shift from depressed, intense crisis to pacific openness, from no sense of God to a new sense of God.  From wrenched and wrecked to calm communion with a God I both know and don't know . . . the real crisis point . . . is the prelude to the book.  The spiritual unraveling, the alienation from God that I felt . . . that is the backstory. . . [it] opens at the tail end of darkness.  The book is not primarily a picture of the darkness.  It is a picture of the end of the darkness, of the stumbling out of the darkness into something new" (202).

While I'm thankfully not going through the death of my mother or a divorce after a five-year marriage like Winner describes in her book, her story has certainly comforted me in my recent climbing (or I might even call it, hiking) the small hill that is job-hunting/what's next?/letting go-letting God/trying to remember everything's going to work out in the end/continuing my journey toward patience.

Because most of my current 'hiking/climbing' deals with trying not to worry about what's next in my life job-wise, Winner's sections on anxiety particularly resonated with me.  I felt like everything she was saying was addressed to me and I wanted to scream, "Yes, that's exactly how I feel!!"  Sometimes I think there are a lot of us who deal with anxiety but we feel like we're the only ones.  And then we hear other people's battles and finally realize it's not some weird phenomena.  Even sweating the small things, Winner suggests about herself and others that this is  "a sort of practice worrying so that when the next . . . crisis rolled around [we're] in good shape . . . This is one of the many ways I am just like my mother.  As far back as I can remember, anxiety has been my close companion, having taken up residence in the small second-floor bedroom of the house that is my body . . . I don't imagine it will ever tire of the neighborhood and move out."  Similarly, I can admit my battle with anxiety; like Winner I've been told all my life not to worry, but it's what comes naturally, the thorn in my flesh.

Again, Winner's words are a comfort: "One way to give up anxiety is to meditate . . . The desert saints said that the beginning of renouncing a thought is simply noticing it . . . after noticing a thought replace it with prayer."  Although I've been told all my life not to worry, it has never truly sunk in; I know worrying does absolutely no good and it's not going to change a thing.  But I'd never really considered it as "the greatest evil which can happen to the soul, sin only excepted" (Francis de Sales, 17th Century priest and writer).  "The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses hold on whatever graces God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One who is all the more ready to fish in troubled waters."

Winner suggests, "When you are conscious that you are growing anxious, commend yourself to God and resolve steadfastly not to take any steps whatever to obtain the result you desire, until your disturbed state of mind is altogether quited," praying this prayer . . .

"O God of Peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of the spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence where we may be still and know that thou art God."

When I picked up this book I didn't think it would have such an effect on me, mainly because I don't feel that I'm going through a 'mid-faith crisis;' but I am climbing, and aren't we all most of the time?  Or at least resting from a very recent climb? I'm sure I'll have to remind myself of these words about anxiety (perhaps tomorrow), remembering the prayer when I begin doubting, and I know that I've not gone through some kind of drastic change after reading this book - I will still get anxious and worried.  But I have been comforted a bit in knowing there are others who struggle with these same feelings, and others who are climbing even taller, more dangerous mountains than my current little mole-hole.