Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis [Hardcover]

Lauren F. Winner (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 31, 2012

Following up her highly acclaimed Girl Meets God, author Lauren F. Winner has written an engrossing reflection of literary grace and spiritual wisdom with Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.

As she lives through a failed marriage and the loss of her mother, Winner finds her Christian faith slipping away. Through reading religious works and tomes and being counseled by leaders of the church, she learns she must find the courage to trust in God in order to to find His presence.

Elegantly written and profound, Still offers reflections on how murky and gray the spiritual life can be while, at the same time, shows us how to see the light we do encounter more clearly.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In Girl Meets God (2002), Winner wrote about moving from Judaism to Orthodox Judaism to Christianity. Now, 10 years on, she has hit a rough patch. The death of her mother and a much-stewed-over divorce have thrown her into a spiritual crisis, and she no longer feels God near. To miss the presence of God is not new. In the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross called it “the long night of the soul,” and more recently, Mother Teresa’s letters recount the absence of Jesus for more than half her life. Within this framework, Winner seems, well, a bit of a whiner. Even her spiritual advisor tells her at one point that she might do less thinking and more serving church, God, and neighbor. Although she muses throughout, Winner never really makes clear to readers, or perhaps to herself, why she thinks this space has formed between her and God. That said, those musings, in short chapters, are elegantly written, and the author’s strong personality makes the book eminently readable, even when you want to tell her to snap out of it. --Ilene Cooper

Review

“Anyone committed to truly examining the shape of personal faith, unfolding over the years in a broken world, should sense a fruitful opportunity, if not a solemn obligation, to expound at length…[Winner] probes these depths as deftly and eloquently as anyone writing today… An instant spiritual classic.” (Christianity Today )

“In present-tense, lyrical essays . . . [Winner] explores her emotional landscape as she struggles to move beyond the depression that plagues her following her mother’s death and her own divorce. Examining feelings of grief, failure, and doubt . . . Winner brings poetic nuances to her exquisitely crafted prose.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

“Compulsively readable, direct yet never indiscreet, Winner’s book shows intelligence and verve as it seriously addresses the spiritual crises around God’s apparent absence or silence, as faced by many. A must-have for Winner’s readers and fans of Anne Lamott.” (Library Journal (starred review) )

“Titles to pick up now... Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis: insights on spiritual uncertainty from a devout Christian convert.” (O, the Oprah Magazine )

“Elegantly written . . . eminently readable.” (Booklist )

“The book is made to pour over again and again. You’ll fill the pages with underlines, the margins with notes. Each short chapter is loaded with insights that don’t so much build on one another as weave a rich tapestry of possibilities in the midst of a spiritual desert.” (Relevant Magazine )

“[A] provocative memoir . . . an open, honest contemplation of a spiritual impasse.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Winner writes thoughtfully and eloquently about finding herself in the middle and accepting her place there.” (Shelf Awareness )

“Still grasps for faith in a Middle space and discovers a stranger, bigger and more faithful God than we expected.” (Relevant Magazine )

“Soft and vulnerable, yet blunt and veracious . . . If you’re a lover of books like Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott or any other writers who are not afraid to unveil their imperfections in hopes of finding kindred spirits, then take this walk with Winner.” (Beliefnet )

“Winner possesses a flair for narrative and a willingness to use her life’s story as an easel. . . . Like Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies), or Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), Winner is at her best spinning small but hopeful meditations on life’s imperfections.” (The Washington Post )

“Lauren Winner’s brave, spare, and subtle book is a great gift to the church. She lifts up doubt and absence with enough honesty to reveal the unfinished edges, and the radiance, of faith itself.” (Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread and Jesus Freak )

“Winner grabs God’s hiddenness by the shoulders and will not let go. She knows the grace that can only be learned when we stand with Moses, staring into the raging waters, and hear a voice say, ‘The LORD will fight for you; you need only to stand still.” (Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of The Wisdom of Stability )

“Still water reveals depth--as does this account of ordinary life and what lies beneath.” (Philip Yancey, author of What Good Is God? )

“An unusually painful story, told with rare honesty by an unusually gifted writer.” (N.T. Wright, author of Simply Jesus )

“Not for the faint-hearted, Winner’s book not only undresses and confronts doubt, but imparts new courage to trust God through it.” (Worship Leader Magazine )

“Winner is one of those gifted teachers who slips in some wisdom along with the sweet stuff on the spoon. We take our medicine from the ancients, the Christian mystics and the scriptures while tasting the sweetness of her narrative.” (Christian Century )

“In an age when it is much easier to make fun of the church than to love it ... Winner has made the church a main character so honestly drawn that we recognize it ... treasure it and laugh in amazement that God can work with it. Still.” (Christian Century )

“Still is about losing the connection to God, or Jesus, and then getting that connection back.” (Washington Post )

“Despite deep pain and doubt, Winner relentlessly searches God’s mysteries, seeking peace and authenticity in her faith. Her spiritual memoir is unblinking, credible, and compelling.” (Christianity Today (Christianity Today 2013 Book Award, Spirituality) )

“Lauren Winner’s prose is insightful, honest and always right on point. In each best-selling book, the Duke professor reclaims previously cliché-laden topics and has developed a new vocabulary for a generation fed up with conventional answers.” (Relevant Magazine )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (January 31, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061768111
• ISBN-13: 978-0061768118
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lauren F. Winner teaches Christian spirituality Duke Divinity School, in Durham, North Carolina. Her favorite things include October weather, mystery novels, and doodling prayer (see Sybil MacBeth's Praying in Color if you'd like to know more about that last one).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

145 of 173 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Dark Night of the Evangelical Hipster Chick December 28, 2011

By Katie Luther VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

After reading an advance copy of Lauren Winner's new (forthcoming in February) memoir Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, it occurred to me that far more egocentric than writing a book all about oneself is the feat of writing a book all about oneself and trying to play it off as a book about anyone or anything else.

Furthermore, the one thing more outrageously premature and obnoxious than writing a memoir--a spiritual memoir, no less--before old or even middle age or even 35, is writing two. There are, of course, exceptional circumstances under which a very young person's memoirs may be notable or especially insightful. The occasion of being a privileged young academic from the American South East does not rise to this level of notability. Winner cannot be blamed for this, entirely. Confessional prose is one of the few publishing avenues wide open to talented young female writers, and only open then given that they fulfill certain prerequisites (attractive, willing to talk about sexuality...) and even then, privilege and connections are required to even get in the door. Winner's career as a 30-something serial memoirist illustrates, through no fault of her own, everything that is wrong and corrupt in the current American publishing industry.

Nonetheless, I was excited to read Still, and despite my slight quibbles and larger objections to Winner's style and theology, I had enjoyed her previous works. The book purports to not be a straight memoir, nor a guidebook, but more of a public service, I suppose, a companion for those of us Christians who might ourselves experience a sort of...dark night of the soul. Which is, of course, an allusion to a work far better suited to serve such a purpose than Winner's present volume. Winner's crisis of faith was brought on by the death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage. Or so the blurb tells me. Once I started reading the book, it all became a lot less clear.

The whole book reads strangely. It is as though we are trapped in Winner's head with her, and it is decidedly a miserable and lonely place to be. Other people are but vague, passing thoughts that pass by on the outside. Events are obscured by constant ruminating. There is no ground to stand upon, no anchor to pull us down, no fresh air to hit our faces and snap us out of the fugue. The marriage is never spoken of in any illuminating detail; her husband is nameless. (I would respect the nod to privacy were he not named in full in her other works and all over the web--given that, this is just odd and confusing.) When Winner speaks of her late mother, it is in weirdly distant terms, passively hostile, perhaps a hint of denial, or perhaps we should take her statements at face value--she really doesn't miss her? Winner never makes concrete any of the details that make a memoir vivid. While she drops names and tries to impress us with her very Relevant magazine Christian hipster tastes, she doesn't tell us what her married life was like, really, what she misses, what she regrets, what HAPPENED. Where we are! What's going on! She just kind of wanders around in a miserable fog, and we are stuck there with her, ruminating.

Because of all of this, we are to believe God is "absent." Now this is one of my theological pet peeves. Why are we to believe God is absent whenever a yuppy has the flu? It screams of spiritual wimpiness, as it is ALWAYS these spoiled types who are bemoaning the absence of God when anything goes wrong in their lives. The poor working sorts of the world lean on God even more heavily, by and large, when things go bad. The rich and spoilt whine that God has abandoned them when very normal, cycle of life, kinds of bad things go down. It is the definition of self-centered and overprivileged.

In fact, rather like a spoiled child, Winner proclaims that if believing in Jesus means she has to stay married, she just won't believe! That showed Him! It never occurs to her, I suppose, that it's not Jesus' fault that she has chosen to make herself a very public figure proclaiming very authoritatively and very smugly a very rigid form of Christianity. That she chose to make sexual fidelity the focus of her public preaching. That she has chosen to make statements like that it is better to marry just for sex than to have premarital sex and sin. (One might be tempted to pull a Dr. Phil on her about that one.) She has chosen to make her living by loudly narrating her conversion only several scant years after it started--only a few scant years after her prior conversion to Jewish orthodoxy. By now narrating this "crisis of faith" only a few years later, it is as though her spiritual evolution was crippled by her own self-satisfaction in chronicling it, and her vaunted "pure" marriage, much the same. Did she love a man, or the idea of being piously married? She has nothing specific to say about Griff, the man she left. She never seems to see the hubris and hamartia in this little tragedy. Or if she does, she certainly isn't telling US about them. That would really be risky.

Reading, I just wanted to pull Winner out of herself. She seems to have some vague sense that she is to blame for some of this mess, but she needs to work it out with the people involved, not inside her head, and not with the audience for her memoirs. Theologically, I find this book useless as a teaching moment (although it purports to be one) because she never delves into the concrete matters that brought her to crisis. So she feels like she's a bad Christian because she married and then quickly divorced. How does she resolve that? It seems she resolves to ignore it and move on--something that tells me that the personal trainwreck resulting in memoir number three can't be long down the road from here. She doesn't miss her dead mom, what's that about? Is it numbness from deep grief? Unresolved something else? What does it mean, spiritually, to feel that way? These questions don't need to be definitively answered, but they must be at least addressed. But to fall back on a cliche accusation, Winner seems too self-absorbed to have perspective on any of this. Which is perhaps understandable, but it makes her a terrible guide for fellow Christians feeling a spiritual crisis because of personal issues.

I wonder where Winner will go from here. I understand she is planning to become an Episcopal priest, but my sense is that this may just be yet another way for her to run away from whatever anxieties have kept her talking fast and glib since her first memoir. This book was frustrating and unrewarding to read, and I will surely be denounced as a grouch for panning such a fashionable Christian writer. But so be it; Still was a miserable, stifling read.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Loneliness is often a spiritual disease, which is a profound insight for a country that has more people living by themselves tha January 31, 2012

By Adam VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I have been sitting on this book for over a week. Normally I write my reviews almost immediately after I finish the book, read through them a couple of times and publish them. But I am not sure how to review this book. It is not because I didn't like it. I really did like it.

It is more because I am not sure how to describe the book. This is not a straight forward memoir, or standard prose Christian Living book. Parts of it are more like diary entries. There are chapters that are just a single quote. It is a book intended to take a while to work your way through. It is the taking the reader through the arc of pain and spiritual loneliness that the author went through.

I finished the book last Tuesday. On Monday, Christianity Today posted a review that was probably ill advised. Winner is a regular contributor to Christianity Today and Books and Culture. So she is well known to the other editors and to many of the readers. When the reviewer ended the review with:

"Still is an instant spiritual classic, and a balm for disillusioned Christians who don't know or particularly like the God to whom they pledged fidelity years ago, as well as for those who divorced God long ago but are looking into remarriage. The Christ who wooed Lauren Winner away from her lively Judaism so many years ago is the same today and forever, till death do us part."

I knew there would be a problem. Many of the comments decried her divorce and a few hinted that she should no longer be considers an author of spiritual works. A couple almost danced at the fact that Winner (whose previous books includes a book on Christian sex) did not manage to have a marriage last more than six years.

There is something particularly nasty about Christians that cannot give grace. I understand that people's sins matter. I am unlikely to pay a lot of attention to a financial consultant that recently declared bankruptcy. However, there is a lot of wisdom that comes from making mistakes yourself. A lot of addiction counselors are former addicts. Dave Ramsey once declared bankruptcy.

Ms Winner's divorce is not really the point of the book. Although the effects of the divorce are important. The divorce is the first thing that she has really failed, but wanted to succeed. And the distance from God that is described in the book started before the marriage, at the death of her mother weeks before the marriage.

The central theme of the memoir is that the middle part of faith is often hard. That is not a new theme. The beginning is new and fresh. But after the new and fresh, there is a period of learning and growth. Still is about the dry points. The points where we often go through the motions waiting for the newness to come back.

The newness is not really going to come back, at least not in the same way. Winner works back to faith, but she has to work through her issues. Community is a big part of this book. Winner does not have to work through life alone. She has her local church and pastor-friend. She has her students, her work and her books.

For me, I related to the books (although she likes poetry a lot more than I, and understands a lot more than I). Winner is, like me, probably overly analytical. There is a good line in the book about how she has so many books on prayer, not because she prays so much but because she wants to pray, but is somewhat afraid, so she reads about prayer instead of praying. I get that. In the end, it was not her brain that helped her out of the middle slump of faith. It was her community and her liturgy. Those things that kept her moving, even when she did not really want to move.

This is a weakness of low-church evangelicals like me. We hit middle slumps and we do not have a liturgy, we do not have a theology of the sacraments that pushes us back to the power of God, imparted to us by these physical actions. Instead we have popular preachers and good catchy music. But it is easy to avoid church services is no one knows we are not there. It is easy to ignore sermons when we can intellectualize them or minimize the exegesis of the preacher.

Winner is an example of why Eugene Peterson is really right. Spiritual growth apart from the church is impossible. Not because we need the 'holiness' of the church. The church is not holy or made up of perfect people. Instead the church is made up of people that have bad days on different days than us. We help our neighbor on days that she needs help. She helps us on days we need help. It is about a body that actually needs the rest of the body to function.

79 of 98 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A crisis in editing rather than faith? December 23, 2011

By William T. Barto VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Lauren Winner is a talented writer and a provocative thinker, but I do not believe that this book is her best work. The subtitle says the book is "Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis," and the author describes it as "an autobiographically inflected rumination on a focused spiritual theme -the theme of desolation and consolation," and acknowledges that it is "not really a narrative . . . the chapters are reflections." This is generally accurate, but to use the term "chapter" to describe many of these observations is a bit of overstatement: many are only a page or two in length, some only a few sentences. The author admits that "structuring this book was hard," and it shows - the book has the feel of a collection of blog or journal entries that have been bound between two covers in roughly chronological sequence. "Mid-Faith" is also a bit of a stretch, given that the author is in her thirties and is a relatively recent convert to Christianity from Orthodox Judaism (although Wikipedia tells us that she was recently ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, notwithstanding her "mid-faith crisis").

I found the content of the book to be sometimes interesting, but usually when the author was quoting another thinker or writer. The author acknowledges at one point that her complaining "sounds tinny and childish," and that same tone is present in many of the chapters of the book. She mocks another post-divorce memoir (snarkily calling it "Masticate, Meditate, and Masturbate"), yet her style constantly - relentlessly - evokes that other work with its references to the type of food being eaten, the wine being drunk, the color of the dress she was wearing, the music that is playing, the piece of artwork being contemplated during the discussion with "my friend [fill in the blank - e.g., Ruth, Samuel, Molly, Hannah, Sarah, Phyllis - the list of names invoked by the author seems endless]" and yet none of these descriptions really seem to have anything to do with the substance of what it is the author is relating. The author's writing style was a distraction to my understanding of her content and it adversely affected my ability to benefit more fully from reading the book; all the effort spent to create a mood in the writing could have been profitably spent editing the book into a more coherent whole.

If what I have described still sounds irresistible to you, I encourage you to first read some of the other authors who have walked this trail before Winner and may have more profound insights on the topic. I especially recommend Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness by Kathryn Greene-McCreight or Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life by Kathleen Norris. McCreight tells the story of her struggle with mental illness in the context of her faith, while Norris shares the spiritual aftermath of her husband's death after a marriage of over 30 years. Another alternative story of one soul's dark nights can be found in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. These books offer substantial meditations on the crisis of faith and adversity, and also provide helpful perspective to Winner's predicaments.

Update 11/19/12: I am always trying to improve my reviews, so if you're tempted to vote that my review is not "helpful," please take a few moments and leave a comment as to your reasons so I can do better next time. Thanks!