Lauren Winner's 'Wearing God' - Surprises, passion, and spiritual autobiography

Wearing God

nolead begins Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God nolead ends

nolead begins By Lauren Winner

HarperOne. 304 pp. $24.99

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Reviewed by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans

In Wearing God, Lauren Winner, a convert to Christianity, an Episcopal priest, and a professor of theology at Duke University, explores forgotten or ignored images for God drawn from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Her aim is to help readers cultivate a fresher and deeper relationship with the divine, "to provoke your curiosity and inspire your imagination."

But the plethora of quotations from venerable Christian theologians and mystics in this volume attests to another compelling reality: Unlike our spiritual ancestors, we live in an age that is starved - not only for metaphor but also for meaning, mined from attending to the practices of daily life.

If we envision God only as shepherd or doctor, sovereign or light, Winner suggests, these vehicles may become so dulled by overuse that they will become almost divorced from what they represent: "I repeat them, I restrict my prayer to that small cupful of images, and I wind up insensible to them."

Using concrete and often surprising images from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, Winner invites readers to ponder the way God is portrayed in uncommon, challenging, and occasionally unsettling ways.

The book includes meditations on God as the clother and clothed, God as vital aroma, God as a purveyor of and living participant in bread and wine, a God who laughs, or pants like a woman in labor.

What makes these excursions into divine metaphor engaging? The shock of unfamiliarity in a familiar place, texts already ceaselessly analyzed, dissected, and tamed. Even the title - the notion we can "wear" God - carries a slight jolt.

 Winner is comfortable with the biblical texts, and she moves easily from them to a host of other resources - a volume on the multiple ways African American women have found to cook chicken, a friend's masterly series of Christmas letters, and so on.

She deliberately does not tackle more disturbing metaphors for the divine, such as God the soldier. This reminds us that Wearing God is as much - or more - a spiritual autobiography than scholarship.

Yet in recapturing the richness of a literary world both mundane and celestial, Winner reminds us that in the past, both near and distant, there is much not only worth keeping, but also worth fighting for.