Quotes from Lauren F. Winner

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.

In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.

I feel annoyed that in His wisdom, [God] chose to reel me in with middle-brow Christian fiction. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have come to faith while reading Left Behind.

My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down.

To invite people into our homes is to respond with gratitude to the God who made a home for us.

T]hat finally is the questions, that is the anguish--to abide in God's hiddenness is one thing, to abide in God's absence is altogether something else.

When God made His covenant with Abraham, He promised that He would "make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky." Jesus is the needle who sews the children of God who are not direct descendants of Abraham into that nighttime sky.

Fasting is meant to take you, temporarily, out of the realm of the physical and focus your attention heavenward; as one Jewish guide to fasting puts it, 'at the heart of this practice is a desire to shift our attention away from our immediate needs and to focus on more spiritual concerns.

Meanwhile, other people seem to be getting along with God just fine, very well indeed. Why not me?)

Maybe, if God is fire, we are a grove of ponderosa pines. Without the heat and burn of God's flame, our pinecones would remain closed tight around the seeds that are needed for our thriving and growth and new life.

I cannot describe God in the same way that I cannot describe a picture I am holding millimeters from my eyes—the picture is made strange and unknowable not because it is distant but because it is so close.

I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.

friendship with God is the entire goal of the Christian life.

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.

Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

In the words of Jewish liturgical scholar Lawrence Hoffman, 'Jews do offer freely composed prayers... But overall, it is the fixed order and content of Jewish prayer that gives it its distinctiveness and that demands the personal commitment to prayer as a discipline.

These words of prayer are among the most basic words Dr. Gatewood knows. When he has forgotten everything else, those words are the words he will have. Those words have formed his heart, and—regardless of what he feels or remembers on any particular morning—they continue to form his heart still.

This is why Jesus is hymned not as grape juice but as wine: because He is dangerous and excessive. He is more than you need, and He is more than pleasure, and if you attend to Him, you will find so much there that you will be derailed completely.

Wine is God's special drink. The purpose of good wine is to inspire us to a livelier sense of gratitude to God. —John Calvin

Being a Christian means being a pariah, Lauren, it means not fitting in anywhere in this world.

This is why Jesus is hymned not as grape juice but as wine: because He is dangerous and excessive.

But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain.

I can often be found in an art museum. Mostly I like being in a museum because I find visual art both absorbing and disorienting. I don't know very much about painting. I have taken exactly one art history course, and I can't draw a credible stick figure. I like being in a space where my senses are stimulated, indeed swamped, and where I don't know enough to think my way out of the experience.