Quotes from Lauren F. Winner

In the crisis moments, I was desperate to narrate. As I moved somewhere else spiritually, out of crisis and into a new odd calm, I was more peaceably floating through whatever was happening. I wanted to record moments, but not so intently to tell stories.

When you find that God is absent, you do many things. You temporize, for a while. You buy a new prayer book, hoping that perhaps some Celtic blessings might do the trick.

Because I know more and more that this glass here is so very dark, that this really is a long loneliness, that it is both lonely and long.

Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory. Living the Christian life, however, is not about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't.

I am not thrilled by the idea that I am entering a vague in-between, after the intensity of conversion and before the calm wisdom of cronehood.

And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.

Augustine wrote that God sometimes does not give us what we ask in prayer. "Of His bounty, the Lord often grants not what we seek, so as to bestow something preferable.

No, no, I'm not one of them. I'm one of you. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, but I also wear fishnet stockings and drink single malt Scotch.

finally I say            all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't            there that makes the notion flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put it out. . . .

We could call the second problem with the current Sabbath vogue the fallacy of the direct object. Whom is the contemporary Sabbath designed to honor? Whom does it benefit? In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.

I become professional or hip, depending on what I am wearing. I feel different when I am wearing different clothes. I act different. I let my Talbots suits and my vintage shirts remake me in their image. I want to let Jesus do the same.

If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God.

There is an elaborate North African mezuzah case that dates to sometime in the 1700s, and by the nineteenth century Jews in Russia, eastern Europe, and Morocco were shaping mezuzah cases out of silver, creating miniature arks and fish and other pretty symbols in which to house their slices of parchment.

Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing , a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: "You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God." The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. But the monk's words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.

It's not all about mountaintops. Mostly it's about training so that you'll know the mountaintop for what it is when you get there.

It turns out there is something worse than attending a wedding where you don't know anyone: attending a wedding where you know six people, and they are all your ex-husband's best friends.

Food is part of God's creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him.... The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

but that is how the clues God leaves sometimes work. Sometimes nothing comes of them. Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along. Sometimes you wonder, how did I miss it? Surely any idiot should have been able to see from the second chapter that it was Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the rope.

The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.

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 .

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.