Wearing God by Lauren Winner (Book Excerpt)
Wearing God by Lauren Winner (Book Excerpt)
Wearing God by Lauren Winner (Book Excerpt)
God
1
L au r e n F. W i n n e r
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Grateful acknowledgment to the following for permission
to use their previously published works:
Jeanne Murray Walkers Staying Power, published in Helping the Morning
(Seattle, WA: WordFarm, 2014), is used by permission of the author.
But Not With Wine is from The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers
published by ICS Publications, Washington, D.C. All copyrights,
Carmelite Monastery, Pewaukee Wl. Used with permission.
In order to protect the privacy of church members and friends,
some of the names and identifying details of people who
appear in this books vignettes have been changed.
wearing god: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways
of Meeting God. Copyright 2015 by Lauren Winner. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers,
195Broadway,NewYork,NY10007.
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fi rst edi t ion
Designed by Ralph Fowler
The leaf ornament throughout this book is part of the text font family
Type Embellishments. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-P ublication Data
Winner, Lauren F.
Wearing God : clothing, laughter, fire, and other overlooked ways
of meeting God / Lauren F. Winner. first edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 9780061768125
1. Image of God. 2. SpiritualityChristianity. 3. Spiritual lifeChristianity.
4. Christian womenReligious life. I. Title.
BT103.W56 2015
231.7dc23 2015001455
15 16 17 18 19rrd(h)10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Sarah
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Contents
The God Who Runs after
Your Friendship
1
A Short Note on Gender and
Language for God
25
Clothing
31
Smell
63
Bread and Vine
91
Laboring Woman
133
Laughter
179
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contents
Flame
203
In This Poverty of Expression,
Thou Findest That He Is All
227
111
A Short Note from the Womens Prison
243
A Bookshelf to Quicken Your Scriptural Imagination
251
Notes
255
Acknowledgments
285
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God
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1
The best metaphors always [give] both a
shock and a shock of recognition.
s allie mcfague
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111
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Yet the repetition of familiar images can have the opposite effect. The words become placeholders, and I can speak
them so inattentively that I let them obscure the reality whose
place they hold. I repeat them, I restrict my prayer to that
small cupful of images, and I wind up insensible to them.
Unlike my church, with its four favored metaphors, the
Bible offers hundreds of images of Godimages the church
has paid a great deal of attention to in earlier centuries,
although many are largely overlooked now. Drunkard. Beekeeper. Homeless man. Tree. Shepherd and light are
perfectly wonderful images, but in fixing on themin fixing on any three or four primary metaphors for Godwe
have truncated our relationship with the divine, and we
have cut ourselves off from the more voluble and variable
E
There are many metaphorical names for God in the biblical
literature ... but playing a privileged role amongst them are
anthropomorphic titles. These personify God, and it seems
that the biblical writers were pressed to use anthropomorphism to do justice to a God whose acts they wished to chronicle. This is a God who cajoles, chastises, soothes, alarms,
and loves, and in our experience it is human beings who pre-
eminently do these things. Early Christian theologians saw
in this plentitude of divine titles a revelation of the manner
in which God, while remaining one and holy mystery, is in
diverse ways God with us.
Janet Martin Soskice
E
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Underneath all that psychological and sociological ruminating, there are spiritual questions: How do our images of Godand our resulting images of ourselves (sheep?
vassals?)invite us to become (or interfere with our becoming) the p
eople God means us to be?
How do our images of God draw us into worship, reverence, adoration of God?
How do our images of God help us greet one another as
bearers of the image of God?
How do we pray to the God who is king or shepherd? Or
dog? How does the God who is king or shepherd pray in us?
If the kind of self-knowledge we seek is precisely knowledge of ourselves, unsheathed, before God, what self-
knowledge do we gain when standing (kneeling) before the
God who is a tree, a glass of living water, a loaf of bread?
(And what kind of bread? Might things change if we pause
to really think about bread, all the many kinds of bread
there are, how different they taste, what different memories
they conjure?)
Where, in the variegated topography of life with God, do
the images we hold of God invite us to go?
The Bibles inclusion of so many figures for God is both
an invitation and a caution. The invitation is to discovery:
discovery of who God is, and what our friendship with
God might become. The caution is against assuming that
any one image of God, whatever truth it holds, adequately
describes God. As Janet Martin Soskice has noted in her
reading of Deuteronomy 32which identifies God as a father who created you, and as the Rock that bore you ...
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All images are necessarily partial.
Marcia Falk
E
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Every meaningful metaphor implies some differences between
the thing and that to which it points. When a metaphor suggests something quite the opposite of what we think, it can
evoke a negative reaction that might actually help us clarify the
objects under consideration. ... To be useful, a metaphor for
God needs to evoke [two] reactions at the same time: Oh, yes,
God is like that, and, Well, no, God is not quite like that.
Carolyn Jane Bohler
E
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No one image or model, however elusive or rich, can do
more than offer glimpses and hints toward the divine.
Nicola Slee
E
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111
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hearers and pray-ers of the Bible saw shepherds all the time,
and knew all about the qualities of a good shepherd and the
characteristics of sheep; to call God shepherdor for that
matter vine, vintner, or kingwas to describe God with
images drawn from peoples quotidian repertoires. I dont
live in a society in which I have daily contact with, or even
daily thoughts about, shepherds or kings, but many other
biblical images for God are still very much part of my daily
life. One of the invitations of this bookand, I think, of the
Bibleis this: you can discover things about God by looking
around your ordinary, everyday life. An ordinary Tuesday
what you wear, what you eat, and how you experience the
weatherhas something to offer you about God. There is a
method here, and it is Jesuss method. Jesus, after all, specialized in asking people to steep themselves in the words of the
E
We should exercise that far higher privilege which appertains
to Christians, of having the mind of Christ; and then the
two worlds, visible and invisible, will become familiar to us
even as they were to Him (if reverently we may say so), as
double against each other; and on occasion sparrow and lily
will recall Gods providence, seed His Word, earthly bread the
Bread of Heaven, a plough the danger of drawing back; to fill a
bason and take a towel will preach a sermon in self-abasement;
boat, fishing-net, flock or fold of sheep, each will convey an
allusion; wind, water, fire, the sun, a star, a vine, a door, a
lamb, will shadow forth mysteries.
Christina Rossetti
E
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The child became a man and the man became a preacher
whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and
nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air.
Wherever he was, he had a knack for looking around him and
weaving what he saw into his sermons, whether it was sparrows for sale in the marketplace, laborers lining up for their
pay, or a woman glimpsed through a doorway kneading her
familys bread. ... The kingdom of heaven is like this, he
said over and over again, comparing things they knew about
with something they knew nothing about and all of the sudden
what they knew had cracks in it, cracks they had never noticed
before, through which they glimpsed bright and sometimes
frightening new realities. ... Every created thing was fraught
with divine possibility; wasnt that what he was telling them?
Every ho-hum detail of their days was a bread crumb leading
them into the presence of God, if they would just pick up the
trail and follow.
Barbara Brown Taylor
E
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God is friendship.
Aelred of Rievaulx
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earlier eras have to say about being friends with God? Second, what could my own life, which is full of friendship,
tell me about friendship with God?
As with many of the images I explore in this book, the
saints of the traditionpreachers and mystics, theologians
and pastorshad a great deal to say on the subject. In their
company, with their books and sermons on my lap, I began
to see how much a simple three-word idiom might hold.
I was especially drawn to Thomas Aquinass discussion
of friendship in his great treatise, the Summa Theologiae.
Friendship requires intimacy, said Aquinas: we see the
friend as an other self. That is a beautiful notion, but it
simply led me back to the question I had when I first heard
Sam Wells speak of our friendship with Godif to have a
friend is to have an other self, can I possibly claim the
Creator of all as a friend? The Summa, it turns out, is interested in this question. In the Summa, Aquinas examines
friendship through the writings of Aristotle, who, centuries
before, had argued that true friendship required mutuality,
reciprocity, and equalitythree things that dont seem to
exist between God and human beings. So, says Aquinas, if
Aristotles description of friendship is correct, can we possibly be friends with God? Then Aquinas answers his own
question: in a straightforward way, there is indeed no equality between God and me, between God and you. There is
no mutuality or reciprocity either. But there is Jesus, and
Jesus is a bridge. Jesuss life and work create a sort of mutuality. There is no mutuality or reciprocity between us
and God, but (as the theologian Mindy G. Makant has put
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it), Jesus makes it so. Jesus calls us his friends, and just
as Genesis reports that Gods speaking makes creation so,
Jesus words that we are his friends make it so.
When I took up the language of friendship with God,
then, I was not just adopting a nice phrase. My use of Sams
idiom, and my studious attempts to plumb the idiom, became diagnostic, showing me the limits of my own appreciation of all that Jesus is and does. If I were going to
understand myself as a person in a friendship with Godif
I were going to understand God as my friendI had to
accept, and expect, that my theological imagination would
be changed, deepened, stretched.
But the task of receiving God as friend, and receiving
myself as one who might be a friend to God, is not just
cerebral. To be embraced by this metaphor, there are certain spiritual practices I should take up. The fourth-century
preacher John Chrysostom said that two groups of people
are especially friends of God: saints and the poor. One way
to pursue our own friendship with God, said Chrysostom,
would be to pursue friendship with the people who are already Gods friends. We should pray, in order to become
friends of the saints, and we should practice hospitality
and generosity, in order to become friends of the poor. It
is through those disciplinesprayer and generositythat
we might become friends of the One who, in Chrysostoms
rendering of Jesuss words in John 15, said to his disciples,
I ran after your friendship.
Reading Aquinas and Chrysostom has helped me understand what friendship with God might entail, but so has
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Also, I know I am an uneven, inconstant friend. Friendship has probably been the category of relationship most
sustaining in my life, and I have been lucky to have the most
interesting, most faithful friends in the world (you will meet
some of them in the pages of this book). But I am sporadic.
I can go months without calling. I sometimes give extravagantly to my friends, but if there were a balance sheet
which, thankfully, there is notI am pretty sure it would
show that I take more than I give. And yet I also know I
have grown as a friend. I am less inconstant than I once was.
I have begun to set aside other things, ratchet down other
priorities, so that I have more time to practice friendship.
All this, it turns out, can be said of my friendship with
God. All this frames my life with God in a way that shows
E
One of the aims of prayer is to grow in friendship with God.
If this is the case, then lets consider what constitutes a friendship, and then try to pray in accordance with that. One of
the things about friends is that they want the same thing for
each other. Not that they necessarily both want ice cream at
the same time, but that the well-being of one person is tied to
the well-being of the other. This doesnt just mean that God
wants what we want, but that we want what God wants out of
friendship for God. That is a basis for intercessory prayer. If
Gods deepest longing is for the well-being of the world, then
God wants the well-being of Bosnia, and we pray for that out
of friendship with God.
Roberta Bondi
E
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place the two of you have never visited before, each chapter
concludes with a prayer. The final aim of this book is not to
persuade you to stop thinking about God as your shepherd
and start thinking about God as a cardigan sweater or One
who weeps. The aim, rather, is to provoke your curiosity,
and to inspire your imagination, and to invite you farther
into your friendship with God.
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