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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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May 2005
Jewish roots nurture Christian faith in young writer
Mudhouse Sabbath By Lauren Winner Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003 $19.95 CND, Hardcover, 162 pages ISBN: 1-55725-344-7
If Lauren Winner’s books weren’t so delightfully orthodox and palpably human, they’d be fertile ground for sin since they could easily foster envy or loathing. Nobody, but nobody, can be that good.
Winner is intense. Raised by a Jewish father and lapsed southern Baptist mother, she was a devout member of the Reform Jewish congregation in her hometown of Charlottesville, NC. Then in her freshman year at Columbia, in New York, she converted to Orthodox Judaism, keeping a kosher kitchen, wearing a long skirt, and making her own challah on Fridays.
Within the space of a couple of years, however, she began to doubt, had a dream about Daniel Day-Lewis, took up serious study of orthodox Christianity and was baptized in the Anglican Church while doing graduate studies in England.
At the end of her first book, Girl Meets God, there was a sense that she might return to Judaism. After reading Mudhouse Sabbath, one can see where those wistful hesitations came from. She sorely missed the Orthodox Jewish traditions that helped realize her Christian life.
But a spiritual ritual is more than behavioural therapy. It’s the active participation of the created body that leads to an intellectual and spiritual participation in the Other, or as any firm and nurturing parent would put it, Lauren Winner obedience provides the appropriate boundaries for free exploration.
For example, Winner herself prays daily from the liturgy because she finds that its fixed order and content allows her to float freely in seeking God. Conversely, she finds that foregoing this ritual for any length of time causes her to “lapse into narcissism”.
Not unlike others of her generation, she has thrown herself into activity and excelled—sporting three degrees and three books (Real Sex arrives in April) and she’s only 29.
Even if Winner’s refreshing orthodoxy in its unorthodox packaging were not enough, Mudhouse Sabbath is excellent for its call to attention and engagement, and its rebuff of the current culture’s lukewarm tolerance of all things.
It’s this paradoxical orthodox Christian response that mixes obedience with charity, the serpent’s head with the dove’s heart that distinguishes Winner’s books. Like other young women writers who are Christian, notably Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris, she pokes and prods with an unnerving accuracy, and yet reveals a charity of spirit, forgiving nature, and elastic faith, which allows room for both doubts and certainties.
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Reviewed by
Alex Newman
And
it’s those time-honoured Jewish rituals that Winner explores in
Mudhouse Sabbath. From Sabbath to prayer, from fasting to mourning,
she shares the Jewish “sacraments”. She claims that ritual and
discipline lead to spiritual engagement. Put in behavioural therapy
terms: feelings follow actions.|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2005 |