In her spiritual memoir, Girl Meets God, Lauren Winner writes with refreshing wit and occasional eloquence about her pilgrimage from Orthodox Judaism to evangelical Protestantism (in this case, the Episcopal church). This twenty-something graduate student draws on a wide breadth of knowledge-both personally and professionally-to discuss a variety of religious experiences. Her father was a Reform Jew and her mother a lapsed Southern Baptist. "No one in my family … talked about God," she admits. Winner, herself, is now finishing a Ph.D. in American religious history at Columbia University.
The book's organization follows the church calendar, beginning with Advent and moving through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, Pentecost, and back to Advent. This is a useful device to tell Winner's story. Reared in Charlottesville, Virginia, Winner highlights the novelty she experienced as an observant Jew in what Flannery O'Connor referred to as the "Christ haunted south." She embraced orthodox Judaism passionately. "If the Torah was true, then we should spend all our time reading it, and all our life living it." As would any good writer, she adds the specifics: " I began attending Orthodox services every day; rose at 6:00 a.m. to study a treatise on hilchot Shabbat, the Sabbath laws; worked part-time at the kosher deli; declared to my parents that I couldn't eat off their plates …" Winner's love of the Old Testament animates the pages of the book and should be a challenge to all Christians who find themselves more comfortable and conversant in the New Testament. She speaks of "living in the text," and indeed peppers her text with many Old Testament figures an stories.
Yet it is while grappling with the Incarnation that Winner truly understands "the radical secret of God becoming man." She explains that, "The Incarnation, that God took flesh, is the whole reason I am not an Orthodox Jew." As such, Good Friday helps her learn the lesson that "one grave and theological term, incarnation, most poignantly meets that other grave and theological term, atonement…. On this basic fact all orthodox Christians can agree: through Christ's atoning work on the cross, we fallen sinners are reconciled with God." These are moments of great insight and profundity. More often her style is clever and breezy as she romps through life facing the pride of life, and the lusts of the eye and flesh.
At the risk of sounding like a Presbyterian version of Saturday Night Live's church lady, Winner's breezy style may also make readers cringe. For instance she often refers to Jesus with too much familiarity, as her buddy, or worse a wooing boyfriend. Her bedroom is filled with pictures of him. For whatever reason, the reverence and awe she shows in her Jewish phase is not evident in her evangelical identity.
Yet with all her excesses and eccentricities, this very self-aware Virginian-turned New Yorker, who at various times refers to herself as "chic," "sophisticated," and "learned," in the end, relates best to the words on an early American sampler, which she says shaped the education of countless girls in New England. It is, she says "the essence of the Christian story" and hers: "In Adam's fall, we sinned all," and "Christ is my salvation."
This forty-something reviewer looks forward to another installment of Lauren Winner's spiritual autobiography in, say, about twenty years. If the title is Woman Grows in Grace it may even be better than her first.
