A Review of Still by Stacy Sergent
An almost-memoir from an almost-saint is the gift Lauren Winner offers us in Still. Those first pulled into Winner’s story through her conversion memoir, Girl Meets God, may be frustrated with the looser structure of Still. But she gives fair warning that memoir is not what she is doing here, and the book’s subtitle, Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, fits. These short chapters are like scribbled messages scattered by wind then gathered up again, or like photos snapped from a moving vehicle. “I am not a saint,” she writes. “I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.” (p. 194)
In the section titled “Wall,” Winner tells us, briefly, about her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, two events that most directly led to this time of spiritual dryness. Though the minutiae of her particular story may arouse curiosity, what is compelling is her very relatable crisis of faith. Many readers will be nodding emphatically at Winner’s descriptions of the seeming abstractness of God, of the crawling passage of time while waiting and hoping for things to get better, of well-meaning Christians offering hurtful words. The aching honesty and subtle humor that make Winner’s writing so engaging are still at work here.
“Movement” introduces people and rituals that help Winner out of inertia. Friends, church members, strangers pray for her, challenge her, share their own stories of “losing Jesus.” Winner reads psalms, gives up anxiety for Lent (at least for fifteen minutes at a time), finds loneliness to be a form of prayer, slips into synagogue on Purim and remembers God’s hiddenness. The choice she makes there–to believe that God is hidden rather than absent–is a crucial one. She infuses these chapters with pathos and vulnerability.
To her credit, Winner does not oversimplify reality in “Presence,” which would have felt like betrayal to this reader. Even the end of the book finds her in a spiritual middle place, where most of us spend the lion’s share of our Christian lives. Winner brings the reader to a point where “God is no longer an abstraction. But God is elusive. With this elusive God there is a certain kind of closeness, one I did not know before God became elusive, one I did not know when God was still nearby as friend.” (p. 162)
The ending feels abrupt, but works as a reminder that this is not an ending so much as another glimpse of the middle. I recommend Still for anyone who knows what it is to feel far from God and alone. Being an academic and theologian, it should come as no surprise that the author engages her experience well both intellectually and spiritually. Many of us have been on the journey Winner relates, but few could write such an eloquent travelogue.
Stacy Sergent is staff chaplain at MUSC Medical Center, Charleston, South Carolina.