Still by Lauren Winner

Lauren Winner's website

I heard Lauren Winner speak at the Faith & Writing Festival one year. It was several years ago and she seemed quite young but I liked her a lot. I liked the way she just said whatever, even if it wasn't something you'd expect from a literary, highly educated writer.

This book, Still, has the subtitle "Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis." It's written shortly after Winner divorced her husband of, I think, 7 years. Winner grew up "with a Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother who had agreed to raise my sister and me as Jews." She writes that she loved Judaism and everything that went with it - the food, the songs, even "every letter of the Hebrew alphabet." But in college she had a dream about Jesus, read Jan Karon's Mitford novels, bought a Book of Common Prayer and after graduating from college she was baptized. After seeing her at the Festival I read and enjoyed her book Girl Meets God: On the Path to Spiritual Life.


I suppose you could compare Lauren Winner to Anne Lamott, who I love, but I didn't even think of that until now, when I was trying to figure out how to write about Winner and this book. It is a memoir about faith, as some of Lamott's books have been, but Winner has a very different style of writing. She's more serious, for one, although not heavy or preachy or anything like that.

Winner is writing about "middle" in this book. She feels she's in a mid-Faith crisis, when she is no longer as certain and joyful in her faith as she was in the past. Yet even while she expresses doubt, I never felt she'd lost her faith. One thing I thought was notable is that she continued to go to church, to kind of go through the motions, even when she didn't feel like it, and she found that was good. It helped. That's good to hear.

I liked all the meditations and musings on the word "middle." I had never heard of the "middle voice," a grammatical term. She says that we don't have the middle voice in English but it's found in ancient Greek, Sanskrit and some other languages. She says it's "somewhere between the agent and the one acted upon. When you have something done to you. I will have myself carried. I will have myself saved." She said she started listening for hints of the middle in English and heard it in sentences like "That scotch drank smoothly; politicians bribe easily." She says the middle voice is used "when the subject has some caracteristic, some quality, that makes it partly responsible for whatever has happened in the sentence...The subject is changed....but the subject is not just being...acted upon; something in its own qualities...is necessary for the action, too--if the scotch weren't smooth, it wouldn't drink well."

I don't know why I think that is so interesting, but I do. She writes about middle verbs being verbs that "name a change in bodily posture but not much motion (lie down, kneel). Also...verbs for speech actions with emotional overtones (confess), verbs of cognition (think), and verbs of spontaneous happening (grow, become, change) and she says "these middle verbs...are religious; they are the very actions that constitute a religious life: to forgive, to imagine, to grow, to yearn, to lament, to meet, to kneel." Cool. Never thought of that.

Finally she writes, "If I could make English speak middle, I would use it to say this: I wait; I doubt; as the deer yearns for a drink of water, so I yearn. I long. I praise."


I highlighted this quote from a historian Christopher Grasse who, she said, was writing about the religious late-eighteenth-century America: "Faith...meant more than intellectual assent to a set of doctrines. It was a commitment of the whole self, a hope and trust that, if genuine, ought to be the foundation of an entire way of life and vision of the world."

I also liked this: "I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God."