Reading “Still – Notes On A Mid-Faith Crisis” by Lauren Winner
Favorite quotes:
- Laziness may have been a problem for nineteen hundred years but not anymore. Busyness is the new sloth.
- I am too busy to go to church, too busy to pray; there’s not enough time to pray, not enough time to hold body together, let alone soul. Ii am too lazy to do what’s important, or hard, so I stay busy with everything else.
- Some days, even a direct word from the Lord doesn’t take.
- “you only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.” The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. …it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward.
- (about Esther) This may be the only book where God is not named, she says, but God’s hiddeness is in fact shot all throughout the the Torah. All throughout Torah, we find people looking for God and not finding God, because God doesn’t often conform to our expectations. God is somewhere other than the place we think to look. …If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn’t intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your ver wondering may be a nudge to work in God’s stead.
- …because on principle, she invites in anyone who knocks on her door-
- dislocated exegesis, that is the practice of reading scripture in unexpected places, in places that might unsettle the assumptions you were likely to bring to the text.
- Like every other spiritual practice with which I have any acquaintance, it doesn’t always work, if working means producing startling insights or some sort of spiritual uplift.
- I carry Ezekiel’s promises in their voices around with me all year. (Ezekiel 37:1-14 Dry Bones)
- “that is how my spiritual life has always moved,” she says, “like a Jewish day, from darkness then into light.”
Living Out Love 