Book Reviews

girl meets GOD: on the path to a spiritual life
by Lauren Winner

Excerpt: "Once, when we were still dating, Steven read aloud to me from an obscure British novel...; he read a scene in which a believer and a cynic are debating God. Of course I know you believe in it, the cynic says, what I want to know is do you believe in it the way you believe in Australia? Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory.
"Living the Christian life, however, is not really about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't. After all, when I stand up in church to say the Creed, it may well be that that very morning I didn't really know for sure that some fifteen-year-old-virgin got pregnant with a baby who was really God. Saying the Creed is like vowing to love your bride forever and ever. That vow is not a promise to feel goopy and smitten every morning for the rest of your life. It is a promise to live love, even, especially, when you don't feel anything other than annoyance and disdain."

When I first started reading girl meets GOD I wasn't too excited about it. I've met Lauren Winner, before I read any of her books, and I felt like she was more put together than this book illustrates. I had to keep reminding myself that when she wrote this book she was a young Christian, single, and not really sure what God was doing with her.

But the more I read, the more I liked her. She was raw and honest. She talks about how God draws to you Himself. She talks about looking back at her life and seeing the clues God dropped along that way to show her that He was seducing her. Her conversion was not a specific moment in time, but a process of slow commitment. She told her friends, "I think I'm becoming a Christian."

Winner starts with the Jewish festival of Sukkot and goes through the year, highlighting Jewish and Christian holidays and melding them together, showing the Jewishness of the Bible. She sheds new light on the Bible and points out nuances that I'd never have realized without some Jewish flavour added.

She's honest. She talks about her experiences and those of her friends. She shows that God sometimes doesn't appear out of the sky with a ray of blinding light and announce that we will now serve Him; sometimes He whispers sweet nothings in our ear until we turn and embrace Him.

Winner has a faith that is rooted in ritual. Having been raised Jewish, she finds the liturgy appealing and the sacraments speak to her heart more, I think, than to your average evangelical. Keep and open mind when you read her book, and let God whisper seductively to you, too.

real sex: the naked truth about chastity
by the same.

Excerpts: "In Romans 12:1, Paul instructs teh church to "offer your bodies as a living sacrifice." The grammar of that command is odd- we are offering bodies, plural, as one living sacrifice, singular. But that seeming grammatical slip, I think, tells us a lot about community, chastity, and prayer. Those who are not married and those who are married offer our bodies as a single, communal sacrifice to God. It is something we do together- as one Body."

"...Marriage consists not simply or even primarily of a personal relationship. Rather, it crystallizes the love of the larger church community. The couple is not just two-in-one but two together within the whole, with specific responsibility for the whole.... They must presevere in love, because the community needs to see God's love actualized among God's people."

real sex is a real book. When Lauren Winner started writing it, she was single and insistent that this would not be one of those books where a happily married person prattles on about how great marriage is and how all singles should aim for it. But during the course of the writing, she met, dated, and got married to her husband. At the book was sent off to the publisher, she'd been married exactly three-and-a-half months, she explains.

She begins with talking about the Scriptural defense of sex and marriage, not that anyone needed to hear that, but it's a good beginning. And then she starts with communalism. This is probably my favourite part of her book. The chapter is entitled "Communal Sex: Or, Why Your Neighbor Has Any Business Asking You What You Did Last Night." She defends the concept that sex is inherently a part of community and that as Christians, we should actually have very little privacy in our lives. We are, after all, One Body.

She discusses lies that our culture tells us about sex, and that the church tells us. And then she goes into actually practicing chastity. How do you do it? Where is the line? What are the dos and don'ts? "Conforming your Body to the Arc of the Gospel," she calls it. She goes into the value of singleness- what the church can learn from it. And how chastity is a spiritual discipline- something you do to bring yourself closer to God, something you do even when you don't feel like it.

I hardly ever "feel like" being chaste. In fact, Western culture has so poisoned my mind concerning sex, that it seems to crop up everywhere I look (see my previous post). Winner gives me new eyes when looking at chastity. She points out the Body of Christ in a fabulously simple way, a way that makes me want to be chaste, if only to be able to share the lessons God teaches me with the rest of my Body.

Read real sex if you can get your hands on it.