Girl Meets God. By Lauren F. Winner. Algonquin Books. 303 pp. $23.95
Lauren Winner never met a sacrament she didn’t like, and she has had more chances than most of us to test the pleasures of sacramental life. The 27-year-old daughter of a Reformed Jewish father and a lapsed Southern Baptist mother, Winner grew up Orthodox, her parents having decided to raise their kids Jewish. Smart and bookish as well as dutiful, Winner embraced her religious training enthusiastically. She observed religious holidays, studied with a Hebrew tutor, joined a Jewish meditation group, and read every book she could find about Jewish history, Jewish ritual, and Jewish law. Like the graduate student she was shortly to become, the teenage Winner mastered the available literature, tested every observance, and had her adolescent identity shaped by her faith experience and commitment.
No wonder her parents, by then divorced, were surprised to learn, shortly after Lauren’s enrollment at Columbia University, that their daughter had decided to become an Episcopalian.
This book is about her transition to a new faith, though it’s neither a repudiation of Orthodox Judaism nor a celebration of Protestantism’s putatively unique virtues. Instead, it’s an account of a scholarly, warm-hearted, sometimes impulsive, always deeply thoughtful young woman searching for, and possibly finding, an incarnational experience (that is, apprehending the presence of Jesus in human form). The saga includes moments of near-comedy (when Winner’s Columbia-based Episcopalian rector asks her to give up, for Lent, “the thing you love most”—reading—she agrees, though reluctantly, and holds to her disciplined self-denial for most of two days) and, of course, puzzlement, but no one can doubt Winner’s straight-ahead seriousness.
Girl Meets God is not so much organized as constructed, like a particularly elaborate salad. Its sections are based roughly on the elements of the Protestant liturgical year, though the connection between memoir and liturgy is frequently a stretch. The story proceeds in fits and starts, often reversing itself and leaving only marginally developed many of its potentially potent elements: a married friend’s determination to have an affair; Winner’s on-again, off-again relationship with a suitor she discards with a phone call; an open-eyed enjoyment of sex and alcohol.
Winner’s book is learned and discerning about the two religious traditions she knows best, and unpretentious in exploring her abandonment of one in favor of the other. If there’s a lesson here, it may be, simply, that God is love. Couldn’t happen to a nicer woman.