Wearing God: Review and Reflection
I have often felt God’s kindness through the right book at the right time, especially books that were thrifted finds or unintended discoveries. Wearing God by Lauren F. Winner was one of these serendipitous gifts. I just completed the book about “Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God.” While the persistent muck of scandals and disappointments in the church world and the daily traumas of living in this dehumanizing world have weighed down my hope and faith, Winner’s words were fresh fodder for my imagination.
I first experienced Winner when she came and spoke about her books Mudhouse Sabbath and Real Sex at my small Christian liberal arts university. I was stunned by her mix of spirituality and knowledge of literature and culture. Her Jewish background, academic curiosity, writerly exploration and honesty, and humble humor all impressed me as rare in the Christian world I was discovering. All of these came shining through in Wearing God.
The premise of the book is this question: “What pictures, what images and metaphors, does the Bible give us for who God is, and what ways of being with God might those pictures invite?” (Wearing God, pg. 5). Winner argues that our churches tend to choose a few favorite images to center: Shepherd, King, Father, Physician, which are beautiful but which can become so familiar that they are no longer stirring or helpful.
The images we choose, she says, provoke these questions (on page 8):
How do our images of God draw us into worship, reverence, adoration of God?
Ho do our images of God help us greet one another as bearers of the image of God?
How do we pray to the God who is king or shepherd? Or dog? How does the God who is king or shepherd pray in us?
What self-knowledge do we gain when standing (kneeling) before the God who is a tree, a glass of living water, a loaf of bread?
Where, in the variegated topography of life with God, do the images we hold of God invite us to go?
Winner describes the book like this (from page 23-24): “In this book, we will explore several overlooked biblical idioms for God. We will look at what the Bible itself suggests about these idioms, and what our daily lives have to say about them, and what various preachers and pray-ers and writers from earlier eras made of them…the final aim of this book is not to persuade you to stop thinking about God as your shepherd and start thinking about God as a cardigan sweater or One who weeps. The aim, rather, is to provoke your curiosity, inspire your imagination, and to invite you farther into your friendship with God.”
After a brief note on gender and the language we use for God, Winner launches into six ways of viewing God, sharing her reflections as well as quotations in the margins that could lead you on a reading trail for days and days. Because I want you to read the book, I’ll briefly share the metaphors she chose and what stirred me with these overlooked images:
Clothing
Clothes shape identity. Clothes communicate identity to those we meet. Clothing can create community but also borders and boundaries. Clothing can blur distinctions and affect the way we move. Clothing can be a verb, an imperative from God as we interact with the world. Clothing is entangled with comfort and with shame.
“Perhaps I will come to know that God is in fact intimately pressed up against my body, as near as a camisole or a neon running shirt. That God is as close to my shame as this shawl is to my shoulders…While I feel cloaked with shame, God is tenderly stitching me a suit of clothes. The clothing is God’s own self. (pg. 59).
Smell
“The God of the Bible smells, in both senses of the term: God emits a fragrance, but more centrally in biblical texts, God inhales aromas and perceives scent…according to some scholars, the incense [of sacrifices] was sort of aromatherapy for God…it is the smell of our prayers that connects us to God, and God finds the smell comforting” (pg. 58-59, 72).
Smells are often complex and hard to completely describe. Jesus emits a fragrance. How we live conveys are certain aroma either like or unlike him. Smell bridges absence. It can also divide classes and can be challenging when in Christianity it has become associated with virtue. There are enough reflections in thinking about God’s relationship with smell as notes in a high-end perfume.
Bread and Vine
“Bread is basic food, but bread nonetheless contains meanings beyond sustenance…bread contains both: enjoyment and necessity, sustenance and pleasure.” (pg 94-95). I loved this chapter, especially the list of responses Winner received when she asked folks what type of bread was Jesus, the Bread of Life:
“a bagel, rye, toast with jam, morning glory muffins, chocolate tea bread, rosemary ciabatta, my grandmother’s sourdough, my grandmother’s challah, French toast, a crusty baguette” (pg 95).
Beyond our visions of our favorite bread, Winner explores manna, God preparing banquets (both in joy and in exhaustion), white bread vs shoe box lunches for Civil Rights marchers, eating disorders and the Eucharist. She moves on to wade through images of vineyards as places of love, care, judgement, and risk.
My favorite quotation from this chapter is this: “Perhaps Jesus the true vine tells us about something beyond our reliance on God. Perhaps the image also tells us about the perils of incarnation. It is as if Jesus studied the Hebrew scriptures and found the most precarious depiction of humanity He could, and said, ‘That is who I am : I am allying with humanity when it is most endangered.’ When I am producing bad fruit and farthest from God’s pleasure, Jesus is already in that place. It is not alien to Him, and I am not alone.” (pg 120).
Laboring Woman
This was by far my favorite chapter in the book, the most provocative of my engagement and expanded imagination. Beyond basic explorations of God as laboring woman in Isaiah, Winner deep dives into God’s breath and groans: “God is in control of redemption: God chooses to participate in the work of new creation with bellowing and panting. God chooses a participation that does not fight the pain, but that works from inside the pain.” (pg 140).
I loved the subversiveness of this passage: “Isaiah’s metaphor converts the groans of childbirth from a sign of humanity’s fallenness to a sign of God’s intimate identification with us.” (142).
And this one, “The next time you’re belting out a hymn in church, consider that the hymn is the music that helps the laboring mother God focus on delivery. Perhaps our music, our new song, helps God in birhting a new creation. God is redeeming us, yet we are the singers encouraging God in the work of delivering a new creation…[our song] helps God breath, helps God relax, helps God feel less pain, helps God deliver.” (pg 146).
Winner goes on to reflect on how a laboring woman image helps us to learn what true strength is: “strength entails enduring, receiving help and support, being open to pain and risk. If our picture of strength is a laboring woman, strength entails entrusting yourself…Strength even entails giving yourself over to the possibility of death” (pg 152).
I also appreciated how Winner dives into the experience of laboring women who are incarcerated, God as midwife, God as a breast-feeding mother, God as someone who risks, like a parent putting a child into care, the work of redemption in human hands.
Laughter
In this chapter, Winner traces laughter in the Bible from Abraham and Sarah through the challenging picture of God laughing in the face of the unjust. She shares about the role of laughter in peacemaking and protest, of expressing humility in our certainties, in drawing a community together in the midst of inhuman conditions. She describes Jesus as fool, and calls us to imagine, “a small glimpse of the world that Jesus promises, a small glimpse of the comedy that God is writing. In that comedy, of course, there will be no prisons, and all the women who used to be locked up crying will be free and will laugh.” (pg 202).
Flame
This image is one of challenge and paradox, the most mystical, perhaps, of the images in the book.
“Fire warms us, and gives us light, and makes it possible for us to cook and to read late into the night and to keep warm in winter. But fire can also destroy: fire can engulf bodies, devour towns, annihilate whole cities. Fire is essential for life and civilization, and fire is a threat to both. Fire warms but can blister; fire heats but can consume. Jesus, somehow, is all of that. Jesus brings the fire, and the fire He brings is Himself. Jesus the Fiery One (as the ancient Syriac hymns name him.” (pg 206)
The chapter then goes on to reflect on God’s fire as that of a lover, a sleuth, a revelation, as ignition of prayer into justice.
Before she goes on to reflect on images she didn’t include from her time working inside women’s prison, before she gives a “bookshelf to quicken your scriptural imagination,” and before she lists pages of notes in this crazy-well-researched book, Winner concludes with thoughts on how little we know of God.
My favorite passage in the book is in this conclusion.
Winner shares words from theologian Belden Lane on the self-hiding God of Isaiah 45— the God who plays hide-and-seek. “Our job, as friends and disciples and reverencers and lovers of the Lord, says Lane, is to listen for God’s laughter. The self-hiding God, in this formulation, is not one whose end is to stay hidden. The self-hiding God is also, at the same moment, the God who self-discloses, so that God might be found, by us.” (pg 237)
“Another thing that is true about kids who play hide-and-seek is that they usually hide in the same places over and over again, and so the parent or friend tasked with looking might reasonably know, even without the sound of laughter, where she is likely to find the one hiding. This is true of God, too. God has a habit of hiding in the same places…God hides in bread and wine, in silence, in gardens, in cities, in prisons, in hunger and privation and poverty, in song. The self-hiding God seems to be the God who wills Her own disclosure.” (pg 237)
It’s my hope that you’ll look this week at where God might be hiding. That you’d search Scripture, your life, and the words of others for images that would reignite your tired imagination. What metaphors, identities, and surprising associations of God are you mulling over these days? I’d love to know.
May we continue to pursue the one who cannot be fully known but who wills disclosure for the sake of relationship and thriving.
