In this follow-up to Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Religious Life, Lauren F. Winner reveals the spiritual lessons she has brought into her new life as a Christian convert. Born the daughter of a Reform Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother, the author savors the practices that were an important part of her life when she became an Orthodox Jew following their divorce. While in graduate school in England, she decided to embrace evangelical Christianity. In this fascinating work, Winner salutes the most important legacy of Judaism: "Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity. That is not to say that Judaism doesn't have dogma or doctrine. It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action. Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver. (Indeed, Judaism suggests that the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter's faith will return.)"
Although Christians have their own practices, including fasting, vigil-keeping, confession, and meditation, Jews have a longer tradition of devotional activity and plenty of instructional manuals on how to stay diligent in them. Winner shows how Christians — and people of other traditions or those seeking one — can learn from their Jewish brothers and sisters. She discusses Sabbath, prayer, fitting food, mourning, hospitality, body, fasting, aging, candle-lighting, weddings, and door-posts.
Reading this book, we begin to see afresh the depth and riches in the Jewish traditions of spiritual practice. Winner points out that keeping kosher helped her transform eating into faithfulness, how the Sabbath rituals created a true day of rest, how the communal dimension to mourning honored the slowness of this process, how blessing prayers could be used in relation to sex, and how fasting could turn attention from immediate needs to focus on God. This is an ideal resource for those just starting out on the path of spiritual practice.
