Wearing God, by Lauren F. Winner

Lauren F. Winner’s Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God is playful, serious, informative, devotional, and as important as it is gratifying. As a reader who has long been unable to resist Winner’s engaging if uneven oeuvre, I read it with the sort of joy one feels when watching someone utterly hit their stride.

Everyone has always liked to talk about Winner’s youthfulness. Plenty of ink was spilled over the horror of a 26-year-old memoirist. But Winner is no longer notably young. She’s written her way through more than a decade of life since “meeting God”—writing about sex and faith and divorce and doubt. Her work plots a religious life over time, the disarming girlishness of her early work giving way to the stark voice of Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. It’s only by looking at the whole shelf that you see the inevitability of Wearing God. Of course this is the book that follows the mid-faith crisis, just as the crisis followed the conversion.

In Wearing God, Winner’s attention is fixed on the biblical images that have captured her fancy and yanked her out of the doldrums: God as clothing, as smell, as laboring woman, as flame. The essays showcase Winner’s wry humor, geeky swagger, and capacity to research the heck out of any given topic. Just when you suspect one could not possibly peer any more closely at a particular image of the divine, she leans in further. It’s as though she’s inspecting the pixels on a screen or the points of a Seurat painting. Sometimes it’s awkward to witness the exegesis of these metaphors. It feels like they’re being exposed, their secrets revealed. Yet Winner’s attention to exhaustive detail is rewarded: her more arcane musings often turn out her most astonishing wisdom.