Regarding "Still"

Winner, Lauren. Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. New York: HarperOne, 2012. Clothbound; 244 pages.

  I liked the insight and frankness Lauren Winner brought to her earlier book Real Sex (on the subject of chastity), and so was interested in what she would have to say about her own crisis of faith, precipitated by life crises such as the death of her mother and a divorce. I've not had any such crisis of faith, but I thought I might find in her some sympathy for my own struggles with depression.

  Still is written elliptically, its "chapters" really more meditative fragments pushing toward something like prosody. I don't read it as a narrative of a loss of faith so much as a loss of awareness of God's presence. Around the middle of the book (p. 102), Winner shares a friend's observation which she finds comforting; namely, that God gifts some with a natural feeling of God's nearness and gifts some others with a no natural feeling of his nearness so that these latter might undergo the discipline to know it. I've often put myself in that latter camp, and wonder whether Winner's mid-faith crisis may have resulted from having to move from the realm of feeling to knowing. I know God's presence, though I have rarely felt it, and that is the foundation which keeps my faith from shaking.

  Across several chapters she returns to the relationship between busyness, boredom, laziness and depression, but without drawing any definite conclusion. Here, I think, she puts her finger on the dissatisfaction with the present moment which depression breeds. Any distraction is welcome if it promises escape.

  What Winner found, if I may be so bold as to speculate, is that one moves on and that the future, though different from the past, still remains. This moment, no matter its power or gravity, cannot remain and must give way to the next. And God will be there still.