Lauren F. Winnera leading writer at the crossroads of culture and spirituality and author of Still and Girl Meets Godjoins the ranks of luminaries such as Anne Lamott and Barbara Brown Taylor with this exploration of little knownand, so, little usedbiblical metaphors for God, metaphors which can open new doorways for our lives and spiritualities.There are hundreds of metaphors for God, but the church only uses a few familiar images: creator, judge, savior, father. In Wearing God, Lauren Winner gathers a number of lesser-known tropes, reflecting on how they work biblically and culturally, and reveals how they can deepen our spiritual lives.Exploring the notion of God as clothing, Winner reflects on how we are clothed with Christ or how God fits us like a garment. She then analyzes how clothing functions culturally to shape our ideals and identify our community, and ruminates on how this new metaphor can function to create new possibilities for our lives. For each biblical metaphorGod as the vine/vintner who animates life; the lactation consultant; and the comedian, showing us our follies, for exampleWinner surveys the historical, literary, and cultural landscapes in order to revive and heal our souls.
"Around five years ago, I began to realize that my pictures of God were old. This intersected, not coincidentally, with my newfound wakefulness to the scriptures, and it led me on a search: 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?
"One of the invitations of this book?and, I think, of the Bible?is this: you can discover things about God by looking around your ordinary, everyday life. There is a method here, and it is Jesus's method. Jesus, after all, specialized in asking people to steep themselves in the words of the scriptures and then to look around their ordinary Tuesdays to see what they could see about holiness and life with God. This is not merely entertaining wordplay to give overactive minds something pious to do. It is the Bible's way of making us aware of God and of the world in which we meet God."
?from Wearing God
So begins a wise and lyrical journey as scholar and Episcopal priest Lauren Winner tries on overlooked metaphors for how we meet and experience God. Chapters on God as clothing, laughter, flame, food, wine, and a laboring woman not only invite us to understand God in a new way, but each reveals God to be much closer and more intimate than we imagine, opening up the opportunity for experiencing and knowing God more deeply. If God has felt distant or absent, or if your reading of scripture has become cold or rote, reading Wearing God can serve as the hymn that revives you.
