Book Review: Still

I appreciate the way Lauren Winner writes.

She is honest, and writes honestly and bravely about things that mean a lot to me. She writes in a way that engages my attention and makes me want to read more.  I appreciate her sense of humor and her sense of perspective. I enjoy reading what Lauren Winner writes, and gain new insights and strength from her. I learned from her books Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath, and now from Still.

Still is an excellent book to read during Lent. It describes what it is like to let go of things when you can no longer hold onto them. It grows out of experiences that feel like failure and loss, sadness and anxiety. It includes time spent listening and waiting, time spent in museums and on front porches. It describes what it is like, slowly and carefully, to rediscover the sweetness of the Holy.

Still is a book filled with work and striving, but the kind of inner struggle that often appears to be still from the outside. There is quite a bit in this book about spiritual direction, and it is an accurate description of what spiritual direction can be. As Lauren Winner writes:

In general, I think that different people have different paths to God, different people are called to and nourished by different spiritual practices. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who wouldn’t benefit from spiritual direction. I think my spiritual life would have gone comatose long before now had it not been for the prodding, and the listening, of these generous directors. I think of spiritual direction as lending another set of ears to God’s conversation with me. Or I think of it as analogous to my cello lessons, only instead of learning to play the cello I am trying to learn to pray.

How could another set of ears help you?