More on God

Read that title out loud. No heresy intended. I promise this will be the last religious book entry for a while--I'll head straight into thrillers and chick lit, possibly some sci fi.

I just read Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren F. Winner. This is the woman who wrote Girl Meets God, which I read a while back, and really didn't like. And yet somehow, I keep reading all her books. I actively seek them out, and I actually enjoyed this one, and I'm struggling with that, but I think I've figured out why.

First, Girl Meets God was a personal story of being Jewish, converting to Orthodox, and then converting to Christianity. That's a convoluted journey to take, and, in my opinion, requires some justification, which the author does not give. Not only does she fail to seem at all sheepish for having such a tangled path, but she narrates the book with such conviction and authority, as though it was silly how much confusion she went through to arrive at such an obvious spiritual place. But she's writing only a couple of years after her conversion. She acts like someone with perspective and some secret knowledge, without earning either of those things.

So why do I keep coming back to her? I think this is quite simple, and it's the same reason I love Sarah Vowell--I love it when someone takes a complicated and esoteric subject and does all the research for me, so I can just show up and be showered with the interesting tidbits. (It's a cheap way of being intellectual, but it's better than nothing.) And when she's not talking about herself, Winner is excellent. She's at her best when she's synthesizing the work of academics and priests and rabbis and the Bible and the Talmud, and telling me what obscure mystic writers say about some of the things that she's discussing, and then telling me about how her friend Molly put this theory into practice.

So I really enjoyed Mudhouse Sabbath, which was about some of the things that Christianity (with its focus on faith at the path to salvation) could learn from Judaism (with its focus on the practice of worship). I love learning about esoteric Jewish traditions, and I love how she claims to have tried a lot of them, in the charming, random way young people wander into trying things.

I wonder if it seems silly to people, how much I like nun books and C.S. Lewis and Lauren Winner, when I'm not even remotely a Christian, not even at all.