Quotes from Girl Meets God

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Lauren Winner's fantastic book Girl Meets God:

“the very anonymity that made church-hopping appealing has begun to wear me down. I am tired of looking for a church, tired of having my spiritual community be just a patched-together group of Christian friends scattered across the four corners of the earth, folks I can call at any hour but never pray with face to face or eat cheese straws with during coffee hour. I am tired of being expected anywhere on Sunday morning” (30).

[On Christmas Day] “So much for celebrating Jesus’ birthday. I am more like the child who spends Mother’s Day demanding to know why there is no Children’s Day, not understanding that Children’s Day is every other day of the year” (76).

"Hannah, who's a Baptist, often says that a baby can't promise to do everything one promises in baptism. I have never found this a very persuasive argument. It strikes me as too individualistic. The very point is that no baptismal candidate, even an adult, can promise to do those things all by himself. The community is promising for you, with you, on your behalf. It is for that reason that I love to see a baby baptized. When a baby is baptized, we cannot labor under individuals in Christ can or should go this road alone. When a baby is baptized we are struck unavoidably with the fact that this is a community covenant, a community relationship, that these are communal promises” (80).

“Judaism taught me daily to expect God to resurrect the dead. True enough, over the centuries the rabbis have debated the details of Jewish after-life, but it boils down to what you say every day in prayer. And what you say every day in prayer, in the middle of the Shemoneh Esrei (literally, the ‘eighteen,’ because it comprises eighteen blessings), is that God ‘heals the sick’ and ‘releases the prisoner’ and is ‘faithful to raise the dead.’ Easter, it seems to me, is the most profoundly Jewish of all Christian holidays. For a Jew becoming a Christian, bodily resurrection is no surprise. It is what we had been expecting all along” (193).

Why am I a Christian?
“because this with-God-in-Heaven was this end I was created for. I was, as St. Ignatius of Loyola said, ‘created to praise, revere, and serve Him’; I believe, with Augustine, that people desire to praise God, that God ‘prompts’ that desire in us and that the end toward which we restlessly ever move is rest in Him. Or again, there is what Cyril said, right after he instructed his catechumens to allow themselves to be caught in God’s net: ‘Jesus is fishing for you, not to kill you but to give you life’” (194-195)

While I certainly don't agree with everything Winner has to say, she seems to model what it looks like to have a heart for pursuing authentic Christianity.