Wearing God

"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.