Read, Write, and Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro: Part Two
As we engage more deeply with the ancient streams of art and faith, how they inform one another, and how all of this can create profound new possibilities for belonging, we need ways to respond. The Spiritual Direction for Writers Read, Write, & Pray series uses themes and excerpts from various books, essays, and articles to help you respond to writing by a specific author.
I have not worked with Lauren Winner or Jamie Quatro to create this series, but I did host them for an online conversation in October 2022, which informed how I designed this particular Read, Write, & Pray series. You don’t need to own a copy of their books to complete this series, but you should definitely buy their books anyway! You can buy their books here.
I’m excited to invite you to explore Winner’s and Quatro’s work in meaningful ways. I hope Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro helps you make space to notice God’s presence in your life and creative work. I hope it gives you opportunities to discover how making art and engaging with art help you belong to yourself, others, God, and the world.
Parts One and Two of Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro are available to the public at spiritualdirectionforwriters.com. Parts Three and Four are exclusive resources for those who registered for the Spiritual Direction for Writers Conversation Series with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro in October 2022.
Learn more about Read, Write, & Pray here.
Additional Read, Write, & Pray Resources:
Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro Part One
Read, Write, & Pray with The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Read, Write, & Pray with The Great Belonging by Charlotte Donlon
Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro: Part Two
When I invited Lauren Winner and Jamie Quatro to participate in a Spiritual Direction for Writers Conversation Series event, I wanted to pick a book from each of them to focus on for our time together. I picked Still, one of my favorites by Lauren, and Fire Sermon, my favorite by Jamie. In case you’re interested, I love everything both of these women have written, especially Wearing God by Lauren and Girl Meets God, of course. Jamie’s book of short stories, I Want to Show You More, is fantastic, but Fire Sermon is just brilliant and it does something to my soul that I don’t have words for and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
While pulling together the four installments of Read, Write, & Pray with Lauren Winner & Jamie Quatro, I realized I could do 20 installments and be perfectly giddy doing so. These women are beautiful writers and humans and I’m so thankful for both of them and their genius writing and work.
READ
This excerpt from Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner.
WRITE
In this interview with NPR’s Guy Raz, Lauren Winner tells a story about how she met God in a particular way during a church service. The story begins around the 3:15 point.
After listening to this story, use the scene described as a prompt for a prayer or new fiction or a new essay or a new poem. What happens next? Or, how have you met God in a way you weren’t expecting? Or, how do you wish you could meet God?
PRAY
“The Bible itself shows us that one good thing to do with the words of the Bible is offer them back to God in prayer. For example, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Mary offers a stunning prayer, praising God for the strange thing God has done in making her pregnant with the Messiah. Mary is not making this prayer up out of whole cloth. She draws on a prayer she would have known from reading 1 Samuel, a prayer of thanksgiving Hannah prayed after she became pregnant. Even Jesus did not concoct all his prayers from whole cloth. As he was being put to death, Jesus himself offered the words of Psalm 22 to God the Father…
I am increasingly trying to allow the liturgy’s reliance on scriptural language to shape my understanding of what scripture and prayer are. If the church’s worship consists largely of reciting scripture, then scripture in part is the text Christians pray together. And if the church’s worship consists largely of reciting scripture, then prayer isn’t foremost about carrying my individual concerns to God. Prayer, rather, is about offering to God something—some sentences, some odes—we’ve made from words God first gave us.” –Lauren Winner, “God’s Words and Liturgy’s Echo”
Find a few words in Scripture that feel appropriate for this particular day or night or week and pray them back to God. Flipping through the Psalms might be a good way to find some language for this prayer.
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Lauren F. Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, and most recently, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin.
Dr. Winner’s research has been supported by numerous institutions, including Monticello, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She has appeared on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has served as a commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Books and Culture, and Christianity Today, and her essays have been included in several volumes of The Best Christian Writing.
Dr. Winner, an Episcopal priest, is vicar of St. Joseph's Episcopal Church in Durham, N.C.
Charlotte Donlon helps her readers and clients notice how they belong to themselves, others, God, and the world. Charlotte is a writer, a spiritual director for writers, and the founder of Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and Parenting with Art™. She is also the founder and host of the Our Faith in Writing podcast and website. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University where she studied creative nonfiction with Paula Huston and Lauren F. Winner. She holds a certificate in spiritual direction from Selah Center for Spiritual Formation. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. She is currently writing her next book, Spiritual Direction for Writers, which will be published by Eerdmans in 2024.