This year, I have read four of Anne Lamott’s books. Some of you have also read some of her many books, but others may not know much, if anything, about her or her writings. In this post, I will briefly introduce her and share a few of her “theological” ideas and statements.
Anne
Lamott was born in San Francisco on April 10, 1954, so tomorrow will be her 71st
birthday. As a girl, she grew up in a lower-income neighborhood of Marin City,
Calif., a few miles northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Marin
City was originally built as housing for shipyard workers during WWII and later
became home to a predominantly Black community. Lamott described it as
"the ghetto in this luscious, affluent county," noted for government
housing, drugs, and crime as well as strong families.
For
several years, she also lived in a small houseboat in Sausalito, a more
eclectic and artistic environment, where she struggled with addiction and
financial instability before finding her footing as a writer.
Most
people try to present themselves as better than they are, but in her
self-deprecating writing style, it seems that Lamott probably presents herself
as worse than she actually is. Still, until she was in her early 30s, her
lifestyle was characterized by alcoholism, drug abuse, and promiscuous sex.
Things
began to change for the better when she started attending what became St. Andrews
Presbyterian Church, an interracial congregation that met for years in
borrowed/rented facilities. She was baptized there in 1986, and she wrote that “one
year later I got sober” (TM, 51).
For
many years, Lamott’s pastor was Veronica Goines, a wise Black woman from whom Anne
learned much. It will soon be 40 years since Lamott was baptized, and she has
been a faithful member and lay-leader of that church up to the present.
In
1989, her son Sam was born, and in her books she repeatedly writes about her
dear son, whom she raised as a single mother.*1
Lamott’s
books are a mixture of humor, ordinariness, and profundity—at least that is my impression from
her books that I have read:
Traveling
Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999,
TM)
Plan
B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005, PB)
Grace (Eventually):
Thoughts on Faith
(2007, GE*2)
Hallelujah
Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy
(2017, HA)
As one who spent considerable time in graduate school studying Søren Kierkegaard, I was surprised that early in TM, she wrote that reading SK’s Fear and Trembling changed her life " forever.” Then, she wrote words directly related to last month’s blog posts about certainty and faith.
She
realized that “since this side of the grave you could never know for sure if
there was a God, you had to make a leap of faith, if you could, leaping across
the abyss of doubt with fear and trembling” (27). Because of reading SK, she
“actively made, if not exactly a leap of faith, a lurch of faith” (28).
I
was surprised to find such theological statements embedded in her humor-laden writing.
Further, her theological understanding of Christianity, as was also true of Kierkegaard’s,
is not about “pie in the sky by and by.”
In
Plan B, she states that her faith tells her that “God has skills, ploys,
and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families,
prisons, governments.” In that regard, she quotes Pastor Veronica: “Nobody gets
into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” (citing James Forbes*3.)
Here are some insightful “theological”
nuggets from Lamott’s books:
* We “are not punished for the sin but
by the sin” (TM, 128)
* “…
not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die”
(TM, 134)
* “God
loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like
this” (TM, 135)
*
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back” (PB, 47).
* Fr.
Tom told her that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty” (PB, 256).
* “…
we’re punished not for our hatred … but by it” (GA, 129-130).
* “Mercy means compassion, empathy, a
heart for someone’s troubles” (HA, 51).
*
“God doesn’t give us answers. God gives us grace and mercy” (HA, 104)
_____
*1 Lamott’s
memoir about the first year of motherhood as a single parent, Operating Instructions,
was published in 1993. I have not read it, but according to CoPilot (Bing’s AI
tool), that book, written in journal format, “captures her joys, fears, and
struggles raising her son.” Further, it “was widely praised for its raw
honesty, humor, and heartfelt portrayal of single motherhood.”
*2 You
can hear Lamott talk about her faith in this
2016 interview regarding her book Grace Eventually.
*3 Forbes
(b. 1935) served as pastor of historic Riverside Church in NYC from 1989 to 2007,
the first African American minister to hold that position.