Anne Lamott: A Humorous “Theologian”

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 71^st 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.

Remembering Rachel

Some of you know the name Rachel Held Evans well; others, not so much. Regardless, it seems appropriate to take some time to remember Rachel now, just before the 40^th anniversary of her birth on June 8. I'm greatly saddened that she didn’t live to celebrate the big 4-0, as she died on May 4, 2019.

Who Was Rachel Held Evans?

Rachel Grace Held was born in Alabama but moved with her birth family to Dayton, Tennessee, when she was 14. Dayton, you may remember, is where the (in)famous Scopes Trial was held in 1925.

Five years later, Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor at the 1925 trial, was founded in that small city. Rachel’s family moved to Dayton because her father got a job at the college there.

Rachel graduated from Bryan College in 2003 and married Dan Evans, her college boyfriend, that year. Rachel and Dan’s two children were three and one when Rachel died.

During her much-too-brief life, Rachel Held Evans (RHE) became a prominent Christian blogger, author, and speaker. But because of her faith in Jesus, she regularly rejected the biblicism, patriarchalism, and homophobic ideas of the conservative Christianity of her youth.

What Did Rachel Write?

RHE wrote four books published between 2010 and 2018, the year before her untimely death. The first was Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. Four years later it was republished as Faith Unraveled with the same subtitle.

Her 2012 book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, became a New York Times bestseller in e-book non-fiction, and her Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (2015) also became a New York Times bestseller nonfiction paperback.

Rachel’s only book I have read is her last one, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, published less than a year before her death. I was much impressed by it.

Here is just one of the many statements I liked in that book: “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in” (Kindle ed., p. 186). 

Those words embody her central emphasis. 

Goodreads.com has nearly 700 quotes from Rachel’s books that have been placed on their website by her readers (see here). There have also been over 10,500 ratings of Inspired posted on Goodreads—which is far fewer than those for her previous two books!

Why Remember Rachel?

One main reason I remember Rachel and encourage you readers to do the same is because her central emphasis, as indicated above, expresses the truth of one of my favorite old Christian hymns, “There’s a Wideness in God’s mercy.”**

Here is what others said about her shortly after her death.

Writing for Religious News Service on May 4, 2019, journalist Kately Beaty lauded RHE for preaching “the wildly expansive love of God.”

Two days later, Eliza Griswold’s article in The New Yorker was titled, “The Radically Inclusive Christianity of Rachel Held Evans.” (Griswold was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2019.)

Also on May 6, Emma Green’s article in The Atlantic referred to RHE as a “hero to Christian misfits.”

Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans’s piece about RHE in the June 5, 2019, issue of Christian Century was titled “Apostle to outsiders.” Journalist Evans (no relation to Dan) wrote in the last paragraph, “Christianity in America is more lively, loving, generous, and honest because of Rachel Held Evans.”

Journalist Green concluded her May 6 article with these words: “Evans spent her life trying to follow an itinerant preacher and carpenter, who also hung out with rejects and oddballs. In death, as that preacher once promised, she will be known by her fruits.”

Yes, let’s fondly remember Rachel now and give thanks for the many fruits her much-too-short life is still producing.

_______

** There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy (1862) by F. W. Faber

1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.

3 But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

4 For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

(From Voices Together, 2020)

Is Politics Trumping Mercy?

In this age of the demise of many magazines because of the great growth of information on the Internet, a small Christian community in New York known as the Bruderhof has bravely begun to publish the Plough Quarterly, an excellent new publication said to be “breaking ground for a renewed world.” 

The theme of the Winter 2016 issue, which I received earlier this month, is just their seventh one, and it is a good one. Each issue has a theme expressed in one word, and the theme of the new issue is “Mercy.”

A week ago, on the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council (about which I wrote in my previous article), the Jubilee Year of Mercy began in the Catholic Church. 

Back in April, Pope Francis issued a public statement that the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy would begin on the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. And he went on to declare, “The Church feels a great need to keep this event alive.” 

I don’t fully understand all that is meant by the Jubilee Year, but I do comprehend that Pope Francis is calling upon Catholics, and all Christians, to “live lives shaped by mercy.” 

According to Catholic teachings, seven types of actions are called “the corporeal works of mercy.” They include the seven things you see in the following image:

So even though they are on a vastly different scale, a small Protestant group and the large and powerful Catholic Church are emphasizing mercy at the very same time. That seems to be highly appropriate, for in the Bible the prophet Micah spoke these powerful words about God’s desire for us humans: 

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (6:8, NIV)

Acts of mercy are central to the Christian faith.

One definition of mercy is “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm.” The dictionary’s third definition of mercy is “compassionate treatment of those in distress.” 

As I understand it, the Bible’s emphasis on mercy is particularly of the latter type—and that is the type of mercy found in the Catholic Church’s list of “corporeal works of mercy.”

Recently (here) I was critical of Kentucky’s new governor and the other (mostly Republican) governors who are so negative about accepting Syrian refugees. Of course there has to be extensive checks on those coming into this country and the safety of U.S. citizens must always be a matter of great concern. 

But why does anyone think the President or the (mostly Democratic) governors who want to receive Syrian refugees are not concerned about the safety issue? Of course they are. 

Like so many other current matters, the acceptance of Syrian refugees into this country is to a large degree a political issue. 

Among other things, the Republican presidential candidates have greatly exaggerated the number of Syrian refugees being considered. Donald Trump even charged that the President wants to bring 250,000 into this country. But the real figure under consideration for 2016 is around 10,000. 

It is a real shame that politicians (and the segment of the public supporting those politicians) put politics ahead of mercy. I have it on good authority (see Matthew 5:7) that it is the merciful who will be blessed; for to them mercy will be shown.