(Reprinted
from the spring
2002 issue of Spectrum magazine.)
I
am reluctant to admit my Christianity. Partly this is because
I can’t help wishing to distance myself from wild-eyed,
far-right-wing-type Christians. You know; those overly sincere,
humorless folks who bomb abortion clinics, think Jesus destroyed
the World Trade Center to get back at homosexuals, and use
words like "abomination" with no trace of irony.
But
there’s also the cringing, status-conscious, wannabe
liberal arts intellectual part of me worrying that in the
smart-people culture Christianity is just not cool. Yes, it’s
straight back to junior high. So, even more remarkable to
me than the power and beauty of Anne Lamott’s meditations
on faith and living in touch with the love of Jesus is the
fact that she makes Christianity seem cool, something compatible
with feminism, reading the New Yorker, and thinking.
She
also rehabilitates the testimonial. Traveling Mercies:
Some Thoughts on Faith is basically a testimonial—stories
from her life, often relating how faith or God helped her
deal with death, heartbreak, and that hardest trial of all,
daily life. Unlike most testimonials—where ex-sinners
detail the many and lurid escapades of their previous life
until they hit rock bottom and in the end get themselves saved—Lamott
takes the end of most stories and begins hers there. She fits
her entire preconversion story (which has as much drama as
any I’ve ever heard) into her overture, which is entitled
"Lily Pads."
However,
her story is hardly your average testimonial. (For instance,
I don’t recall any of the speakers at my college’s
vespers ever using the "f-word" to accept Jesus
into their lives.) The problem with most testimonies is, as
far as I’m concerned, the problem with our whole society:
ratings. The drug deals, violence, general depravity of the
"before" part of conversion stories make for much
better ratings, and in an attempt to hold audiences’
short attentions, these features become the focus.
Lamott
trusts that the Christian life—eating breakfast, paying
bills, leaning on Jesus every day—will make for an exciting
enough story. Instead of focusing on her old life, with all
its lurid details and vicarious thrills for those safely in
the fold, she knows that much of what is thought and said
and done each day is often lurid enough, and infinitely more
useful for those of us not currently addicted to drugs while
running from the law and the mafia.
Community
is central to Lamott’s Christianity. All the Christians
(and Hindus and unaffiliated people) who help her get over
alcoholism attest to the importance of community. Members
of her church help her get through pregnancy and single motherhood
with their love and financial help, even though most of them
could hardly afford to take care of themselves. When she is
depressed or angry or afraid, God most often uses her friends—whether
they’re old friends or have known her for five minutes—to
comfort her.
However,
what really made me understand the point of community for
maybe the first time since high school was the end of the
book, after the last chapter, where Lamott thanks all the
people who helped her write it. There are priests who explain
theology; her mother, who helps with Marin County history;
friends who help with politics, marine biology, and geology;
and editors who give input and ideal conditions in which to
write.
Perhaps
I’m the only one foolish enough never to realize this
before, but that’s the way to do it. If I had tried to
write this book, I would never have thought to involve my
friends. I would be out there reading encyclopedias, trying
to become an expert about too many things, when other people
could have explained it all in a fraction of the time and
in greater detail. It’s amazing to me to think of just
calling up a friend and chatting about, say, politics, instead
of slogging through mostly unhelpful entries in reference
books or entirely unhelpful Web pages.
Because
I was so dense about community, it took this outright, unsubtle
example to make me finally understand. The idea of community
permeates this book, the beauty of people working together
to make the world better, to prop each other up, and to let
each other know that they are not alone. To me this was a
revelation, an epiphany even, which may mystify those who
have understood community all along.
Anne
Lamott knows how easy it is to slip into routine, how easy
it is to go from relief at simply being alive after bulimia
and alcoholism to complete despair because the car ran out
of gas. But she also is able to find meaning, and sometimes
even miracles in everyday life.
At
one point, she is traveling on a plane, sitting between a
prim, uptight Christian man reading a book she has recently
reviewed ("hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic
homophobic misogynistic propaganda—not to put too fine
a point on it" [60]) and a woman who hardly speaks English.
Then the plane hits turbulence so bad that the pilot yells
at the flight attendants to sit down, and a passenger has
a heart attack. Then, bolstered by the memory of a small miracle
that happened in church, Anne Lamott reaches out and connects
with the two people sitting next to her.
Writes
Lemott:
I thought, I do not know if what happened at church
was an honest-to-God little miracle, and I don’t know
if there has been another one here, the smallest possible
sort, the size of a tiny bird, but I feel like I am sitting
with my cousins on a plane eight miles up, a plane that is
going to make it home—and this made me so happy that
I suddenly thought, This is plenty of miracle for me to rest
in now. (66-67)
Lamott
knows a thing or two about grief. Close friends, her father,
and people at church all die in the course of this book. "I
am no longer convinced that you’re supposed to get
over the death of certain people," she writes, "but
little by little, pale and swollen around the eyes, I began
to feel a sense of reception, that I was beginning to receive
the fact of
Pammy’s
death, the finality. I let it enter me" (72-73). And,
"if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear
disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then
to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving
you the two best things: softness and illumination" (72-73).
Often
bitingly funny, and insightful, and at times heartbreaking,
Lamott’s writing conveys the feeling of coming from a
normal person—small, weak, scared—who has the exhilarating
experience of resting safe in the arms of Jesus. All of us
could use more of that feeling.
©
2002 Spectrum/AAF
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