March 24 column on Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is speaking tomorrow, March 24th, at the St Louis County Library. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, but I know her through her printed essays and when she wrote a column for salon, the on-line magazine.

She has struggled in her life, especially with alcohol. She found some solace and stability in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church in the California bay area. She raised a child, mostly on her own, and faced the tough decisions about being sandwiched between a child and a mother slipping into dementia.

She has a knack for the aphorism. “If God hates the same people you do, you can be fairly certain you have created God in your own image.”

she came to the faith as an adult, but she speaks for many of us in her constant battles to live within it. She wants her life to be a a smooth flight path toward heaven. Instead, she often finds it a slow slog, of small steps, and relapse, and then finding her footing again. As she puts it, “slog, scootch, scotch, rest.” One of the tricks in life, she learns is ‘falling better.” She learned to ski but falls a lot, and she enjoys the run in between the “spills and humiliations, just like life.” In the story she recounts taking her friend Sue, who was dying of cancer, for one last ski trip, the week after Easter. They replayed the Hoy Week services a week late, in the hotel room. Her friend was in a Good Friday time, but she lived as if it were Easter. She taught Anne that the trick to skiing was learning to fall better. The fear of falling impeded her love of the skis. For many of us, we will not reach the summits of our desires. On the way there, perhaps the best we can do is to learn to “fall better.”

She is that most special and gifted of writers on the spiritual life, as she is funny, irreverent and funny, moving and funny. She imagines the disciples on the day after the crucifixion all playing Monday morning quarterback, drunk, and deciding that is was all over for them too. She tells of her struggle finding a dress as an adult flower girl in a wedding where she had visions of looking like some forest princess but being told that she could fit only into an extra large mother of the bride outfit, at 5-7 and 140 pounds.

One of her special gifts is finding some grace in small moments in the hardships of life. She speaks of going past the choir at practice and enjoys their muffled piety. Then, someone has to step out for a moment and “a beam of singing falls directly on me.” She troops off to do a service in a nursing home. Her teenaged son has been impossible all weekend, but he dutifully helps his partner follow the songs and she recites the Lord’s Prayer with him. Her lady falls asleep during the service, and then se wakes and yells that she likes a house, and points to the air. Her teenaged son comes to help her and says let her sleep, she like d the house in her dreams.

Lately, a number of folks have complained that they miss hearing ministers preach about hell and damnation as much as they recall from their youth. they are convinced that we have to demonstrate, prove, our worth before God and each other. Anne Lamott knows better. she knows of grace, full and free. “Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.”