Like last year I have chosen to tell you about some reading I think you might find enjoyable and/or inspiring and/or interesting. It is not “Christmas reading”in the the way people usually use that term since it has nothing directly to do with Christmas. But since it invites you into the considerations of religious philosophy–questions about faith, doubt, meaning etc I think it may be said to fit the season–or at least some of it will–could depend upon your mood.

I LIKE ANN LAMOTT A LOT

Anne Lamott, “Hallelujah Anyway Rediscovering Mercy”, copyright 2017, Riverhead Books, 176 pages

If you read my article on Anne Lamott about a year ago, or if you’ve read some of her since, then you sort of know what to expect. You know this wasn’t a book written for people who think every religious expression should be couched in terms acceptable in a grade school level Sunday school class. Well, Anne is obviously very fond of young children, but that’s not her style. If there’s such a thing as a hard-boiled(if soft hearted)religious writer with a flair for (sometimes slightly raunchy)humor, then she’s it. So enjoy

Anne begins this one by observing there are times in just about every life during which the person needs help or answers or something along that line. But where do you look, particularly if you’ve already experienced some of the usual answers and found them unsatisfactory? She quotes the Old Testament prophet Micah who she opines likely looked like a stoner and smelled like a goat, But he asked, famously, what we needed to do but “do justice and love mercy,and walk humbly with thy God.”

Now I’m sure a lot of religious writers have quoted this, but then followed with advice that was pietistic or unrealistic or both. But Anne won’t do that to you because she’s honest with herself about herself and so she’s honest with the reader too, “Right off the bat I can tell you that ‘walk humbly with thy God’ is not going to happen anytime soon for me or my closest friends. Arrogance R Us”(She reversed the R but I can’t)

So, you now know to a large extent who you are dealing with here. A woman who won’t take BS and won’t lay any on you. She knows her own feeling and failings and she know those of her friends and she knows those of the human race. And she has developed around 2000 opinions and several hundred jokes about them. And she’s fallen into the clutches of BS sometimes and has tasted failure and addiction, abandonment and depression But “Hallelujah Anyway.”

Her book is a kind of rambling reflection on life and what it’s taught her. It is vaguely but not more than vaguely chronological. She often gives you specifics of experiences and then explains how she dealt with them–or, sometimes, failed to deal with them. Her writing, as always, is fast and uncomplicated, though the lady and her thoughts are certainly not.

On p 48 she tells us “The path away from judgement of self and neighbor …requires giving and, horribly, receiving. Going without either of them leads to fundamentalism of all stripes, and fundamentalism is the bane of poor Mother Earth.” There’s no way out, sometimes she says, except admitting that you’re wrong and and sorry. You don’t want to. It’s hard to do.

“But I can’t launch forgiveness of my own volition …To have borne broken hearts and seen such broken lives around the world is what gave us a shot at becoming mercy people.”

Later Anne tells us the story of the Good Samaritan. Nearly everyone knows the story, but she goes over all the main points just in case you’ve forgotten, ending with an explanation of how the Samaritan got the injured man to an Inn-Keeper “who welcomed them both.”

Then she adds, “Who is our neighbor? The person who helps us when we are suffering. And implicit in this story is Jesus saying, you go do this too. …The reviled Samaritan might be …a person at the other end of the poitical spectrum. In Texas it would be a drag queen tottering up to a Tea Partier in a ditch …Those who have gotten sober all began as the man in the ditch …But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves …It was and is the hardest work ever. ” And as a recovering alcoholic of many years standing, Anne knows.

And so it goes. Anne knows the bottoms and the tops, has seen them both, lived them both, and survived to tell the tale. Now married for the first time and trying to stay on good terms with a 29 year old son who inherited some of her instability, she’s doing OK–maybe. But nothing is easy–or has been in her past.

“I converted to Christianity while I was drunk … and about a year later, several months sober, I was baptized.” She phoned her pastor first and said she couldn’t go through with it, she was too damaged and foul to do it. He told her “to get my butt over to church, that I wasn’t going to heal sitting alone on my …houseboat. He said that I didn’t have to get it together before I could be included, and, in fact, couldn’t get it together without experiencing inclusion.” So she went ahead with it and therein hangs a tale, some of which you’ve just heard. Of course some of it turns up in nearly everything she has written, too.

She particularly makes her point in her final chapter which begins with the statement that mercy began to reach out to her when she was five. She was with her father who was fishing with another man. The other man made a crack about her hair.
“Then he used the most evil word on earth, in a declaration about who must have been hiding in the woodpile. And my dad, the love of my life … laughed.” Her father did nothing and later said nothing to her to indicate he thought the other guy was a jerk and he just wanted to placate him. He noticed than Anne was feeling terrible on the way home and suggested she grow thicker skin. “This would turn out to be the battle cry of my childhood. I should have thicker skin, i.e., just be someone else entirely.”

She carried this anger and pain for years and one day during a psychoanalytic session, a revelation came to her-“And I suddenly saw and could feel in my adult heart that my father had viewed the fisherman as a harmless, helpless, jovial, ignorant redneck. He was not colluding with him but understanding him. …I forgave myself for the fisherman’s words and behavior.”

And her message, sometimes stated pretty outwardly, sometimes not, is there. We all have needs and we all have bad feelings and sometimes do wrong things. Try to understand those who have wounded you, but don’t forget in the process to forgive yourself.
“The world keeps going on. You can have yet another cup of coffee and keep working on your plans. Or you can take the risk to be changed, surrounded, and indwelled by that strange yeasty mash called mercy, there for the asking.”

Sound too easy? Maybe, but try it sometime–may be harder than you think–and more rewarding. In any event, hats off to Anne Lamott for showing us a way nearly all of us knew was there somewhere, but which most of us likely forgot along the way.