Anne Lamott on the ‘kind face’ of mercy for the world

It’s not often I attend a theological convention. But I’d been looking forward to Anne Lamott’s appearance at the fall convocation of the Perkins School of Theology for the past year. Anne Lamott, author of the beloved writing handbook, Bird by Bird, teaching something that sounds as dry as theology? But after devouring several of her nonfiction books (and a novel or two), what other word would I have chosen to describe her earthy, funny, painful, joyous and heartrending words except – theology? At its best.

Anne Lamott

Although I had trumpeted my intention to attend Lamott’s talk for the past six weeks, I apparently had forgotten to actually register to attend, back when tickets for her appearance were free. Now, moving to the entrance to McFarlin (seating capacity 2,300), I noticed people presenting paperwork to verify their right to attend. The university had announced days earlier that, with limited seating, no more free tickets would be issued. I could pay to attend the entire two-day convocation or I could go home. Luckily (or so I believed) I had printed my initial email invitation and held it out, prepared to argue with the ushers. One of the smiling women at the door simply tore off a corner of my printed email, dropped it in a basket, and waved me in. Not luck, but mercy, the theme of Lamott’s latest book, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy.

Lamott emerged onto the stage, looking more petite than ever next to tall Perkins dean Dr. Craig Hill. A pink scarf tied bandeau-style around her head covered some of Lamott’s trademark short dreadlocks of graying blonde hair. She wore blue slacks and a green sweater with another, darker scarf draped around her neck.

After Texas’ trials of hurricane and, little more than a week before Lamott’s appearance, the most horrific mass murder in the state’s history, “We’re had Texas in our prayers a lot,” Lamott told the audience that nearly filled McFarlin to capacity. “I love Texas. And,” pausing a beat, “I especially love Texas when it’s not summer.” One hundred plus degree summer days in the Lone Star State? Everybody in the audience understood that one, and alternately laughed and applauded Lamott throughout.

“I accidently wrote this book on mercy,” Lamott continued. Pondering where to turn for hope and guidance in “these agonizing days, she had searched her Bible from the beginning, finding little help until she reached the Old Testament book of the prophet Micah. “He must have looked a stoner. Or a Game of Thrones extra, and smelled like a goat,” she said, “but his admonitions struck her: do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God.

Justice? Humility? Not happening in this world, as far as she could tell. But mercy? That might be doable. 

“I started to notice whenever I used that word (mercy), people responded.” She began to ask herself, what’s the next merciful thing you could do today? And She decided that mercy must include kindness, wrote a note to herself “why not be kind?” and ended by writing her “accidental” book. 

“Mercy calls us for sharing at our must human, without the armor and without the masks. It’s scary and gorgeous to become a person of radical mercy. The bad news is that it begins with developing a merciful attitude toward ourselves.”

She briefly recounted her early life – many of the details already familiar to her audience from her books – her parents’ troubled marriage, a brilliant alcoholic father she worshipped, the years of childhood and adolescence spent trying to be whatever others needed, while “stuffing down” her own needs.

“I didn’t want to go back and experience that kind of bleakness, but stuffing it down doesn’t help.”

Do we sometimes think neither the stuffing down nor the merciful attitude applies to us? Didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional family? Aren’t/weren’t an alcoholic like Lamott? Not an unwed parent? Not a person who forgets to sign up for something she dearly loves?

“Some of you are fine,” Lamott assured us, then skewered her 2,300-hundred-member audience, ever so gently. us. “Well, eight of you are fine. The rest of us are really messed up. . . We get well in such small increments, and I hate it. If I were God, or God’s West Coast representative, I would just wave a wand. But I’m not. Mercy means a heart for someone else’s troubles – and not in that co-dependent way. It means (God) turning a kind face toward you,” and because of that, “you decide to be fully alive for as long as your live, a person of hilarious generosity.”

(For more about Anne Lamott, take a look at her Facebook page, because she’s probably the most public person who doesn’t have her own website. Or better yet, read her books.)

Wordcraft -- Readers’ favorite posts: the first runner-up

With major changes coming to this blog next year, I’m using these last December weeks of Wordcraft to count down readers’ all-time favorite posts. Today’s entry is the first runner-up among most highly-viewed pages in all categories. It’s actually the most highly viewed of Wordcraft posts, and one of my earliest, from April 13, 2011, titled, “Anne Lamott on writing, families and faith.”

****

Anne Lamott arrived at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Dallas’s Northwest Highway last Friday looking waifish. Still slim at nearly fifty-seven, her graying blonde hair in its signature short dreadlocks, and with skin pale enough to write on¾ which she apparently does if she has ideas without paper at hand¾ she took charge of the crowd, inviting people to sit on the carpeted area near the podium when all the store’s spare chairs filled.

She was there for the paperback release of her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, but pronounced herself reluctant to talk about the book after a weeklong publicity tour.

“Tell us about Sam,” an audience member asked.

“I’d much rather talk about Sam,” Lamott agreed, referring to the son whose infancy she chronicled in her memoir Operating Instructions. Sam, now nearly twenty-one, has a twenty-month old son, Jax, who shares the current dedication page. (The original hardcover version of included a poem by the Sufi poet al-Rumi that explained the title of Imperfect Birds. But most of the crowd seemed to treat it as a reference to Lamott’s cult-status writing handbook, Bird by Bird.)

“Sam is tall and thin and has dark, normal hair.” She paused for knowing laughter from the audience at the comparison to her own hair, so curly she related opting for dreads as the only way to control it. “He’s very funny, full-time art academy. He’s a believer. I gave him a lot of rope to walk his own spiritual path.” For the rest of the discussion, Lamott’s passions for family and spirituality intertwined with her passion to writing.

“I write the same book,” she said in response to a question about what she’s writing. “(I write) that it’s scary here. That for people like me who are shy, it’s not a good match.” But she writes, she said, as part of the conversation she has with life, God and her readers. She doesn’t write, she said, because she enjoys it, but because she counts herself among those “longing to be one of the storytellers of the culture,” who serve as narrators for a collective. “Nothing has ever happened to me that hasn’t happened to you. The great words of all liberators, including Christ (are) ‘me, too.’ Only the details are different.”

After nearly an hour, she tore herself away from the discussion with the audience, which clearly loved her, to read and comment on her book. Imperfect Birds is the third in series about the Ferguson family that began with Rosie and continued with Crooked Little Heart. Lamott called it a trilogy, but I had to wonder whether the Fergusons might turn up
again whenever society has problems their creator feels they can address. They dealt earlier with the death of young Rosie’s father and the effects of the highly competitive environment that Rosie (and Lamott) experienced as adolescents. The present book shows Rosie at seventeen, “beautiful and yet with a lot of secrets,” Lamott said, “and it starts to occur to Elizabeth (her mother) that she’s in over her head.”

It’s no secret to readers now that Rosie’s problem is drug addiction. Lamott has struggled all her life with various addictions, and admitted that there’s some of her in all her characters. In this case, she felt the need to hold a conversation with young people and their parents about the evils of addiction, the reason, as she states at the beginning of her book that “a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses or jail.”

****

When this post first appeared, I thought its popularity might be due to Lamott’s shyness about embracing social media. It’s hard to believe, but three and a half years ago, there were few mentions of her online except a few interviews. Now she’s made the leap to Wikipedia, Twitter (@annelamott) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/) but readers still drop by here, for which I’m grateful. Sometimes you’re looking for the complete al-Rumi quote that headed the first edition of Imperfect Birds. I have not been able to locate a source, despite searching several English translations. But I’ll leave you another, which I think Lamott would approve. Khaled Hosseini quoted it when he visited Dallas last year: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The complete verse is available in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

(Next Monday, Anne Lamott’s post actually has a close competitor. What is it? You’ll have to check back here to find out.)

Wordcraft on Wednesdays -- Anne Lamott on writing, families, and faith

Anne Lamott arrived at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Dallas’s Northwest Highway
last Friday looking waifish.  Still slim at nearly fifty-seven, her graying blonde hair in its signature short dreadlocks, and with skin pale enough to write on -- which she apparently does if she has ideas without paper at hand –she took charge of the crowd, inviting people to sit on the carpeted area near the podium when all the store’s spare chairs filled.

She was there for the paperback release of her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, but pronounced herself reluctant to talk about the book after a weeklong publicity tour.

“Tell us about Sam,” an audience member asked.

Anne Lamott

“I’d much rather talk about Sam,” Lamott agreed, referring to the son whose infancy she chronicled in her memoir Operating Instructions.  Sam, now nearly twenty-one, has a twenty-month old son, Jax, who shares the current dedication page.  (The original hardcover version of Imperfect Birds included a poem by the Sufi poet al-Rumi that explained the title, but most of the crowd seemed to treat it as a reference to Lamott’s cult-status writing handbook, Bird by Bird.)

“Sam is tall and thin and has dark, normal hair.”  She paused for knowing laughter from the audience at the comparison to her own hair, so curly she related opting for dreads as the only way to control it.  “He’s very funny, full-time art academy.  He’s a believer.  I gave him a lot of rope to walk his own spiritual path.”  For the rest of the discussion, Lamott’s passions for family and spirituality intertwined with her passion to writing.

“I write the same book,” she said in response to a question about what she’s writing.  “(I write) that it’s scary here.  That for people like me who are shy, it’s not a good match.”  But she writes, she said, as part of the conversation she has with life, God and her readers.  She doesn’t write, she said, because she enjoys it, but because she counts herself among those “longing to be one of the storytellers of the culture,” who serve as narrators for a collective.  “Nothing has ever happened to me that hasn’t happened to you.  The great words of all liberators, including Christ (are) ‘me, too.’  Only the details are different.”

After nearly an hour, she tore herself away from the discussion with the audience, which clearly loved her, to read and comment on her book.  Imperfect Birds is the third in series about the Ferguson family that began with Rosie and continued with Crooked Little Heart.  Lamott called it a trilogy, but I had to wonder whether the Fergusons might turn up again whenever society has problems their creator feels they can address.  They dealt earlier with the death of young Rosie’s father and the effects of the highly competitive environment that Rosie (and Lamott) experienced as adolescents.  The present book shows Rosie at seventeen, “beautiful and yet with a lot of secrets,” Lamott said, “and it starts to occur to Elizabeth (her mother) that she’s in over her head.”

It’s no secret to readers now that Rosie’s problem is drug addiction.  Lamott has struggled all her life with various addictions, and admitted that there’s some of her in all her characters.  In this case, she felt the need to hold a conversation with young people and their parents about the evils of addiction, the reason, as she states at the beginning of her book that “a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses or jail.”

(Next week -- Character vs. plot -- agent Weronika Janczuk's series on plotting returns)