GOD TALK:

ANNE LAMOTT AND GOD GIRL

One of the most daunting and perpetually frustrating things about writing for a newspaper is that invariably I end up having far more information that I desperately want to communicate than I have space.

Every week it’s like trying to wrestle a buffalo into a bento box.

Not surprisingly, last week that was precisely the predicament I found myself in after having a really lovely interview/chat with the author Anne Lamott for my weekly Sun-Times column. There’s only so much a writer can say in 800(ish) words, and it’s absolutely not enough words to let Annie say all that she says so beautifully.

So … I decided to post the transcript of our chat, on the odd chance that someone besides me might like to hear all that this amazing author and beautiful Christian had to say the other day by phone from her home, where she had a piece of carrot cake and the new issue of People at the ready for when she (finally) got me off the phone.

For your reading pleasure and, hopefully, spiritual edification we give you:

THE GOD GIRL INTERVIEW WITH ANNE LAMOTT
FRIDAY MARCH 16, 2007

GOD GIRL: What is grace, to you? And how do you try to communicate that to others.

ANNIE: Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when you’re feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever-it-is.

I wish grace looked like, I wish that it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that’s what was happening, but for me it’s that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute’s patience against all odds.

The piece I like in Grace (Eventually) is the one about the ski patrol when I’m in the cabin and it smells of kerosene from the little heater that’s burning and it’s small and I’m feeling very nauseated anyway, and all of a sudden I realize there’s these little cracks in the wood paneling of the hut and very thin, cold ribbons of air that smell like pine trees are getting in.

And that’s sometimes what grace feels like: Little ribbons of fresh air when you’re really feeling sick, or even soul sick.

Sometimes I experience grace as a little kid with water wings. I feel scared for a minute and then I realize I’m being buoyed up.

GG: Do you think we can be grace for other people?

ANNIE: I think that we can hold space for other people. And when we stop trying to fix and control other people, or to try to love them into behaving the way we want them to, then all sorts of things start to happen.

I think when we give up fixing, controlling and thinking our ideas are good ones, then the plates of the Earth start to shift. To give somebody 10 minutes of your time just to sit there and listen quietly, not have opinions and positions, is such a profound thing to offer.

To bring somebody a cold glass of water when they’re really feeling twitterpated and exhausted.

I really love to flirt with old people, especially at the health food store. And I see people who feel really exhausted and broken and tired and old, and I see how just flirting with them for a few minutes, talking about the produce, you know, or what a great price they have on the Odwalla this week, it’s like fresh air for people.

It’s sort of like spritzing people with a plant spritzer. Where you kind of go “Oh!” It helps people reconnect and it helps people come out of this terrible isolation.

GG: I think we’re feeling that isolation more acutely these days. I know I am.)

Uh huh. Definitely.
Yeah.

GG: I love the way you talk about your faith, the warts and all. I appreciate so much the way you communicate your faith, I think it’s really beautiful. But I would imagine you might get criticism occasionally from people who perhaps wish you weren’t so honest about your Christianity and what they might see as your cracks, the cracks in your vessel.

ANNIE: When Traveling Mercies came out and I was on book tour, I usually can tell things by what the response or the questions are on book tour. But when I went out in 98 or something, … I was getting a lot of callers on call-in radio shows who were explaining to me in the usually sweet Southern voices that I was going to be rotting in hell for all of eternity because I was kind of cherry-picking from the Bible, and that they actually had the truth and the Bible right in front of them to prove that. Ya know, Traveling Mercies came out when Clinton was still president and I was in a much better mood. And then Plan B came out and Sam was still a young teenager then.

That’s so much easier – 13 and 14 – but also I was so angry about the administration and the war. And I felt a real call to help people keep their spirits up and to not give up on grace or the Democratic Party or the fact that — it began to feel that this was the new and permanent us, and it was just getting worse and worse and worse. I just wanted to help people not lose their sense of humor, because when we do we’re just doomed.

There’s a line in Plan B that says “laughter is carbonated holiness.”

GG:I’ve used it many times …

ANNIE: That’s what I was really trying to do, to help people not go under. Grace is water wings. Grace takes the form of laughter so often – being able to laugh at yourself when before you felt very grim and attacked. To have a very gentle sigh of laughter about what a mess we all are. And so with Plan B I really didn’t get as much of an attack as I did with Traveling Mercies.

But I think I was so angry. It starts out with the first piece, I had just turned 49 and I was thinking of killing myself that day because I couldn’t stand one more day of Bush, but I was too tired and my back hurt, so I wasn’t going to. I think that scared a lot of people off. I think a lot of people who are fundamentalist Christians – and they don’t carry me in Christian book stores – so that’s usually not been a big problem for people.

I think that was kind of scary for somebody who loves Jesus so much, who loves God and sort of tries to live in my funky, erratic way being love, being God’s love for other people and really experiencing God’s love in my own life – for somebody doing all of that to be so angry at the same time I think was kind of frightening. But it didn’t seem to turn people off. It just meant that on call-in shows people weren’t saying, ‘Well, I guess this will seem funny to you, Miss Lamott, when you’re rotting in hell.’ And then I didn’t get that many calls.

It’s going to be interesting with the tours, which I don’t start until Monday or Tuesday.

GG: I was wondering about that myself. In a couple of pieces in here you’re hitting some hot-button issues for people who relegate the Christian political agenda to, like, four things. The euthanasia piece and then the piece I just reread about abortion, which was so refreshing in how you talked about it, and your anger and your truthfulness. Some people have such a hard time when they can’t fit the pieces together in their head: ‘She says she’s a Christian. And then …’ What do you think the response is going to be to that?

ANNIE: Well, I had a very big event at a church canceled the other day because, while the pastor loved my work and really loved the book, he said the piece about helping a very sick friend die was just too out there for his evangelical church, and that there are so many people in the church who have the illnesses of the age – lots and lots of cancer and AIDS and that they have struggled to be able to stay alive and that God’s love will be sufficient for them in their weakness and suffering and that he just couldn’t risk having me come in – as if I’m there trying to promote suicide.

But I completely understood it. I said just take really gentle care of that church. I secretly love it when anything is canceled at all. So I was glad. But I really understand that.

I’m not promoting suicide. It’s just that there comes a time for a certain kind of person when the deterioration of their bodies and their minds has become so devastating that for whatever reason they’re not going to be able to choose hospice, and they don’t have the plan to endure it with faith – possibly because they don’t have faith – and there are lots and lots and lots of people, including Christians and including doctors and nurses, who have helped the mortally ill cross over to whatever awaits us, instead of taking the position that you ‘can’t play God.’ I wasn’t trying to play God. I was trying to be there for a man I really loved who was in extremis.

GG: That seems to fit together with the way you talk about abortion …

ANNIE: It’s law, you know? I don’t even have eggs any more. But for a long time when I had, like, eight eggs left and they were running around trying to hide from whatever had picked off their brothers and sisters, I realized that no matter what happened, and no matter that even almost done with reproduction, the law says I am entitled to a safe and legal abortion.

I’m not trying to get people to have an abortion and I have often encouraged people to go ahead and be single mothers, which is another thing Christians don’t believe in, because what you’re supposed to do is incubate the baby and then give it to the Christian couple to raise. It’s all so crazy.

All I can do is really share my experience and strength and hope and my understanding of these things. My understanding is that it’s the law. And what made me crazier than almost anything else was the ‘snowflake babies’ thing that Bush was doing a couple of years ago, when he was saying that the frozen embryos that were to be discarded were actually the youngest and most vulnerable Americans. You just think, Dear God. What can you say in response to that? But you know what? He gets to say it. And I don’t have to want him to continue to run our government. He gets to say it, the fundamentalists get to say what their experience of truth is, and I get to say what mine is.

GG: Being a lefty-leaning self-described evangelical Christian myself, people are constantly trying to kick me out of the tent, as if it’s a private club and I got the secret handshake slightly wrong, and therefore my presence there will be somehow sullying their witness. That’s hard. I have anger issues around that that I’ve worked through for years. And some days I’m really good at letting go of it, and other days I’m not. You talk wonderfully about anger and how to wrestle with it…

ANNIE: And how to insist on it, too.

Don’t you love how when Bush went down to the sacred Mayan sites they had to do the smudges afterwards because his presence was so contaminating on the sacred spots? All the Mayan high priests came in and smudged.

I know that in a lot of churches I’d be seen as somebody who is in mortal sin for about 20 different reasons, one of which is that I totally love gay people.

You know, Jesus doesn’t have a word to say about sex. Not a word. The only time it ever comes up is in the admonishment to marriage, but that’s socio-political because widows were so doomed, and unmarried women were just so doomed.

But I know Jesus doesn’t have a position on who we love. Just that we should.

GG: If we could just get that one part down . . .

ANNIE: I think if we could just get the Golden Rule down Jesus would be thrilled. I feel like it would be Mardi Gras day in Heaven if we could just like nail this one concept.

GG: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about forgiveness. Forgiving others is one thing. But in terms of talking about grace – I don’t know if you’ve seen this film “Amazing Grace” about Wilberforce . . .

ANNIE: I havent’ seen it yet.

GG: It’s actually quite lovely. The character in the film who was the most striking to me was John Newton, the fellow who wrote the song Amazing Grace, who used to be the captain of a slave ship for like 20 years, and although he preached grace and knew and told his parishioners time and again about god removing our sin from us .. but he couldn’t’ accept that for himself. It took him his whole life to accept that grace actually applied to him because he thought he was such a wretched sinner. How do you handle forgiving yourself when you’ve really screwed up?

ANNIE: Well, for me, things usually come down to the fact that I seem to have a real disease of perception. And I see so many things that are probably neutral as being charged, either positively or negatively. The original understanding of sin was as an archery term, ‘to miss the mark.’ So usually I have just so missed the mark and I have gotten things so wrong because I am basically a pretty worried, terrified person.

I am a terrified person with a lot of faith. I am a very worried person. I was a worried 3 year old and I’m going to be a worried 53 year old on April 10.

So I usually at least have the good sense to talk to someone I love when I’m being really mean and judgmental to myself, and when I’m just kicking myself.

Usually what happens is that they end up telling me their version of it, because we all do the same things. The details are just different.

And they’ll tell me their version and then I’ll think they’re just telling me it so I’ll feel better, but it’s usually not true. It’s usually just true that we think we’re terminally unique and we’ve done worse than anyone else and we think stuff that thank God there is no live feed to our brain because people would just shoot us down because we think such terrible and unmanageable thoughts.

But usually just talking to a friend will help me remember how human it is and how I get to screw up right and left and that then I get to make amends and I get to try to clean up my mess and that the way I am with myself is just so much worse than the way I am with anyone else, including a 17-year-old.

And that’s what everybody says: I wouldn’t talk to my worst enemy the way I talk to myself.

When I’m being really hard on myself it’s like I get into this trance, which is probably why I would get so hard on myself. First of all, it recreates your childhood, if you’re feeling ashamed and holding your breath and trying to make sure the adults are OK in case there’s trickle down, you know? If Mom and Dad are OK, then maybe the kids will be OK, too. So it creates that trance, and I think it’s an old survival skill.

Now that I’m not struggling to survive, I can sort of gently break the trance and try to bear being a human who has wonderful qualities and who screws up right and left.

I’m not angry and awful to myself nearly as long as I used to be. Now I go into a sort of shame spiral for a couple of hours if a certain kind of person rejects me, or if I get like a really awful review or a really bad word from any of a number of places, I’ll feel really shamed and kind of stricken. But now I can get it to last a couple of hours, whereas before, in the case of my 20s, I got it to last most of the decade. And even in my 30s and 40s it could last for days.

I think the great gift of being older is that you find the breadcrumbs back to the path a lot sooner; and you take a long deep breath and you shake your head at yourself and . . . Aaaaah, get on with it.

GG: I wonder if that’s a function of physical age or if it’s also some spiritual maturity?

ANNIE: I think it’s partly that we do grow up. We grow up spiritually. And also, I think it’s the gift of absent-mindedness. I think that it’s the gift of a sort of myopia, encroaching myopia.

I don’t notice as much wrong because my vision isn’t as good. With my spiritual vision you sort of get these tools along the way that are sufficient for most circumstances, but all my life, I know, I thought that when I got the tool box that I assumed all the adults who were doing well had, I thought they would be very fine tools. It turns out everything is kind of dented and old and people leave stuff out and it gets a little rust on it, and it doesn’t look that impressive. But it’s the same old tools people always used.

It’s the tools of starting over, it’s the tools of maybe doing a written inventory, or Catholics might go to confession. Just sort of clearing out the guck.

Or the tools of prayer. Or the tools of . . . I’m a huge believer in the cool glass of water.

Or the tools are just kind of crummy looking and yet they’re the tools we were looking for our whole lives, the tools of telling the truth. The tool of trusting someone else to hear what is so scary or so scaring you about yourself or someone else. And people listen and they go, “Oh my God. You know what? Me too. And then you’re home.”

GG: You sound more hopeful these days. Is that because the Bush administration is coming to an end?

ANNIE: Pretty much, yeah.
I’ve been in a state of sort of low-grade ecstasy since the mid-term elections. I really have.

It had been so devastating election night 2004, because of those exit polls that came out that made it look like Kerry was going to win. My friends and I, without exception, were literally mentally ill in the aftermath of losing that election. I mean, literally we were in bed, were unable to get out of bed. We had nausea like Sartre wrote about. Nausea!

Because there was so much fear, and this-can’t-be, this-can’t-have-happened! But it did.

So this year, during the mid-term election in November, I wouldn’t’ watch with anybody. I’d learned my lessons. I wasn’t born yesterday. I wouldn’t even watch with my boyfriend, I would only watch with the animals. And I had all my comfort food medicines, like Cheetos and Hersheys Kisses with almonds and cranberry juice. And I sat here and I had my arms folded across my chest and I was watching it very grimly, thinking I’m just not going to fall into that same hole again.

And then I looked up, talking to a friend from New York, and at the very far left of the screen, the first thing I noticed is that Chafee lost. And there had been those polls, two or three days before, that all of a sudden Chafee was neck and neck and Menendez was going lose New Jersey, and McCaskill was way down, and that Burns had pulled up to almost even.

And when Chafee lost, I started to come back to life and then I could watch it. I mean, it looked like the Olympics around here.

I remember when Claire McCaskill excepted victory over Jim Talent but he hadn’t conceded yet. Oh my god! I felt really worried. He hasn’t conceded and we’re gonna get in so much trouble when Mom finds out! But it turned out she won. And then Allen was ahead for the whole night and then all of a sudden Webb was ahead by 1,000 and I woke up and Webb was ahead by more.

And the world changed. It was a massive sea change. And I’ve actually been in a really good mood ever since. I’ve been in a good mood almost every day because we got the Senate back. And there wasn’t a single person who I knew before the election who thought that we were really going to get the Senate back.

GG: Who do you like in the next election?

ANNIE: I am an oddity, because I just love the Democrats – all of them. Hillary is really growing on me, even though I’ve been angry that she’s been trying to be such a centrist about the war and ends up being so hawkish. And I was angry that she was really being so mealy-mouthed about abortion rights. She’s really growing on me. There is nothing like a brilliant and competent woman to make my little heart beat faster.

And I love Obama. I love the whole concept of hope and all the chance for rebirth of who we are.

And I love John Edwards. And Gore I’m just crazy about. I like everyone. Isn’t that funny?

Right now I’d really love to see a Hilary/Edwards ticket or an Obama/Wes Clark ticket.

GG: I know Obama a little and I cant’ say enough about the man.

ANNIE: Really? Is it really true?

GG: Yeah. It really is true. … He has this regality and vision about him.

ANNIE: That’s a good word for it: regality. He’s just a luscious person. He’s lived abroad, he has known poverty, he has seen it. I think he’s great.

But I don’t know anyone else who sort of loves them all. I usually don’t. I am so opinionated and I’m terrible at forgiveness.

Like it’s taken me a long time to forgive Hillary for not being more progressive. But suddenly it’s just like, when did this great competence, great understading about how things work become a liability.

So honestly, I’m just happy as a clam right now.

I’m so excited that Giuliani is doing so well because he’s such an awful candidate. Such an awful person. And McCain is awful, too – all that necking and smooching with Bush is going to hurt him. And then Mitt Romney is hilarious. It’s like, thank you for sharing, Mitt.

So … I just feel like I’m the cat bird seat right now.

GG: How’s your church?

ANNIE: My church is great. I’m missing it a great deal because I’ve been traveling so much. I went to see Molly Ivins right before she died. I was very very lucky and glad to see her. And then Sam is off in the Pacific Northwest studying. He’s graduated [from high school] and he’s studying. So I’ve been going up to see him whenever I can. And the best time to travel is weekends, so I’ve been missing church.

I just hate it. I never miss it if I’m in town. So I’ll go tomorrow, but then next week I’m in Chicago, and then I’ll be back in town.

It’s a real church and it has real problems and real personality conflicts and little groups of people get mad at other groups. But it’s so beautiful. It’s the center of my life. It’s the most nutritious place on Earth for me.

GG: You’re lucky you found a good one.

ANNIE: I am. And I know it’s really hard to do. But having found it really think of it as the clinic. I go to the clinic once a week to get the medicine and I often show up there in a state of either rage or disgust toward Bush, or whatever, and then when I leave I am so much better. And so it’s just wonderful.

You can come any time you’re in the Bay Area. It’s about 10 minutes from San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin City.

GG: Well, maybe this time next year I’ll be on a book tour and make it out that way.

ANNIE: What’s your book on besides grace?

GG: It’s in my own voice and often sort of confessional. It’s trying to describe grace to people by telling them experiences I’ve had that I think are grace-filled. And it’s called Sin Boldly.

ANNIE: I love that.

Well, you don’t have a bad reputation, yet.
You’ll be one of the bad girls of Christianity.

GG: Can I be part of the club?

Yeah, totally.

People are just starved for more of your humanity as a seeker. And I thought I was supposed to be getting more esoteric or to be able to understand more and more complicated aspects of faith or grace. And people are just so hungry for just a little bit of your own truth. And when you say the truth, something inside of them just comes alive.

And goes, Oh My God. And you know when you hear it, you just feel so grateful for anyone. I feel desperate, like a little dog. Thank you, thank you! Because there’s so little of it in the popular culture.

GG: That’s why I’m so grateful for what you do, Annie.