Author and Presbyterian Anne Lamott speaks from her big heart during a talk at First Presbyterian Church in San Rafael, California

The author of many best-selling books still has plenty to say about matters of faith and hope

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

Anne Lamott

LOUISVILLE — Displaying the candor, humor and deep faith that has made her a best-selling and beloved author, Anne Lamott — who for decades has worshiped and taught Sunday school at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City, California — appeared last week at First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, California before a large and enrapt crowd. Watch Lamott’s talk and a question-and-answer session hosted by FPC’s pastor, the Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, here. The event also included a moving testimonial by Lamott’s friend, Chitoka Webb.

“I love this church. I’ve loved it for decades,” Lamott said of the host church. “I’ve gone to a million 12-Step meetings in the back. I’ve worshiped here with you with various ministers. Really the reason I’m here is because of Chitoka Webb,” who served as an intern at St. Andrew and is now a chaplain seeking ordination in the PC(USA). Upon meeting Webb for the first time, “I felt I could leave church that minute and get the medicine I needed for the rest of the week,” Lamott said.

Lamott’s list of publications includes “Traveling Mercies,” “Bird by Bird,” “Hallelujah Anyway,” “Plan B,” “Help Thanks Wow,” “Grace (Eventually)” and her most recent book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.” Since the publication of “Somehow,” she hasn’t been writing much, she said, but “I taught writing forever.” While in that line of work, people spent “most of our time together explaining why they weren’t writing,” she said. She called her son Sam’s upcoming writing collective, found here, “a very benevolent kick in the pants.”

“I thought I might start with a prayer,” said Lamott, reciting a Third-Step prayer from the 12-Step program: “God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I might help of thy power, thy love and thy way of life.”

“It’s an inspired prayer because it doesn’t just say, ‘God, make me all well. Help me with my perfectionism. Help me do better and be even more acclaimed by people everywhere,’” Lamott noted. When she first got sober, an old-timer told her, “You know that flowery Third-Step prayer Bill Wilson gave us?” It turns out that every morning old-timers wake up, their prayer is, “Whatever.” “You know those prayers you say at night that are beautiful and religious?” The old-timers’ version is, “Oh, well.”

“I think those are both good prayers,” Lamott said.

Bill Wilson’s less famous brother, known as Dr. Bob, offered his own Third-Step prayer, Lamott pointed out: “Dear God, I’m sorry about the mess I’ve made of my life. I want to turn away from all the wrong things I’ve ever done and all the wrong things I’ve ever been. Please forgive me for it all. I know you have the power to change my life and can turn me into a winner. Thank You, God, for getting my attention long enough to interest me in trying it your way. God, please take over the management of my life and everything about me. I am making this conscious decision to turn my will and my life over to your care and am asking you to please take over all parts of my life.

“Please, God, move into my heart. However you do it is your business, but make yourself real inside me and fill my awful emptiness. Fill me with your love and Holy Spirit and make me know your will for me. And now, God, help yourself to me and keep on doing it.” Here’s Lamott’s favorite line of this prayer: “I’m not sure I want you to but do it anyhow. I rejoice that I am now a part of your people, that my uncertainty is gone forever, and that you now have control of my will and my life. Thank you and I praise your name. Amen.” Lamott called it “a beautiful prayer.”

Lamott found herself in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a couple of weeks ago offering a talk similar to a TED Talk. With a population of around 11,000 people, Nantucket is home to 89 billionaires, according to Lamott. “It was not my normal mix, which is pretty motley — no offense,” she told the crowd at First Presbyterian Church, who laughed. In Nantucket, Lamott delivered a seven-minute talk on “everything I know about God,” reciting some of it for those gathered at FPC.

Many people, Lamott pointed out, “bog down on God because of the intellect and the history of being hurt by people who think they know who God is.” Her friend Tom once said in a line often attributed to Lamott, “You can tell you’ve created God in your image because he hates all the same people you do.” Maybe it would be “less distressing,” she reasoned, “if we used acronyms for God,” such as “Good Orderly Direction,” which she described as “the next right step,” or the “Gift of Desperation,” which means, “You’ve run out of good ideas, and that’s good. That’s what grace looks like.”

Other acronyms for God are “Great Outdoors” and “Grace Over Drama,” where you’re “just breathing in silence while waiting to hear from the One who has all the power.”

“Don’t bog down on the word. It’s the least important thing about the Divine,” Lamott said. “The energy of God’s reckless love for us is all we’re talking about. You want to experience it? Go outside and give a person who clearly lives on the streets a couple of dollars and say, ‘I’m glad to see you.’”

“Do that with someone at an intersection who’s annoying you because you want to make a turn, and do not ask them what they’re going to spend the two dollars on. It’s none of your business.” It’s ludicrous, after all, to think that “Jesus healed a blind man and said, ‘Now what do you plan to do with your sight?’”

As Lamott saw it, the crowd at FPC “was gathered today to connect with our own sense of the sacred and to our own deepest parts, our hearts and souls — not who people told you you were, not who you tried to be because it made people relax to think you were going along with their plan — but to free ourselves from the toxic chains of perfectionism. … We get free through worship, the readings, through music that gets in so deeply to places only music and the Holy Spirit can get.”

“We get free by giving it away,” Lamott said, adding her aunt used to tell her, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

“You’ve got to sit with people who are lonely and scared and say, ‘do you have a minute? Because I’ve been there. I know the hopelessness. If you have five minutes, I just want to share my story with you.’”

For 30 years, Lamott taught Sunday school at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church. Now she’s either “on hiatus or retired.” She’d teach her students endearing aphorisms like this one: “What’s the difference between God and me? God never thinks she’s me.”

“That helps me get right sized,” Lamott said as the crowd laughed.

After she got sober, Lamott spoke to a man in a parking lot who’d driven to a meeting in an expensive car. “I came into AA as a hotshot,” the man told Lamott, “but the brothers helped me work my way up to servant.”

“I love that,” she said. “If you can’t connect to God, make a casserole. Being of service is where we are most able to get out of ourselves with our pinball minds.”

“Some of you are living with challenges, physical and familial, that are so hard, and they’re hard every day,” Lamott told the crowd. “Some of you are living with broken dreams. You wanted to be a parent or a grandparent, and it didn’t happen for you. How in the face of that do you step into the offer of freedom from bondage of self … and the sheet-metal loneliness each of us experiences during the hard times?”

Before sobriety, Lamott asked an Episcopal priest friend what he meant by being “saved.”

“That word has been weaponized in a way to browbeat people and keep women small and afraid,” she said.

The priest told her this story: Say you go into a pawn shop and encounter the scary-looking, depressed owner. You are on the third shelf, along with the old typewriters, and you’re covered in dust. Jesus enters the shop and says, “I would be glad to take Annie’s place there. I want her to go outside and into the light. I want her to experience the beauty of having been born.”

The Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney

During a question-and-answer session following Lamott’s talk, Cochran-Carney asked her about the ways that church feeds her soul.

An important piece is “just to walk into a church where you feel safe,” Lamott said. “You’re not going to be made to believe something or have to find answers to tricky questions.” At St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, “I experience the air as being nutritious, like bread baking. The faces of the people nourish me. I go partly to see my friend Margaret. The love energy feeds me, and the poignancy of the prayers of the people … They share their pain, and they say, ‘Lord, hear my prayer.’ It’s profound to be in a place where people will be real and vulnerable and not be their personas or their accomplishments.”

“I always say laughter is carbonated holiness. If someone is making you laugh, you are on holy ground,” Lamott said. “It breaks up that encapsulated sense of our own selves.”

Cochran-Carney asked about navigating the weeks remaining until the Nov. 5 election.

That made Lamott think of Mother Teresa’s quote: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

“We feed children, work for peace and try to get out the vote,” Lamott said. “I pray for right outcomes and to have people have an awakening. When you hate people, you’ve lost your spiritual core. You go through your neighborhood and pick up litter. You figure out who you can drive to the polls. You do small things with love. You can’t do nothing, because that just fills you with the deepest sense of hopelessness.”

Asked if she’s ever “intimidated to proclaim your belief in Jesus Christ,” Lamott said she thinks of herself as “a terrible Christian. I’m so clenched and so self-centered, too shy to go out there and proclaim the words of Jesus on the street corner. What I try to do is be the light of Christ.”

Then she noted that “lighthouses don’t go running around the island looking for boats to save. They’re just where they are. I don’t proclaim overtly, but I hope I give off some of the light of somebody who was in the slough of hopelessness and craziness and got fished out. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I probably say that prayer 2,000 times a day.”

Chitoka Webb

Then it was Webb’s turn to share the story of her friendship with Lamott. One Sunday Webb was serving as pulpit supply at St. Andrew. She exchanged greetings with some of the members, then sat in a pew for some time, feeling a bit lonely. “I heard someone sliding down the pew toward me. I turned around to the warmest smile I’d ever seen. It was Annie.” After they hugged and spoke, Lamott went off to fill Webb’s request for water. When she returned, Lamott was carrying so many bottles of water that Webb couldn’t see her face. “You can take some home,” Lamott suggested.

Later that year, Webb was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis. Her doctors told her she’d need a transplant to survive. While she waited for one, her health spiraled downward. One Sunday, Webb heard Lamott’s voice at her hospital door. “Oh, honey,” Lamott said. She’d brought Webb fresh fruit, a copy of her new book and communion for two.

Lamott logged into worship at St. Andrew, and the two watched on Lamott’s phone. They took communion together, and Lamott gave Webb a bracelet featuring beads that spelled out “miracle.”

“My doctor had told me I needed a miracle to survive. I asked Annie, ‘why did you pick the word miracle?’ She said, ‘because, Chitoka, you are a miracle.’ I didn’t know I already had a miracle — it was me.”

Webb got her liver. “I’m so grateful that for whatever reason, God saw fit for you to cross my path,” Webb told Lamott, “but I’m glad you did.”

“Thank you all for being people of peace and goodness and generosity, for being so human and dear and doing what you can,” Lamott told those gathered. “As we go out from here,” she said in a benediction, “make us ever mindful of the needs of the poor, and that we be people of peace. As St. Molly Ivins said, ‘Freedom fighters don’t always win, but they’re always right.’ I pray we never give up on freedom and peace and goodness, and I pray it in Jesus’ sweet, precious name. Amen.”