Anne Lamott's Dizzying Confusion

Some of you may find of interest Anne Lamott's amazing grace from Salon.com. (She's interviewed by the editor in chief, no less.) I have read a few of her works, and enjoyed them, but find trying the way she mixes good stories about her life with statements that leave you scratching your head, like this one from the interview:

Everything in the culture says that if you're a person who really loves Mary or Jesus or one of the Hindu gods or whatever, that you're not supposed to have jealousy or existential waves of judgment.

I suppose some Christians, of the tv evangelist and "health and wealth gospel" types, say something like this, but it's rather far from the message you get in the average American church. (And for that matter, much in the culture says that if you're a person who really loves Mary or Jesus, you're a dolt, though if you love the Hindu gods, that's kind of cool.)

The average Christian, if he's at all serious about his Faith, knows that he struggles with sin and that he needs grace because he's jealous and judgmental and lots of other bad things, and he keeps doing the things he doesn't want to do, as one famous early Christian put it. Lamott wouldn't need to spend too much time around Christians to see this.

She may have a useful point to make about the way American Christians appropriate Grace and presume upon God — and maybe even about the secularized versions you see in the self-help movement and the therapeutic — but if she does she loses it in her hyperbolic statement, and this kind of thing (insight, if it is there, lost in hyperbole) is typical of her writing.

Judging from her writing, Lamott seems to be someone who has read and observed a lot, but not actually studied anything. She seems to be the kind of verbally gifted quick study who goes to print long before she should, and what she writes is so enjoyable and breezy and personal and sometimes insightful, offering so much with which some readers can identify, and the content so safely what I call "p.c. with modifications" (that is, essentially inoffensive to the liberal mind but with enough quirks and dissents to make it feel a little racy, ideologically), that a huge number of readers love her work, which keeps her writing.

She writes about religion like a literary critic who writes on War and Peace after reading only every fifth page, drawing as much upon his own experiences as the parts of the book he'd read. In both cases, you keep wanting to say, "But didn't you read . . .?" and "What about . . .?" and "I think you've read something of your own into the book" and "That's not really what he said" and "You've extrapolated too much" and "You need to distinguish . . ." and the like.

If I understand her rightly, she also thinks Hilary Clinton too pro-life. And her religion is sadly politicized. At the beginning of the interview, she declares that

We're in our seventh year of the most catastrophic and appalling administration we've ever had and any place of calm or surrender or spiritual equilibrium we can get to will be hard won. It's very frustrating.

Whatever one thinks of Bush and Company, that the current administration could make finding "any place of calm or surrender or spiritual equilibrium" so hard is really pretty . . . silly. What does she think Jesus means when he says "My kingdom is not of this world?" What does she think the reality of "the resurrection of the dead and the life to come" means for life in this world? Has she not heard of the two Cities? Is she not sure which City is truly her home?

Why does she not see in the deaths of the martyrs, who lived under infinitely worse governments than ours, even accepting her judgment of the current president, yet died in a state of calm and surrender and spiritual equilibrium, the answer to her own distress? Why does CNN news have a worse effect upon her spiritual life than hungry lions did upon St. Ignatius'?

As gifted as she is, I think Lamott would be a much better writer, meaning deeper and wiser, if she stopped to consider such questions. She could stand on the shoulders of giants, and share with her readers what she sees from there. I suspect she would also be a less popular writer, because the answers to such questions, seen from the giants' shoulders, lead you, eventually, to truths that are not p.c.