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St. Paul wrote a letter to you and me and all the people of God, which we know as the Letter to the
Ephesians. It is a letter especially for those who have been lost at some time in their lives. In it Paul tells us what Gods
hope is -- to find those who are lost and to lead them home. God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world, Paul
says, to be without blemish in his sight, to be full of love. He chose us to be adopted as his children through Jesus Christ
in accordance with his pleasure and will. In Christ we have been redeemed and granted forgiveness of our sins in accordance
with the riches of Gods grace. And he has made known to us the mystery of his own divine purpose -- to bring all things in
heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.
So remember, Paul adds -- you who once were lost, outside the community of the people of God -- remember that at
that time you were separate from Christ, foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the
world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near.... For he himself is our peace.... His
purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, one new body out of outsiders and insiders, thus making peace,
and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the Cross.... Consequently, you who were lost are no longer
foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with Gods people, and members of Gods household.
In her wonderful memoir, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott tells the story of her spiritual journey, of how she was lost
and found her way home, and how she discovered that forgiveness means giving up all hope of having had a different
past.
Lamott says that her coming to faith did not start with a leap, but rather a series of staggers. A child of the
sixties, Lamott grew up across the Bay from San Francisco in a very political family in a working class town near the tracks
where the trains still ran. Her parents and their friends were all Yellow-dog Democrats -- people who would vote for an ol
yellow dog before they would vote for a Republican -- and although they did not believe in God, they believed, and they
taught Anne to believe, that you had a moral obligation to try to save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you
registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter, and volunteered in after-school programs
for boys and girls from impoverished families. The Lamotts, though not wealthy, were sophisticated and fashionable in a
politically correct sort of way, people who eschewed dependence upon others and who believed that, with a little help from
John Kennedy and Allen Ginsberg, they just might save the world.
Lamotts own family, however, had a lot on their hands just trying to save themselve’s. My parents marriage, she says,
was not a very happy one, and everywhere you looked as the sixties traipsed along there was too much alcohol and pot and
infidelity. Her mother, whom they seldom saw, was enticed by the womens movement and a law career to move to Hawaii, and Anne
and her brothers grew up with their father and his new girl friend.
Annes father had been reared by Presbyterian missionaries, and he despised Christianity. So she and her brothers were
taught that believing meant that you were stupid. Ignorant people believed, uncouth people believed, and we were heavily
couth, she says.
But whatever the couthness of her family, Anne spent much of her childhood obsessed with her knee-knocking thinness,
her sharp-winged shoulder blades, her wiry white hair and the jokes people made about it, which led her to think of herself as
an ugly duckling who didn’t belong any particular place. She loved her parents, but she always felt that she had to earn that
love by making A minuses rather than B pluses, so she was always longing for the assurance that she was loved and wondering,
in fact, if she was lovable.
By age thirteen she and her friends were drinking and consuming lots of other heavier drugs, and through her childhood
friends and their mothers Anne was seeking the deep love she missed at home. She was also searching for love in sex, and by
the time she was in her twenties she had had relationships withë several married men.
Throughout all this, she says, [I thought that] if I could just do a little better, I would finally have the things I
longed for -- a sense of OKness and connection and meaning and peace of mind, a sense that my family was OK and that we were
good people. I would finally know that we were safe, and that my daddy wasn’t going to leave us, and that I would be loved
some day.
Lamotts closest encounters with God in a church were when she would visit a Roman Catholic friend and go to mass with
her family. I loved every second of the Catholic church, she says. I loved the incense, the overwrought altar, the birdbath
of holy water, the votive candles, the poor box, the stations of the cross, the curlicue angels in gold paint on the ceiling,
the slutty older Catholic girls with their mean names, the ones with white lipstick and ratted hair that smelled of Aqua Net,
the priest intoning Latin. All that life surrounded you on all four sides plus the ceiling -- it was like a religious bus
station. [My Catholic friend and her family] had all that stuff holding them together, and they got to be so conceited
because they were Catholics.
Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike my friends father, [who
sometimes beat her when he was drunk] -- God as borderline personality... This God could be loving and reasonable one
minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in
general what a fraud you really were. He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in, and trust, unless his mood
shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah.
Despite her family’s contempt for Christianity and her own wariness of the God of her friends church, Lamott says that
she was thirsty for something that I will dare to call the truth. As a child she prayed, alone, not because she believed in
God, but because she believed that there must be someone who listens to you. And in college she did come to believe in God
when she read Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaards account of Gods requiring Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. I don’t
know how else to put it or how or why I actively made, if not exactly a leap offaith, a lurch of faith.... I left class
believing -- accepting -- that there was a God. I did not understand how this could have happened. But she could not take
her faith home with her, because, while her father didn’t mind my recounting adventures on LSD or romantic dramas, even if
they involved married men, the God business made him act impatient with me. So I had [to go] underground with it.
After college and more years of fear and self-loathing, when she was twenty-five, her father died, and her world
really began to fall apart. She was trying to write, and had in fact published one or two books, although they earned her
hardly enough to live on. She was drinking sixteen ounces of Scotch a day, and that on top of beer and diet dinners. She
was, she said, broke, clearly a drunk, and also bulimic. She could no longer imagine how even God could love her. She called
a suicide line, but hung up when someone answered. Heaven forbid that someone should think I need help! She thought. I was a
Lamott -- Lamotts give help.... I did have a very stern conversation with myself, in which I said that I had to either stop
drinking or get rid of the car. This was a real no-brainer. I got around on foot, and by bus and friend.
Then some friends told her about a new priest in town, an Episcopal priest named Bill Rankin, and she thought about
talking with him. But I wasn’t remotely ready for Christianity, though -- I mean, I wasn’t that far gone.... I was not
ready to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.
But she did talk with Father Rankin, and he planted a seed that was later to take root and grow. He suggested that
she was trying to save herself and that perhaps she might try letting others carry some of her load for her.
About the time of her thirtieth birthday, Lamott, who was living in a one-room apartment on a houseboat, found herself
visiting a flea market in Marin City one Sunday. I could hear gospel music coming from a church across the street. It was
called St. Andrew Presbyterian, and it looked homely and impoverished, [a pretty good likeness of my own self-image. It was]
a ramshackle building with a cross on top, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But the music
wafting out was so pretty, she recalls, that I stopped and listened.
Finally, I began standing in the doorway to listen to the songs. I couldn’t believe how run down it was.... But it
had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man making all that glorious noise, and a congregation of
thirty people or so radiating kindness and warmth. During the time when people hugged and greeted each other, various people
would come back to where I stood to shake my hand, or try to hug me. I was as frozen and stiff as Richard Nixon. After this,
Scripture was read, and then the minister, a man named James Noel, who was as tall and handsome as Marvin Gaye, would begin to
preach, and it would be all about social justice -- and Jesus, which would be enough to send me running back to the sanctuary
of the flea market....
I went back to St. Andrew about once a month. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left
before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made
about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like
it was composed of these people's exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace. There were always children running around or
being embraced, and a gorgeous stick-thin deaf black girl signing to her mother, hearing the songs and the Scripture through
her mothers flashing fingers. The radical old women of the congregation were famous in these parts for having convinced the
very conservative national Presbytery to donate ten thousand dollars to the Angela Davis Defense Fund.... And every other
week they brought huge tubs of great food for the homeless families living at the shelter near the canal to the north. I
loved this. But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
I could sing better here than I ever had before. As part of these people, even though I stayed in the doorway, I did
not recognize my voice or know where it was coming from, but sometimes I felt I could sing forever.
Eventually, a few months after I started coming, I took a seat in one of the folding chairs, off by myself. Then the
singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's heart. There was no sense of performance or
judgment, only that the music was breath and life.... [And it began to wear down] all the boundaries and distinctions that
kept me so isolated...
.
During this period, Anne became pregnant by someone she had just met, and had an abortion. I was sadder than Id been
since my father died, she said, and when a friend brought me home that night, I went upstairs with a pint of Bushmills and
some of the codeine a nurse had given me for pain. I drank until nearly dawn. And the next night she did it again, and the
next. And one night she began to get sick. But I was so disgusted that I had gotten so drunk one week after an abortion
that I just couldn’t wake someone up and ask for help.... I got in bed... and as I lay there, I became aware of someone with
me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was
frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light to make sure no one was there. Of
course, there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely
as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.
And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive [non-religious] friends. I
thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply
could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, I would rather die.
I felt him just sitting there on his haunches, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but
that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with. Finally, I fell asleep. And in the morning, he was
gone.
This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze
and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down
and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it
a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered
or left.
And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I
stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of
extraterrestrials. But the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were
singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in
its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling -- and it washed over me.
I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels,
and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of Gods own dreams, and I opened the door
to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, ÔI quit. I took a long deep breath and said
out loud, All right. You can come in.
So this, she says, was my beautiful moment of conversion.
But it is not the end of her story, or of Gods.
And here in dust and dirt, O here, the lilies of his love appear, George Herbert had written and Anne recalled. And
everywhere in her dusty life at the flea market and St. Andrew Church she experienced those lines being incarnated in her
life:
And here in dust and dirt, O here,
The lilies of his love appear.
She became a regular at St. Andrew, even at the sermon. She continued to drink, and to detest her drinking, though
she was not sure, she says, that she could or even wanted to go one day without alcohol or pills or cocaine. But it turned
out that I could and that a whole lot of people were going to help me, with kind eyes and cups of bad coffee.
[On the Sunday I was to be baptized], I called Reverend Noel at eight that morning and told him I didn’t think I was
ready because I wasn’t good enough yet. Also, I was insane. My heart was good, but my insides had gone bad. And he said,
You’re putting the cart before the horse. So -- honey? Come on down.
Two years later she became pregnant again, and this time she bore a son and became a single parent. Sam was welcomed
and prayed for at St. Andrew seven months before he was born. When I announced during worship that I was pregnant, people
cheered. All these old people, raised in Bible-thumping homes in the Deep South, clapped. Even the women whose grown-up boys
had been or were doing time in jails or prisons rejoiced for me. And then almost immediately they set about providing for us.
I was still poor, she says, but friends and the people at my church convinced me that if I decided to have a child, we would
be provided for every step of the way.
They brought clothes, they brought me casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance that this baby was
going to be part of the family. And they began to slip me money. Tens and twenties, and sometimes baggies full of dimes, she
said, surreptitiously slipped into her pocket by older black women who lived pretty close to the bone on small Social Security
checks and who sidled up to me and made the exchange so stealthily that you might have thought they were slipping me bindles
of cocaine.
And then Annes friend, whom she had always relied on, her longest and strongest tie to her childhood and youth, was
diagnosed with cancer and died. And then Sam was born, and he was baptized. And then the women at church always very
politely pretended to care how I was doing, when mostly they were killing time until it was their turn to hold Sam again.
They called him our baby, or sometimes my baby. Bring me my baby! They’d insist. Bring me that baby now! Hey, you’re
hogging that baby!
And that’s why I go to church, she says, and why I take Sam with me, because I want to give him what I found in the
world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want -- which is to
say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, and joy -- are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in
community, who pray, or practice their faith. They are Buddhists, Jews, Christians -- people banding together to work on
themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of
something beautiful. [As the person I once heard at the Jewish Theological Seminary said], A human life is like a single
letter in the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be a part of a great meaning. Our funky little church is filled
with people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and they are home
writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.
When I was at the end of my rope, the people at St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The church
became my home in the old meaning of home -- that it's where, when you show up, they have to let you in. They let me in.
They even said, You come back now.
My relatives all live in the Bay Area, and I adore them, but they are all as skittishly self-obsessed as I am, which I
mean in the nicest possible way. Lets just say that I do not leave family gatherings with the feeling that I have just
received some kind of spiritual chemotherapy. But I do when I leave St. Andrew. Where she discovered that forgiveness means
giving up all hope of having had a different past.
[Our new pastor, a tall African-American woman named Veronica, with huge gentle doctor hands, who sometimes tells us
stories of when she was a child], told us this story just the other day: When she was about seven, her best friend got lost
one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single
landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car,
and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly,
You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.
And that is why I have stayed close to mine, because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened,
when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.
That, as I read him, is what Paul means by the purpose of God -- that in Christ, together, no matter what we’ve got
or what we don’t have, no matter what we’ve done or not done, no matter where we come from or where we’ve been, we can always
find our way home.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |