Anne Lamott: "Spotting Improbable Moments Of Grace"

Anne Lamott is responsible for popularizing Jesuit friend Tom Weston's inimitable epitomization of Bad Religion: 

"You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image 
when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
Tom Weston S. J.

***

"Any Religion That Needs Fear To Thrive Is Bad Religion"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/02/religion-that-needs-fear-to.html

"Bad Religion: A Compendium"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/bad-religion-compendium.html

Rewriting the Book of Belonging: Anne Lamott on the True Gift of Friendship and the Uncomfortable Art of Letting Yourself Be Seen

Beyond having written one of the finest books on writing ever published, Anne Lamott embraces language and life with equal zest, squeezing from the intersection wisdom of the most soul-stretching kind. Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (public library | IndieBound) shines a sidewise gleam at Lamott's much-loved meditations onwhy perfectionism kills creativity and how we keep ourselves small by people-pleasing to explore the boundless blessings of our ample imperfections, from which our most expansive and transcendent humanity springs.

In an especially enchanting essay titled "The Book of Welcome," Lamott imagines a scripture that was never written, a set of guidances and assurances that would avail us of haven from one of our most anguishing pathologies – the sense that we fall short, that we are undeserving of happiness, that we are unlovable and undesired; a sense instilled in many of us by "not having been cherished for who we are, by certain tall, anxiously shut-down people in our childhood homes." She writes:

The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can't save us, that welcome – both offering and receiving – is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical.

Somehow that book "went missing"... We have to write that book ourselves.

Illustration from Hug Me by Simona Ciraolo

We write that book, Lamott suggests, in large part through our friendships – those delicate yet supremely secure embraces of welcome, woven of what Emerson memorably termed "truth and tenderness." We nurture these voluntary relationships to heal from the involuntary ones that failed to nurture us when we were coming unto ourselves. Lamott writes:

The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.

[...]

They liked to think their love was unconditional. That's nice. Sadly, though, the child who showed up at the table for meals was not the child the parents had set out to make. They seemed surprised all over again. They'd already forgotten from breakfast.

The parental units were simply duplicating what they'd learned when they were small. That's the system.

It wasn't that you got the occasional feeling that you were an alien or a chore to them. You just knew that attention had to be paid constantly to their moods, their mental health levels, their rising irritation, and the volume of beer consumed. Yes, there were many happy memories marbled in, too, of picnics, pets, beaches. But I will remind you now that inconsistency is how experimenters regularly drive lab rats over the edge.

Illustration from Little Boy Brown

And when "the system" does eventually drive us over the edge, we drop – if we're lucky, if we allow ourselves to fall with grace – into the ungrabby, ungreedy, wholly welcoming arms of those we learn to call friends. Lamott recounts her own crash when, in her thirties, she got sober:

A few women in the community reached out to me. They recognized me as a frightened lush. I told them about my most vile behavior, and they said, "Me too!" I told them about my crimes against the innocent, especially me. They said, "Ditto. Yay. Welcome." I couldn't seem to get them to reject me. It was a nightmare and then my salvation.

It turns out that welcome is solidarity. We're glad you're here, and we're with you. This whole project called you being alive, you finding joy? Well, we're in on that.

Allowing that, Lamott observes, is a massive undertaking, a "big adjustment" that requires a "rebalancing of the soul." But once we do, the book of welcome rewrites your story:

Trappings and charm wear off... Let people see you. They see your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event ever happened – me in your life, you in mine.

Two parts fit together. This hadn’t occurred all that often, but now that it does, it’s the wildest experience. It could almost make a believer out of you. Of course, life will randomly go to hell every so often, too. Cold winds arrive and prick you: the rain falls down your neck: darkness comes. But now there are two of you: Holy Moly.

A master of the touchpoint between wit and wisdom, Lamott adds to the poignant a wink of the playful:

The two nonnegotiable rules are that you must not wear patchouli oil – we’ll still love you, but we won’t want to sit with you – and that the only excuse for bringing your cell phone to the dinner table is if you’re eagerly waiting to hear that they’ve procured an organ for your impending transplant.

Small Victories is an enormously ennobling read in its entirety. Complement it with Lamott on how to handle those who refuse to welcome us, then revisit Aristotle on the art of human connection, Andrew Sullivan on why friendship is a greater gift than erotic love, and C.S. Lewis on true friendship.