Novelist Finds a Little Bit of Faith Lights Her Way

If you’re stuck in an elevator when the Big One hits, you couldn’t do much better than be stranded there with Anne Lamott. In a pinch, even her latest book, a collection of funny, warm and sagacious personal essays that first appeared in the online magazine Salon, could get you through the dark hours. Although her religious faith permeates her nonfiction, “Traveling Mercies” is the first book in which Lamott focuses on the growth of her beliefs and how they helped her to overcome grief, alcoholism, eating disorders and the day-to-day trials of bad hair and dimpled thighs.

Lamott recounts her first exposure to faith, as a 5-year-old, at the home of a Catholic friend whose fractious and affectionate family exerted a rich fascination on her, only heightened by their glamorous, gilt-and-incense religion. Her own parents, ardent believers in books, music and nature, worshiped “in the church of Allen Ginsberg, at the Roger Tory Peterson Holiness Temple, the Tabernacle of Miles Davis.” “No one in our family believed in God,” Lamott explains, “it was like we’d all signed some sort of loyalty oath in deference to the pain of my father’s cold Christian childhood.”

What her parents and their friends did believe in was their obligation to help others and work toward worthy causes. Religion seemed to them like some vestigial limb left on a few benighted members of the species. So although Lamott had always believed, a little, “in someone listening, someone who heard,” she kept this embarrassing suspicion to herself.

In college, however, Lamott read Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” and her life changed. She read his account of Abraham and Isaac, of the leap of faith that allowed Abraham to lift a knife to his beloved son’s neck, and there, in the classroom, she “crossed over.” It made no sense, she recalls, but she had changed: “Though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place.”

How much, and how little, faith can change us is Lamott’s real theme. In meditations on her bulimia, her natty hair, her irritation with her aging, much-loved mother, she makes it clear that she is the same old Annie that she always was, with the same insecurities and quirks. She doesn’t wake up in a pool of sunlight every morning. But her faith provides an outlook on life that is less selfish than the one she would normally resort to. In “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” for instance, Lamott finds herself on an ill-fated flight from St. Louis, wedged between a mumbling Latvian woman and one of those “other” Christians, the right-wing sort, who seems to have sniffed her out as the enemy. As the plane pitches and bucks, she fights back her tears and remembers a miracle at her church, a small miracle, in which a pinched and narrow woman opened her heart to a man sick with AIDS, holding him while the congregation sang “Jacob’s Ladder.” “I couldn’t imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy,” Lamott writes. “Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers, but as she held him up, she suddenly lay her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his and let all those spooky fluids mingle with hers.”

When the plane stops lurching, she is able to make a joke. First the prim Christian man laughs, then the Latvian woman, and then they all laugh together hard.

What saves Lamott’s stories from sentimentality is her ability to face truly taboo subjects, like envy and maternal competitiveness. Instead of a rose garden, she presents us with a scraggly, half-planted patch of earth--a real garden, with mounds of fresh soil and a steaming compost heap. One senses that Lamott, like most of us, is just working through things. Some flowers will get trampled or blighted, but others will burst into bloom. What remains with the reader are her tenderness and generosity. She gives enormous credit to her friends and family, to the old women at her church, to the authors she has read and to that “someone listening.” The reader may whine a little, stuck in that elevator, but the hours will fly by.