FAMILYFANS Books & Comics

GRACE (EVENTUALLY): Thoughts on Faith

by Anne Lamott

(Riverhead)

Reader Appeal: Adults

Genre: Religion

Every sentence that Anne Lamott sets to paper is perfect. Her essays are like the highest quality photographic paper that effortlessly captures the light, dark, and gray of any snapshot of life. Anne’s fans remain loyal because she is somehow aware of God, yet irreverent, able to find humor any moment, and able to be gracious to very people who threaten the delicate balance of her sanity.

Anne is back with her third collection of essays on faith. Fans of TRAVELING MERCIES and PLAN B will encounter many of the same familiar strains: Sobriety, her mother, George Bush, and raising her teenage son Sam. However, in GRACE (EVENTUALLY), Anne isn’t offering warmed-up leftovers. She revisits each of these topics, and some new ones, with having made advances her in conflicted relationships with each of these people.

It’s Anne’s awareness that spirituality is a relational thing that keeps her ever grounded and cognizant of her foibles. She’s aware that she’s unable to get out of her own way as she tried to forgive or serve someone else. Her writing is a sort of spiritual slapstick that reminds us that were all poor in spirit.

The book’s title reveals the next leg of Anne’s journey—she is learning to apply grace to the constellation of people in her life… and herself. She’s forgiving Sam for his adolescent sneer, and forgiving her deceased mother to the point of missing her. And she’s applying grace to herself. She contemplates giving herself the freedom to wear a bikini even though she’s no longer in her twenties. She forgives herself for a failed moment of parenting.

Anne seems to bravely be expecting her readers to extend grace to her as she transparently reveals positions and behaviors with which many in the church will take exception. She reiterates her pro-choice position. She also recounts assisting a friend who was terminally ill to commit suicide. Anne doesn't come across as being confrontational as much as being authentic, all the while knowing that her readers may choose to extend or withdraw warmth and support toward her. These two chapters stretched this reader, not in my understanding of these moral issues, but in remembering that Anne remains my wonderful and irreverent sister in Christ, no less loved by God than I am. And I encourage readers to go ahead and venture in, if only to gain an understanding of how a fellow Christian can come to differing conclusions on differing matters.

FAMILYFANS RATING: A

--LS

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