small victories spotting improbable moments of grace

No matter how jaded I am, no matter how despairing I feel at the way our human failings are destroying this precious world around us, I can always find a shred of peace in her essays. I highly recommend any and all of them-and you definitely don't need to read them in any certain order.īasically, Anne Lamott is the only Christian writer I can read even when I'm completely disillusioned with the church and the people in it. All I know is I love them and I'm always thrilled to find out she's publishing another one. I'm not sure how exactly to classify Anne Lamott's nonfiction books-they're part memoir, part religious reflection, part pep talk. Her writing is filled with the everyday things that shape our personal encounters-the hugs we give, the food we share, the ashes we scatter-and she shows us how grace uses them to move our hearts toward Love. They are filled with fine essays, but not quite as good as those in the first two sections.Īnne Lamott-although she never uses the word-delights in the “sacramentality” of daily life. The last two sections of the four-”Airborne” and “Ground”-contain accounts of spiritual experiences high and low not necessarily related to forgiveness. The first part is entitled “Noraht”, after the mis-spelled version of her mother's name affixed to the box from the crematory, and the second is called “Nikki,” her mother Norah's favorite nickname.) (The essay has two parts, their headings reflecting the movement from resentment to forgiveness.

In “Mom,” Ann eventually makes peace with her difficult mother's spirit when she gathers together with family to spread her mother's ashes. In “Dad”, years after the death of a father she loved, Ann is confronted with a diary of his last days in which he wrote unkind things about her. I like every essay in this section of the book, but my favorites are the two about her parents. She is never self-righteous or preachy, and she is always specific: it is precisely in the details of everyday life that the miracle of love occurs. She narrates in clear, apparently effortless prose-another of Lamott's virtues-stories about her encounters with friends and relatives, and what those encounters tell us about human and divine love.

The first two thirds of this book- “Companions” and “Families”-could have been published under the title Lamott suggested.

This comment embodies many of the virtues of Lamott's writing: witty, ironic, honest, self-deprecatory, and filled with the knowledge that grace flows from our encounters with people-each as fallible and infuriating as ourselves-and that we, through humility and forgiveness, must prepare ourselves to receive that grace. Somewhere in this volume of personal essays, Anne Lamott remarks that she has always wanted to write a book entitled People I Still Hate: a Christian Perspective.

Small victories spotting improbable moments of grace