Flighty Plan
Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith
by Anne Lamott
Riverhead Books, 2005
(320 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
Anne Lamott has been praised for her “zany ardor for Jesus” and her “earthy candor.” Her use of the adjective “Jesusy,” enthused one Christian magazine, “endeared Lamott to her mostly evangelical audience at the 2000 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College.”
“We’ll have the Jesusiest time ever!” she cooed. At her Jesusiest, Lamott not only sounds but even looks like an evangelical: “I’ll buy a wwjd bracelet to wear for the day so I can forget about me when I’m on a radio or TV interview, and I’ll just remember him and ask myself, ‘What is his will for me?’” she says.
Yes, but is it his will for traditional Christians to read Anne Lamott? Is being “Jesusy,” whatever that means (and to me it is an offensive use of his name), enough to be promoted by traditional Christians when you support abortion “rights” and same-sex “marriage” (over one of which she has “presided”)?
This is a difficult question for me to answer, because as I read Lamott’s latest non-fiction work, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, I either felt like throwing the book across the room, or nodded, laughed, and thought her hilarious and ruthlessly honest. I wanted to throw the book across the room because of quotes such as this:
I feel that we began witnessing the end of the world in Super SloMo once George W. Bush became president, and some days it takes everything I can muster not to lose my hope, my faith, and myself. . . . I know that Bush is family, and that I am supposed to love him, but I hate this—he is a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman or Osama bin Laden. . . . I will pray to stop hating him, and that he will not kill so many people, today.
She praises social diversity (“God, I love the Democratic Party,” she writes about the mix of people at a peace march) but is so distraught about Bush that she can barely bring herself to admit that she should try to love him.
Lamott’s Virtue
Lamott does, however, when not writing about politics, lighten up, and therein lies her virtue, in more ways than one. As in Traveling Mercies, her first book about faith (where she showed more tolerance for politically conservative Christians), she shares her day-to-day struggle to live a Christian life and how God helps her through difficult situations, usually through some kind of epiphany.
As when she describes trying to come to terms with her mother’s death and her anger towards her mother. For two years, she kept her mother’s ashes in a “brown plastic box” in the back of her closet because her mother “was like someone who had broken my leg, and my leg had healed badly, and I would limp forever.”
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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