I knew I was going to cut this while I was writing it. It’s more diatribe than narrative, so it needed to go. But if you’ve ever felt guilty for being bored, you’ll dig it.
I have a dysfunctional relationship with Anne Lamott. She’s like that girlfriend you can never bring yourself to break up with even though she drives you insane.
In terms of spiritual wisdom and practical theology, it doesn’t get much better for me than Anne Lamott. I don’t agree with her on everything, but her big themes are exactly the kind of thing I need to hear over and over: love, social justice, kindness, and grace. She also talks a lot about having patience for people who annoy you. A jerk like me needs to be bombarded with that kind of stuff. I love the lessons she teaches. Her imagery and metaphors, however, make me want to toilet paper her house.
Anne Lamott writes in the language of nesting. She writes about finding God in stillness, plants, wind, rain, dogs, and bracelets made out of yarn. Every one of her books mentions a dozen flowers by name. She talks about experiencing God while sitting on a lawn, eating and singing and doing crafts. She describes God meeting us in stillness, breathing, quiet, and the ordinary life of community.
Such pastoral imagery reveals important aspects of God. But half the time I’m reading her I want to shout, “Oh yeah, Annie? What about the part of me that wants to blow stuff up – not to hurt anybody but just because it looks cool when things explode? What about the part of me that wants to blast off in a rocket or mock death as a Nascar driver? What does it mean that I can’t get enough of rock music and video games? What do I do with my longing to run and sweat and move? If God is found in stillness, nature and deep breathing, I’m in big trouble. I crave action, excitement, and risks. Even though I abhor war, I’ve watched Band of Brothers seven times because some crazy part of me is pissed that I missed World War II. And, by the way Annie, I hate doing crafts. Especially ones that involve yarn.”
Annie describes a spiritual tranquility that eludes me. It’s something that sits at the table and listens and pays attention to details. It creates a sense of stillness and place. This focused diligence earns rewards at school, work, church, and home, but I usually feel restless and bored. As a result, I’ve spent most of my life thinking something was wrong with me.
Let’s take reading for example. Reading “literature” is like pushing a rock up a hill for me. Reading Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Joyce, Garcia Lorca, Henry James, George Eliot, Jane Austen and other such canonized authors felt like torture. Their books took me weeks to finish because I couldn’t sit with them for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I would always be glad that I’d read the book. Once I’d absorbed the characters and the big ideas, I cherished them. But reading the book was excruciating.
This confused me for years because, even though I slog through “literature,” I devour anything by Orson Scott Card, William Blake, Stephen King, T.S. Eliot, Isaac Asimov, C.S. Lewis, Pat Conroy, Thomas Harris and a dozen authors whose writing contains motion. I always considered these books art, with depth, big ideas, beauty and pain. They just move faster. People don’t just talk and think and eat and give each other meaningful looks – there’s a sense of adventure. Why does that mean that they’re not art? Why do people regard these as “boys’ books” instead of literature?
I’ve always felt like an outsider when reading Anne Lamott. Her stuff made me think I might lack spiritual balance or a true connection with God. I realized this was something I’d felt most of my life. Our revered institutions – the academy, the family, the corporation and even the church – prize feminine energy. They reward focused, quiet, concentration over action and motion. As a result, I felt stupid, lazy and ashamed because I preferred stimulation to contemplation. I sometimes wondered if I lacked the patience and spiritual depth to be a good Christian.
By my early thirties, I’d corrected a lot of these shameful feelings. Through studying psychology and the literature of the Christian men’s movement, I began to see value in my masculine energy. Yes, all people– men and women – need feminine energy. God has a powerful feminine nature that patriarchal systems don’t acknowledge often enough. But I needed to feel good about my masculine energy again. I needed to discover how God could use it. I began to realize that my restless longing for motion and change is a creative force. My ability to make bold decisions, think on my feet, and tackle big problems are blessings that I once regarded as curses. It turns out my restlessness solves problems and helps people just as often as it gets in the way.
I learned to celebrate my abundance of masculine energy, but the party stopped the day my kids came home from the hospital. While Shelley was pregnant, we referred to the stress of caring for quadruplets as the “good problems” that would result if all the babies survived. I never considered the fact that those “good problems” would require so much of what I didn’t have. I was about to enter a world that demanded absolute patience, perseverance, concentration, and stillness.
Somewhere in a serene field speckled with snapdragons, lilacs, and lilies, Anne Lamott was laughing.
