Book: Stitches by Anne Lamott

A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

A short book, less than 100 pages, and the pages have generous margins. It can be read in an afternoon.

It's a sermon really…with thoughts on life, present and past, and how we can keep learning to be better, keep getting up in the morning, keep looking for and accepting others into our lives, keep helping anyone we can… Being Annie Lamott of northern California, there are sentences like this:

"You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes," or she quotes Ram Dass when he said that "ultimately we're all just walking each other home."

I like her novels better, but also find common comfort in these essays. She is a woman of hard won faith.

She quotes C. S. Lewis on forgiveness: "If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo."

She says, "We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes." Think on that: the "quiet satisfactions of our homes." There's a lot in that little sentence.

Here is the answer from a wise friend whom she asked about whether there is "meaning in what happened…at the Sandy Hook school in Newton" and he simply replied, "Not yet."

She writes of a friend's homeless son, of four young teenagers who, with no malice, leave a campfire not quite extinguished and what happens as a consequence, of making coffee-filter crafts with kids at her church, about staying sober after the age of 32…and "the sober people taught me it was okay to ask for help, even a lot of help. This was stunning. And it turned out that there was always someone around who could help me with almost everything that came up, and that some people seem to have been assigned to me, and I had been assigned to other people."

Her brother teaches as does my brother and of their kind of teaching, Annie says: "To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It's the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin."

She is coming to Calvin's Faith and Writing Festival in April. I also heard her in Portland at Powell's one night and wasn't disappointed. These authors on book circuits…it's sort of digital…they are either on or off. Although the not-so-good speakers probably aren't sent out much.