“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
So while I was in Boston for work a few months ago, I saw her memoir Travelling Mercies<\/a> for only $2 at a really fine used bookstore just off of Harvard. Now, Lamott is like no one I had ever read before: A liberal, dread-lock wearing feminist activist. I’d spent most of my life growing up in the company of conservatives who wouldn’t touch an author like this with a ten-foot pole. So here is the part where I say my eyes were opened and I gained fascinating insight into a different perspective on faith… Except that I can’t say that. Actually, I wasn’t all that impressed. Lamott is a funny and ironic writer and some of her stories from the book were enjoyable to read. I think she clearly has a handle on the fundamentals of who Jesus is and the nature of grace. Nevertheless, I tired of her frequent detailed descriptions of how bad her drinking problem was before she found Jesus. I don’t think I need to write anymore about it since this one reviewer<\/a> on Amazon described it very accurately:<\/p>\n About midway through the book, Lamott reads a review of a lecture of hers that described her as “narcissistic”, and that, I think, hits the nail pretty much on the head. It’s not that one cannot find inspiration here, or humor, or compassion; the main difficulty in Traveling Mercies is that the essays are so consistently self-absorbed as to miss many of the lessons she could have learned were she able to get beyond herself even a little bit. So we have her chalking up as a minor miracle her being able to play the `bon vivant’ with a fellow air-traveler who happens to be of a religious and political persuasion at which she would normally have sneered; it never seems to occur to her, however, that were the shoe on the other foot (as in: “I actually talked to a feminist today, and even though she’s spreading Satan’s lies, she really wasn’t all that bad!”), the essay would have read as intolerably patronizing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Anyway, the next book like this that comes along will need to be a little more highly recommended. There is so much to read and so little time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was originally drawn to reading something by Anne Lamott after seeing potent quotes from her referenced in other works. Things like: “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” So while I was in Boston for work … <\/p>\n