I like the way she writes - pretty salty & straightforward - occasionally as a Salon.com columnist, as an author of fiction and non-fiction. She's a progressive activist who has been quite open about her opinion of GWB. And she is a Christian, who has been around the block a few times and found a faith community (church) in a mostly African-American congregation in California. I can also relate to her as being 51 years old and single parent of a teenaged boy.
A few snippets from her own words:
"Dave(Interviewer): So many assumptions about what it means to be a Christian in America in 2003, you just turn them inside out. You don't argue, exactly; that's not your approach. But you mentioned "the missionary thing" a minute ago, and this recasting of traditional spirituality would seem to be part of your mission: to make room for a different kind of faith.
Lamott: My sense of mission has to do with having one or two things that I can offer a world that seems as needy and hungry as I sometimes feel. . . There's that terrible feeling of isolation when things are going badly as a parent. Or in the case of
Blue Shoe (which is about a woman who is a Christian in the same way I am; that is to say, she has a colorful way of expressing herself), Mattie has a mother with Alzheimer's, but Mattie also has two little kids. I have information about being able to survive in that position: being a mother to some children and being the daughter of a parent who really didn't effectively parent you at all, who you are still mad at; and at the same time trying to live on a spiritual path of loving kindness.
More at:
http://www.powells.com/authors/lamott.html"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."
- From a Quotations website
"Veronica, our pastor, said the other day that Jesus' promise was not that he was going to try and patch up our old raggedy-assed lives, but that he wanted to give us new life. Now, this is not what I would do, personally, if I were anyone's savior. I would at least try spackle, caulking, dry cleaning fluid. Maybe some nice new furnishings to hide the bare spots in the rug, the water-stained walls; some chemicals to kill off the dust-mite ashrams in the old sofa. But Jesus says, as Veronica put it, you can't get to the good stuff without killing off the old stuff. And death and dying, hanging out with the dying and grieving the dead, and grieving the losses along the way, is where this process most often happens."
More at:
http://www.salon.com/columnists/lamott.html
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