Known for her quirky, no-nonsense approach to writing and strong liberal political views, Anne Lamott has something to say about just about everything.
A devout church-goer, her books and essays have reached those who long for faith in their lives but may feel a bit out of touch with religion. Lamott’s lessons prove you don’t have to be perfect to be a follower of God.
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Here are nine of her most memorable statements about faith:
1. "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear."
2. “My father was a very staunch atheist. My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it. But I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.”
3. “I'm a very simple believer. If somebody is immersed in God as love and gentleness and forgiveness and inclusion and freedom, I'm in. And if they can tell me something that's going to throw the lights on for me a little bit — Hindu, Jewish, Mormon, it doesn't matter.” (Source:
Star Tribune)
4. “I was not raised to believe that there was particularly much meaning to my own life. The Bible stories were more like the Greek myths. We were offered the myths as ways of various people trying to understand the fact that life is very, very brutal and scary and weird and mysterious, and it really doesn’t make sense a lot of the time in that the innocent constantly, constantly suffer and are ground down by the powerful.” (Source:
Faith and Leadership)
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5. “It’s about being in a gentle but structured relationship with a Higher Power and one’s own self and the truth, and getting the work done. You close your eyes, breathe, and say, ‘hi.’ The reason ‘help’ is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you’re in despair, you’re teachable.” (Source:
Publisher’s Weekly)
6. “I just talk about faith or how it animates my life. The single most important thing we can do is stop and get off the train of our own obsessive convictions and move into awareness of some sort of presence or the present time, the eternal now — whatever you want to call it — and breathe again. That’s about as prayerful as life gets. That is about as faithful and spiritual as I mean. And everyone can relate to that.” (Source:
The Washington Post)
7. “When I pray, which I do many times a day, I pray for a lot of things. I ask for health and happiness for my friends, and for their children. This is okay to do, to ask God to help them have a sense of peace, and for them to feel the love of God. I pray for our leaders to act in the common good, or at least the common slightly better. I pray that aid and comfort be rushed to people after catastrophes, natural and man-made. It is also okay to ask that my cat have an easy death.” (Source:
Salon.com)
8. “Faith without works is dead. It’s just not nice to sit around — you can sit around in your prayer breakfast with all this faithy-faith and all this talking and thinking and ‘hallelujahing’ and it’s nothing. It’s nothing to God. I mean, I think it pisses God off.” (Source:
PBS)
9. “God's everywhere. God's in the effort, God's in the struggle, whether that's for civil rights or creative expression. God's always in the struggle with us.”
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