By Anne Lamott

This is no ordinary book about the role of faith in the life of someone living as Jesus taught his disciples to live. The phrase “We’re totally fucked” doesn’t appear in most books on Christian bookstore shelves (I just did a quick internet search for this book on the Family Christian Bookstores catalog, but it was not found, nor were any other Anne Lamott books, which tells me that Christian bookstores probably haven’t changed much in the ten years or so since I last perused one, but that is a subject for another day).

Through a series of essays in which Lamott reflects on episodes from her life, she relates the messy ordinariness, humanity, and holiness, of her daily life. These essays do not seem at first to focus on the life of faith, but looking more closely, Lamott reveals a life thoroughly infused with faith in God, filled with Spirit, and modeled after Jesus. The writing teaches with a experiential, and not didactic, style.

The stories are refreshingly human (in a messy-room, hormonal-imbalance, not-surviving-cancer, finding-joy-and-holiness-in-the-ordinary kind of way). I appreciate her judicious but not gratuitous use of profanity. Far from offensive, it was perfectly descriptive. I once had a poetry professor explain that in poetry, words have fixity, with means that when the right word is used in a line, no other word could possibly be used in its place, not even a synonym. And sometimes, in real life, there is no other word for a situation than shitty.

Leave it to lefty, liberal, menopausal, recovering addict, single mother to leave me feeling convicted about the way I live out my faith in Jesus in my relationships with those around me, and wanting my practice to look more like hers.  

“If you want to change the way you feel about a person, change the way you treat them.” -Anne Lamott