The conservative
head of Focus on the Family, Jim Daly, made a lot of sense to me as he reflected
on conservative election losses in his recent interview with columnist Mitchell
Landsberg.
He said, “I
think what we’ve got to do in the Christian community is be far more humble.and
not call it a war, a culture war.”
He also
said, “Frankly, after the election, I felt sorry for President Obama in one
respect: He’s got a tough job. We need to pray for him, as the Christian
community.”
I’m guessing
that Jim Daly and I don’t define the Christian community in the same way, since
the organization he leads invested lots of money in anti-gay initiatives, and I
see myself as a gay Christian.
I
appreciated his reflections on the current state of politics and the Christian
right, though. About immigration policy, he said that the evangelical community
should have been considering immigration reform years ago, “but we were led
more by political-think than church-think.”
Jim Daly
started sounding a lot like the progressive Christian writer Anne Lamott, a
comparison that surprises me and would probably surprise each of them.
He started sounding
humble and thoughtful, down-to-earth and kind.
Last night
my partner Ann and I attended Anne Lamott’s reading at Queen Anne’s United
Methodist church. Our friend Ellen, who is Jewish, attended with us, and we saw
lots our progressive church friends there.
Lamott is an
open kind of Christian, though she too (like me) is political. She opened her
talk by saying, “No offense to any Republicans in the room, but…Yea!!!” With “yea!”
she raised her hands in the air and danced in a circle.
Lamott
talked about her new book: Help Thanks
Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.
She says
that “Help” is the first prayer, a prayer she uttered 27 years ago when she
converted. “If you’re very, very lost,” she said, “just say, ‘Help?’ Someone
asks, ‘What if you don’t believe in God?’ Just say help.”
About her
conversion, she said, “I converted by accident. I was drunk.”
Twenty-six
years ago, she had her last drink, and her prayer turned to gratitude, the
second essential prayer: “Thank you,” or really “ThankyouThankyouThankyouThanyouThankyou.”
She said, “If
somebody is grateful and funny, I want to sit by them.”
I thought, “I’m
grateful and funny. Maybe she’ll sit by me. I would say thank you.”
The third
prayer, “Wow!” is “when we’ve run out of words to express the stunning wonder
and beauty of the natural world.”
If there
were a fourth prayer, she said it would be “Hi.” She said, “I believe that when
I say ‘hi,’ and someone hears, that’s prayer.”
Lamott is down-to-earth
and funny. My favorite quote of the night was from her friend Pammy, who had
cancer and was in a wheelchair at the time and has since passed. Lamott was
trying on a dress and asked, “Does this dress make my hips look big?” Pammy
responded, “Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.”
Lamott’s
thinking about how she wants to spend her time now. “I just want to sit by
someone and talk about God,” she said.
Lamott’s
honest about her shortcomings in the Christian lexicon. (“I’m not one of those
Christians who’s heavily into forgiveness,” she said.)
One of my
favorite themes of the night was the impossibility of naming God. She likes the
name “Howard,” as in “Our God, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”
She also
likes “Chris” but I’ve forgotten why—maybe because a gender neutral name is a
good one for a father-mother God.
Her best
name for God, I thought, was “not me—not Anne.” She would pray, “Oh help me, not Annie,”
meaning a being bigger than she is, a being outside of herself.
Lamott has a
transcendentalist’s concept of God as a kind of oversoul, a great being.
Maybe one
hope of this election is that the Christian right and the Christian left (yes,
there is a Christian left) will talk to one another again.
One of the
gifts in my family—some conservative folks and some liberal ones—has already
been that we are talking to one another in ways that we haven’t before.
A couple of
cousins and an aunt and uncle are ultra-conservatives, but they have always
been loving to me, even when I came out as a lesbian.
(My cousin
Lori sent me a membership to Focus on the Family, which I believe she meant as
a kind gesture.)
They shared
with me their thoughts and feelings about the election, and I appreciated their
respectfulness and their honesty.
As I consider Lincoln’s famous observation before the Civil War, an observation that is still true, "a house divided against itself cannot stand," one of my
hopes is that this divided country may heal.
I feel hopeful.
Well, the Christian right and left can start by dropping the labels "ultra conservative" if you vote for Romney (I guess that's why I got the UC label?) and "leftist" if you vote for Obama!
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