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• About Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith
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Full Interview. (13:33)
 

Tavis: I'm always pleased to welcome Anne Lamott back to this program and especially on this Good Friday. Her best-selling books include "Traveling Mercies" and "Plan B." Her latest now out in paperback is "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith." Anne, I was on the plane earlier this week returning back to Los Angeles and put out my "New York Times" and saw, which did not surprise me, first week out, it's on the list in paperback as it was in hard cover. You are a perennial best-selling author. What do you attribute that to?

Anne Lamott: I'm just like the princess.

Tavis: Yeah (laughter).

Lamott: I don't know, I don't know. I have a great publisher. I have great publicists. I don't know. People are starving to hear about faith. They're starving to hear about spirituality from somebody who isn't telling them that they have to get on the straight and narrow or they're doomed forever.

Tavis: I was giving a speech the other day and making the point in the speech, Anne, that over the last few months or so on my radio and TV program, I found myself interviewing more authors - our viewers know this - I found myself interviewing more authors from the Christian left who are really putting a stake in the ground, whether it's E.J. Dionne from "The Washington Post" in his new book, whether it's Jim Wallis or Tony Campolo.

There's so many people now from the Christian left who are saying, "Hey, the Christian right no longer owns this agenda, and the agenda has got to be more expansive and there are other issues that need to be discussed." Are you reading this the same way that I'm reading this?

Lamott: Definitely. I think Jim Wallis has been really, really important to the progressive left. The whole movement to include under the Right to Life, which you know I'm a ferocious proponent of women's rights, but I've done conferences with him because we believe in almost everything together.

But the Right to Life and Pro Life ought to mean that we don't kill people either, that we don't support capital punishment, that we don't expect people to live on garbage and we don't force women to bring a child to term and then refuse to give her any money to help to raise that child. So he and I agree on about ninety-five percent and then the other part I just think he's wrong. He'll come around like you.

Tavis: (Laughter) What does that say, though - two questions. What does it say about the nation, about the politics of the nation, that we are starting to hear this voice? Not just a voice, but indeed an echo coming from the progressive left. What does that say, number one. And number two, what do you make of the fact that inside of Christendom, there really are two different beliefs about what the American agenda ought to be?

Lamott: Yeah. Well, I think that right after - first of all, the appropriation of Jesus began in the Reagan administration and it began when the Republicans began to embrace the church as a political arm of the Republican Party. But certainly after 9/11, terror was used to keep us holding our breath and not saying what we really - people went along with the program because you were branded a traitor if you didn't just follow the straight and narrow. I think people are starting to wake back up. I mean, that's what spirituality is about. It's about coming to life, you know.

I think people all of a sudden just felt terrified more about what was going to happen for their children and grandchildren than about what happened to us on 9/11; i.e., that the most precious gift America has given to the world, which is the separation of church and state, has been blurred almost out of existence. I mean, the terrible catastrophe of Iraq. I think people are rising back up. You know, the only thing that's ever saved us is the rising up and people were too afraid and they're not afraid anymore.

Tavis: Situate this new conversation, if I can put it that way, this new conversation that we're having around these issues of faiths and what the agenda ought to be. Situate that conversation in the context of this campaign for the White House. Either side, both sides.

Lamott: Well, I just want to say that, before, we would look at President Bush and I would feel - and certainly in my last book, "Plan B" - I felt very angry and just horrified, kind of stunned, by what he was getting away with, that there didn't seem to be an end in sight. Now I look at him and I think very calmly, "Tick-tock, tick-tock."

Although I just want to say, I'm not positive anyone has told him that he has to leave in January and I'm concerned. I think probably Condi is going to be selected to tell him. I don't know if he knows what the term limits and the Oval Office. You know, he is the decider and I think he will just decide that he would like to stay. He loves the chair. He's been very clear about the chair. I'm not convinced that he knows that he has to leave the chair too.

But anyway, I feel that a lot of us, as soon as we realized that there was going to be spring, the metaphoric spring of a new beginning, began to get oxygenated again and we began to mobilize like we've always done. We began to realize it's Good Friday, which is the most profound day of the Christian calendar certainly.

It's a terrible day of darkness and despair and death and yet, because of it, the world starts over. Life begins. Life becomes infinite again instead of this tiny, tightly wrapped little package of these crazy neo-cons who told us that we were all doomed unless we did what they want. Now, you know, I've sort of given up on ever seeing them on trial at The Hague, but now I no longer care because it's lame duck.

With both of the Democrats, who I'm much happier talking about, I would be so thrilled if either of them got elected. I would cry and I will cry. I believe one of them will. But, you know, the old Christian saying is that we're Easter people living in a Good Friday world. What we've been living in has been a Good Friday world, what with, you know, Iraq and Iran and just devastation of the global economy and the global environment and whatnot.

These two people, Hillary and Barack Obama, are coming out and saying that the truth of our spiritual identity is that we're Easter people. We're people of love. We're people of compassion. American people are so decent and they want to share what they have. They're not going for the old Republican, you know, no regulation Wall Street political arm again. They're saying, "We know we're hungry for what we're not giving. We don't need more, we don't want more, we're not trying to get richer, richer, richer. We're trying to be who we truly are."

To me, it's like in Ezekiel, just a little religious for one minute. When Ezekiel sees the Valley of the Dried Bones and just a dead, spiritless body -

Tavis: - can these bones live again?

Lamott: Can these bones live again? And we have not felt for the longest time that they could, that it was over, that if we could undo what the Bush administration has done, it might be fifty or a hundred years. But what Ezekiel does is what we're all urged to do, which is to look upon the despair and the destruction and the hopelessness and to see the vision of hope and restoration and rebirth and spring.

I would say both of the Democrats are about that. I don't think John McCain's a good candidate. I think he wears a little thin and he has a terrible temper and he has episodes (laughter).

Tavis: Beyond the candidates, because I'm always cautioning - how might I put this - I'm always cautioning sober assessment and wise enthusiasm where these candidates are concerned. Sober assessment and wise enthusiasm.

I caution that because I have a fundamental belief which is that, while it does matter - I'm not prepared to say it doesn't matter who gets elected - while it does matter, there's still so much work that those of us, we everyday people, have to do which is really beyond who occupies the Oval Office. Hillary being elected doesn't do away with America's patriarchal predilection any more than Obama being elected does away with America's Jim Crow past.

Lamott: That's right.

Tavis: I raise that because, for even those folks who believe in Hillary or believe in an Obama or, if McCain is your choice, you believe in McCain, what makes you hopeful that, beyond the person who occupies the Oval Office, we can move from a Good Friday experience to an Easter experience? You've answered the question of who occupies the Oval Office, but what about we everyday people, never mind who takes the Oval Office? How do we go from Good Friday to Easter in our own lives?

Lamott: Well, I think that, like Ezekiel, you agree not to look away. You agree not to look away from the suffering. You agree not to look away from what's happening in Darfur or on the streets of Oakland. You bear witness and you register voters. You do what Jesus always said to do, which was to go get thirsty people a glass of water and, if the people are hungry, that you feed them.

You know, Jesus was very clear that we try not to kill people today. You know, maybe make little notes to ourselves and put it by the phone, "Don't kill people today." That's what we do, you know. We see the vision of hope and we carry the hope, which is like a glass of water in that it's small, you know.

The progress is small and there's not a hero out there that's going to save us. There's a hero inside. There's the beauty of the good people that we were raised to be inside. God doesn't seem to have a magic wand and, God knows, Congress doesn't have a magic wand. It's small and slow, incremental, it's messy, and we just do it one day at a time. We have seen miracles and we know that the miracle begins in the problem.

You don't run from the problem, like Bush's crazy little talk last Friday. I mean no offense. I mean that in a loving and Christian way, but his craziness about the economy and how well things are actually going, followed by his little dance, that little soft-shoe he did the week before while waiting for McCain to come. I mean, he and I are both recovering alcoholics. I want to call him because I'm afraid they'll use that little soft-shoe at his commitment hearings or the intervention or something.

But at any rate, you say what is true. You say the economy is a God-awful mess for almost all Americans. The rich will survive whatever shakes down in the next couple of months. The poor won't. The poor will be much, much poorer, so we do what we can. We rise up and we say no and we take care of the poor.

Right now, we don't wait for November to get our marching orders from the White House. You gather together in community. What's the new U.N. Secretary? Bunky Moon. When he went into the refugee camps in Darfur, he did more good, more profoundly did the plates of the earth shift, than all the meetings that took place that month in Washington, D.C.

So when Barack and Hillary are up against each other and everyone's going, "Oh, why can't they be nice" and "Why did she say…," it's like, "Grow up." This is going to be a nightmare by about October and Barack cannot beat McCain without Hillary's, you know, pushing him as hard as she can and vice versa. They absolutely need each other.

Tavis: They got to be tested.

Lamott: It's nautilus, you know, and whoever wins, it's going to be a fantastic day for liberals and progressives.

Tavis: Let me offer this as a quick exit question here. Back to the book's title, "Grace (Eventually)." Is grace for you purely, strictly an unmerited favor or are there things that we can do to call down more grace?

Lamott: You know, I really believe in prayer. I've always told you this before. I really have only two prayers. One is "Help me, help me, help me." And one is "Thank you, thank you, thank you." (Laughter) Because I know when I pray, a hundred percent of the time, it will be heard and I will be helped.

The reason it's called "Grace (Eventually)" is that it's the "eventually" that kills you. There will be grace. I think we breathe. That's how Ezekiel helped those people come back to life. It was the Holy Spirit moving through him, and his compassion brought those bones back to life. So we breathe and I do believe in getting people water.

You know, I don't understand much about grace except that it meets you exactly where you are and then it doesn't leave you where it found you. You know, you can breathe a little better, a little water-wings sensation of being lifted up just enough.

Tavis: I always feel lifted up every time I have a conversation with Anne Lamott. Her book, now out in paperback, on the list its very first week and no surprise there, "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" by "The New York Times" perennial bestseller, Anne Lamott. Anne, nice to see you. Happy Easter to you.

Lamott: You too.

Tavis: Thank you.