Like Annie Lamott

…only better!

..and Catholic!

You might recall that a few weeks ago, in a post inviting you to go read Jennifer Fulwiler’s excellent article “A Sexual Revolution,” I also recommended an older Commonweal piece by Heather King called “One Woman’s Journey.”  It ended up being a recommendation to myself, to pick up a book I’d been meaning to read ever since I’d noticed its publication in the late winter – Heather’s spiritual memoir, Redeemed.

It was serendipitous, that confluence of events, although in the aftermath of reading Redeemed, it would be very wrong of me to term it “serendipity.”

For this book was exactly what I needed to read, now.

The short version is that King was raised in New Hampshire, one of eight children born to Protestant (Congregational, I think) parents. She spent the first twenty years of her adult life drunk, eventually sobered up and went to California to practice law. She eventually left that to write, and in that period also embraced Catholicism. She has lived in Koreatown in LA for years.

Redeemed is essentially about encountering, confronting and accepting reality – the reality of who we are and the reality of the world, both seen and unseen. It is about coming up against the things you thought were you or would make you more you and discovering the inadequacies or straight-out lies coursing through what you thought was true or necessary.

So take King’s chapter on her years practicing law in a personal injury firm in Los Angeles.

Any allusion to right and wrong, any attempt to acknowledge the existence of gray areas instead of blindly insisting on black-and-white, any suggestion that the other side had a certain point, or that our own client was not entirely innocent — and reference, in other words, to the truth – was the ultimate taboo. In fact the entire legal profession was so driven by the fear of not winning enough money, so intent on covering its ass, so inured to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise, that if the truth had stood up from the jury box and waved, we would have stared for a moment in shock, then made a motion in limine to rule it inadmissable.

The core, I think, of King’s pre-conversion searching was about alienation, loneliness and suffering. Where is the light in all of this? Where is the meaning? We do see glimmers of light here and there – are they connected? Is there something coherent about both the suffering and the light?

And so, through a combination of reading and exploring and experience, Heather King found Christ. And she found Him in the Catholic faith:

The other thing I remember from that first Mass: right before Communion, everybody kneeled and said: ‘Lord, I am not worhty to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’ If there was one thing I’d always known about myself, it was that I was sick — soul-sick, weary. A church that didn’t sugarcoat or pretend everything was all right! A church based on mystery, awe, wonder! A church that had behind it the weight of centuries; that had as its guardians the angels and saints; that encompassed and considered equally important everyone from the towering intellect of a St. Thomas Aquinas to the wet-brain on the street. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but it seems to me I never teetered on the razor’s edge thinking, Should I or shouldn’t I? Let me carefully weight this from every conceivable angle. It seemes to me I got one glimpse of Christ and thought, Oh my God, can I come? Am I invited? Don’t leave me out, please! I’ve felt left out all my life…

snip

But as the weeks wore on, and I went to Mass again and again, I wasn’t just believing because I wanted to. I was believing because I felt Christ in the core of my being. I was believing because I felt a stirring, as if I were falling in love. I was believing because I could suddenly see that everything in history, nature, psychology, science resonated with this universal paradigm of death and resurrection that was taking place every second, on an infinite number of levels, from the atomic to…I mean the sun is slowly dying. But Christ didn’t “just” die; he came out on the other side of his suffering transformed: he was — astoundingly, cataclysmically, turn-everything-upside-down-for-all-time resurrected. Something new had been had been made of him, jsut as the longer I stayed sober, something new was almost imperceptibly being made of me. I, too, was being ‘reborn,’ not in the hokey evangelical sense, but in ways so subtle I could sometimes hardly recognize them.

What happens in King’s live is that she lets Christ in and so is finally able to open up. Slowly, and fully consistent with her own personality, but different from before. What courses through the book is the sense that one of the things that Christ brings into her life is solidarity and compassion, living with the awareness that in our stumbling and sins, in our suffering, we are all joined to Christ, whose own suffering binds us and gives our meaning and who lives in us, strengthening us to love, give and be grateful and hopeful, for out of the suffering, He lives.

As I read Redeemed , I thought that this would be a good book for anyone to read who is skeptical or doubtful or wondering how “Jesus Christ” and “Catholic” are connected, particularly for those who don’t get it at all, who see church, particularly the Catholic Church as an obstacle to Christ rather than the way to Him. For it seems to me that King experienced a very Catholic sort of evangelization, if you will - holistic, rich, subtle, a combination of direct and sometimes very indirect. King describes what is very much a personal relationship with Christ – gratefully and joyfully embraced by His Body.

There is so much here, quotes can do it justice. King writes powerfully about Eucharist many times in the book. Her stories of her father’s last days and death, her own encounter with breast cancer, her marriage, her daily struggles just to get along with her co-workers and neighbors – all are beautifully written and hold not only truth, but surprising truth.

I was never a big Annie Lamott fan – she seems too self-absorbed, to invested in her own “difference” – the dreadlocked, politically liberal Jesus-lover! The white chick worshipping with the minorities!

Interestingly enough, Heather King shares some of Lamott’s profile. She’s counter-cultural, she was a prisoner to destructive behavior, she lives in an area in which she is a minority, she hangs out at the edges of society and culture – in her case, with recovering and struggling addicts and others at the margins. But even as her story is about her, I found her writing to take me far beyond Heather King in a way that Annie Lamott’s writing does not take me beyond Annie Lamott.  Like Lamott, like all of us, King wants to feel okay, but the okay-ness she finds points her beyond herself, and so we, too, look with her to the rest of a suffering imprisoned world in need of being…redeemed.

Among the many striking points in Redeemed were King’s  thoughts on writing, thoughts that resonated so strongly with mine, I could have written them, only not as well. The question of “why write?” and “what to write?” and “what is the point of this?” cannot fail to haunt, particularly as a Christian, wondering how if this is really contributing to the Cause or is simply massive self-indulgence and unwillingness to get dressed up for work in the morning. Here’s how she ends her chapter, in a thought process I’ve followed in my own head so many times, it was almost scary to hear her echo them. Well, the first sentence doesn’t apply to me, literally, lest you worry. But the truth and the sense of gratitude here does:

Books saved my life — literally kept me from killing myself– and now I know it was because so many people were willing to burn out their lives in front of a page trying to get it right. People whose goal wasn’t to sound smarter or more profound than the rest of us, but to show us what it means to be human. People who set out not to sensationalize their pain, but to shed light on ours. People who didn’t set themselves above the world, but were part of the world, and loved the world and suffered for it, and made art of their suffering. These are the heroes I look up to, whose feet I hope to sit at one day, whom I hope to have a chance to thank for their stories that sustained and comforted me, their hard work, their example. Maybe fetch them a glass of water, a bedpan, a pill. If I’m lucky — polish their crowns.

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