A newborn and his born-again, unwed mother found family in a
ghetto church.
by Anne LaMott
Sam is the only kid he knows of who goes to church, who is made to go
to church two or three times a month. He rarely wants to.
This is not exactly true. The truth is he never wants to go. What 7-year-
old would rather be in church than hanging out with a friend? It does not
help him to be reminded that once he's there he enjoys himself, that he
gets to spend the time drawing in the little room outside the sanctuary,
that he only actually has to sit still and listen during the short children's
sermon.
It does not help that I always pack some snacks, some Legos, his art
supplies, and any friend of his whom we can lure into our churchy web. It
does not help that he genuinely cares for the people there. All that
matters to him is that he alone of all of his colleagues is forced to spend
Sunday morning in church.
You would think, noting the bitterness, the resignation, that he was being
made to sit through a six-hour Latin mass. You might wonder why I make
this strapping, exuberant boy come with me most weeks, and if you were
to ask, this is what I would say.
I make him because I can. I outweigh him by nearly l00 pounds.
But that is only part of it. The main reason is that most of the people I
know who are doing well psychologically, who seem conscious, who do
not drive me crazy with their endlessly unhappy dramas, the only people
I know who feel safe, who have what I want—connection, gratitude, joy—
are people in community. And this funky little church. It is where I was
taken in when I had nothing to give, and it has become in the truest,
deepest sense, my home. My home-base.
My relatives all live in the Bay Area and I adore them, but they are all as
mentally ill and as skittishly self-obsessed as I am. Which I certainly
mean in the nicest possible way. But I do not leave family gatherings with
the feeling that I have just received some kind of spiritual chemotherapy.
I do when I leave church, though, it's like something horrible inside of me
is healing.
Believe me, church was the last place I would have ever imagined
wanting to be; and so I understand why now it is the last place Sam
wants to be. I think he would almost rather spend Sunday mornings
getting his teeth cleaned.
"Let's go, baby," I say cheerfully when it is time for us to leave for church,
and he looks up at me like a puppy eyeing the vet who is standing there
holding the needle.
The church in the wild hood
I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My
first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12
years ago, were, I swear to God, "I would rather die." I really would have
rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-
believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would
have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship
with Strom Thurmond. At least there is some reason to believe that
Strom Thurmond is a real person. You know, more or less.
But I never felt like I had much choice with Jesus; he was relentless. I
didn't experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old
description has it, as the alley cat of heaven, who seemed to believe that
if it just keeps showing up, mewling outside your door, you'd eventually
open up and give him a bowl of milk. Of course, as soon as you do, the
next thing you know, he's sleeping on your bed every night, and stepping
on your chest at dawn to play a little push-push.
I resisted as long as I could, like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Hams—I
would not, could not in a boat! I could not would not with a goat! I do not
want to follow Jesus, I just want expensive cheeses. Or something.
Anyway, he wore me out. He won.
I was tired and vulnerable and he won. I let him in. This is what I said at
the moment of my conversion: I said, "Okay! Come in. I quit." He started
sleeping on my bed that night. It was not so bad. It was even pretty nice.
He loved me, he didn't shed or need to have his claws trimmed, and he
never needed a flea dip. I mean, what a savior, right?
Then, when I was dozing, tiny kitten that I was, he picked me up like a
mother cat, by the scruff of my neck, and deposited me in a little church
across from the flea market in Marin's black ghetto. That's where I was
when I came to. And then I came to believe.
Champion dwarf tossers
Enter Sam: I got sober, I got pregnant, don't ask me how that works, it is
just the way it was. And as some of you may know, there were these tiny
little problems. For instance, the father was—comment se dit—not that
enthusiastic about my having a baby, and I had no money. But I'd been
going to this little church for a while by then, and when I announced
during worship that I was pregnant, people cheered. All these old people,
raised in fundamentalist houses in the Deep South, cheered.
It was so amazing.
They almost immediately saw me as the incubator who was going to
bring them a new baby, to have and to hold. So they set about providing
for us. They brought clothes, they brought furniture, they brought me
soul-food casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance
that he was going to be a part of this family. And they began slipping me
money.
Now, a number of the older black women live pretty close to the bone
financially, on small Social Security checks. But routinely they sidled up
to me and slipped bills in my pocket: 10's and 20's. It was always done so
stealthily, so surreptitiously, that you might have thought that they were
slipping me bundles of cocaine, or blueprints for the submarine. One of
the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams,
who is in her mid-80s now, so beautiful in her crushed hats and
hallelujahs, who always slipped me plastic baggies full of dimes, noosed
with little wire twists.
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame, or dereliction.
But then I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's, that we are here to
learn to endure the beams of love, and I learned to take a long deep
breath, and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank
you."
Eventually Sam was born. I brought him to church when he was five days
old, and they all passed him around, from one set of arms to the next—
I've said somewhere else that it was a little like watching a team of
champion dwarf-tossers in action. They very politely pretended to care
how I was doing but were mostly killing time until it was their turn to hold
Sam again. They called him "our baby" or sometimes "my baby." "Bring
me my baby!" they'd insist. "Bring me my baby now!"
I believe that they came to see me as Sam's driver, or roadie, or sherpa,
the person who brought him and his gear back to them every Sunday.
Mary Williams always sat (and still sits) in the very back by the door, and
during the service she praises God in a non-stop burble, a glistening
dark brook. She says, "Oh, yes." "Uh-huh." "My sweet Lord."
Sam loves her, and she loves him, and she still brings us baggies full of
dimes. Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction and he walks to where
she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind his ears, where he
most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This is in fact what I think
God may smell like, unwashed new potatoes, a young child's slightly dirty
neck. Then Sam leaves the sanctuary and returns to his drawings, his
monsters, dinosaurs, birds.
I watch Mary Williams pray sometimes. She clutches her hands together
tightly and closes her eyes only most of the way, so that she looks blind;
and she is so unself-conscious that you get to see someone in a deeply
interior pose. You get to see all that private intimate resting. She looks
as if she's holding the whole earth together, or making the biggest wish
in the world. Oh yes, Lord. Uh-huh.
The dime drop
Last Saturday I was driving Sam and his great friend Josh over to Josh's
house, where the boys were going to spend the night. And for whatever
reason, Josh changed his mind about wanting Sam to stay over. It was a
terrible, wrenching experience for me: My boy has so little armor. He
started crying and I tried to self-will and manipulate Josh into changing
his mind, but he wouldn't, and Sam wouldn't stop wanting to spend the
night. Sam wept. He said he wished we'd all get hit by a car. Josh stared
out the window nonchalantly. I honest-to-God thought he might be about
to start humming. It was one of those times when you wish you were
armed so you could stab the kid who has hurt your child's feelings.
"Sam?" I asked, "Can I help in any way?"
"No," he said. "I just wish I'd never been born."
I cannot for the life of me figure out where he gets this s***.
"Shall we pray?" I asked finally, "as a family?" You know, when all else
fails, follow instructions, right?
And he said yes. I was totally surprised.
I said, "Out loud?" He said yes.
So I prayed that God help us find a solution, and help us remember in
the meantime how much we all cared for each other. We drove along in
silence for a while, and I waited quietly for the plates of the earth to shift;
waited for any small free-floating brown-bag miracle that was looking for
a place to roost. After a while Sam said, "I guess Josh wishes I had never
been born." Josh stared out the window: dum de dum.
To make a long story short, Sam did end up spending the night. Josh's
mother insisted that the invitation be honored, and they had a wonderful,
somewhat quiet evening together. I did not know this until later that night,
after they had gone to bed. What I did know, though, was that the next
morning, we would all go to church together, me, Sam and Josh. I would
bring them drinks and snacks, felt pens, papers, Legos.
What I did know was that Mary Williams would be sitting in the back near
the door, in a crumpled hat. I knew that Sam would hug her, that she
would close her eyes and smell the soft skin of his neck, just below his
ears, like it was something holy, which of course it is. And also that we
were due for another baggie of dimes. It had been a little while since her
last dime-drop, and just when I think we've all grown out of the ritual, she
brings us another stash.
She doesn't know that I am semi-famous now, even semi-affluent, and no
longer really need people to slip me money.
But what's so dazzling to me, what's so painful and poignant, is that she
doesn't bother with what I think she knows or doesn't know about my
financial life. She just knows we need another bag of dimes.
And that is why I make Sam go to church.
Anne Lamott is a best-selling author and commentator for National
Public Radio. According to Christianity Today, she is "funny, nutty, fast-
talking, born again," and to the people in her liberal circles, "Jesusy."
