c. 2008 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ The carpet guy, as Anne Lamott calls him in an essay, cheated her out of $50 for a moldy church rug she returned to his store. He did this with a smugness that infuriated her, and she cursed and threatened him.

Finally, days later, the carpet guy gave her a check. Then it bounced.

That’s when Lamott realized the absurdity of it all, that she too had misbehaved in their little feud. She sent daisies and an apology note. And how did he respond?

“That was a decent thing,” he told her that evening over the phone. “But you behaved badly!”

She did not explode. She believes God’s love entered her to stifle an outburst, and the chat ended civilly.

Lamott views the incident, recounted in one of 24 essays in her best-selling book, “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith,” as an example of how grace often comes unannounced.

“It ended in a perfectly resolved manner,” Lamott, 53, said in an interview recently in her Manhattan hotel room. “Grace doesn’t very often look very impressive. He said I had been brave to call. He was still sort of the carpet guy. He wasn’t all of a sudden Walter Brennan. We were on the phone together, and we both said good night.”

Her point, however, wasn’t about him: “I’ve got to keep my side of the street clean,” she said. “I’ve got to make amends for the mess that I’ve created and apologize for my bad behavior.”

Lamott is widely adored, especially in liberal circles, for her best- selling books on faith, writing and motherhood, books composed of plain-spoken essays on her neuroses, jealousies and a host of other problems she says readers identify with.

Through essays touching on her Christian faith, her Presbyterian church, her son Sam, her dreadlocks, her past drug and alcohol excesses, and her day-to-day life in Marin County just north of San Francisco, her life story is well-known to millions of readers she has never met.

“They know the parts of me that I feel like sharing,” she said. “My private stuff and my child’s private stuff I keep to myself. I share that stuff that I know is universal. By the time I’ve written something I’ve usually told it as a story a number of times …

“That’s usually (how) I know that I have a story that is safe to tell, because it’s not too personal and people will appreciate it because it’s something that they’ve experienced.”

She has written _ both in her books and for salon.com _ with unabashed disdain for President Bush and for the Christian right. She is thrilled the religious left and Christian liberals have made more political noise in recent years. She prefers the term “faith” to “religion.”

“Faith is such a nice word. It’s so ecumenical,” she said. “It’s so faith-ey. It sort of speaks of having a deeper sense of the world, or maybe a deeper sense of the reality than the one we perceive. Whereas religion means laws. Religious people tend to be very doctrinaire. Religion tends to be about, `We’re fine, unfortunately you’re not because you’re not part of the same religion. However, you could be fine if you would just come over.”’

Lamott, who writes eloquently of her past problems with alcohol, notes: “In the community of sober people, you also hear the cliche that religion is for people who are afraid of hell, and faith is for people who’ve been there.”

Her quirky 1994 book on writing, “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” established her as an authority to a young generation of writers. She has 11 titles to her name, six novels and five nonfiction works.

She prefers the pace of nonfiction, she says. Her novels typically take three or four years to complete, while her books of essays take about two years.

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She’s a firm believer in the arduous yet worthwhile process of rewriting.

“I love the third or fourth draft,” she said. “The first draft I find very painful. And I have so little confidence when I’m starting out. Then the second draft, I feel equal proportions of being glad that I’m in the middle of it, and just despair that I’m not going to pull it off.

“The third draft, there’s almost certainly a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s a shape. And there’s usually way too much. The third and fourth drafts I tend to have confidence because I know I have shape … I like that part.”

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After the best-selling “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” in 1999, “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith,” in 2005, and now “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith” _ all three books consist of six-to-10 page essays _ she said she’s ready for a new subject.

“I’ve done three collections on faith, and I think it might be unseemly to do a fourth,” she said. “But that form was lovely.”

Lamott pushes no specific theology. She believes Jesus is divine and was resurrected. She is not so sure, she said, about the prospect of a Second Coming.

“I just don’t feel like he went anywhere,” she said. “I don’t have an interesting theology, and to tell you the truth I don’t push myself to figure anything out. I’m just so relieved that he’s here, I’m so relieved he’s real and in my heart and in this room, and in the refugee camps in Darfur.

“And even in the White House.”

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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