c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Anne Lamott is the kind of Christian who makes a lot of other Christians nervous.

I think it’s because she’s really honest.

She’s honest about her sins, her foibles and her faith, and she makes no excuses for any of them.

She’s wide open about her less-than-perfect faith walk, about being a single mother, a recovering addict, a bleeding-heart liberal, neurotic, insecure and wickedly funny. Lamott has chronicled her wacky and (sometimes) wild adventures in faith in books such as “Traveling Mercies,” “Plan B” and most recently the wonderful “Grace (Eventually).”

She makes a lot of people who also call themselves Christians nervous _ and sometimes even angry _ because Lamott should, they think, either keep her imperfections to herself or stop calling herself a Christian.

“Plan B” began with a darkly humorous chapter about how she was so upset with President Bush and so filled with hate for what he was doing to the country and the world that she wanted to kill herself, except that she was tired and her back hurt and she just didn’t have the energy.

“That scared a lot of people off,” Lamott told me with a little chuckle recently by phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, adding that most Christian bookstores won’t carry her books. (They should.)

“I think that was kind of scary for somebody who loves Jesus so much, who loves God and sort of tries to live in my funky, erratic way, being love, being God’s love for other people, and really experiencing God’s love in my own life. For somebody doing all of that, to be so angry at the same time, I think was kind of frightening,” she says.

When Lamott was promoting “Traveling Mercies” after its release in 1999, the response from some conservative Christians was vitriolic at best.

“I was getting a lot of callers on call-in radio shows who were explaining to me, usually in their sweet Southern voices, that I was going to be rotting in hell for all of eternity because I was kind of cherry-picking from the Bible, and that they actually had the truth and the Bible right in front of them to prove that,” she says.

“I know that in a lot of churches I’d be seen as somebody who is in mortal sin for about 20 different reasons, one of which is that I totally love gay people.

“You know, Jesus doesn’t have a word to say about sex. Not a word. … I know that Jesus doesn’t have a position on who we love. Just that we should,” she says. “I think if we could just get the Golden Rule down, Jesus would be thrilled. I feel like it would be Mardi Gras day in heaven if we could just, like, nail this one concept.”

It’s from-the-hip stuff like that that gets her in trouble with other Christians who want to throw her out of their club.

And it’s precisely because of stuff like that that some others of us who call ourselves Christians see Lamott as a hero, a giant of the faith who inspires us to go deeper with God.

A couple of years ago I even had a T-shirt made that says, “Annie is my pastor” on the front, and “Just Jesusy” on the back. “Jesusy” is one of the ways Lamott describes herself as a believer.

In “Grace (Eventually),” Lamott, 52, talks vividly and unapologetically about helping a terminally ill friend end his life in one chapter, and about her unwavering support for abortion rights _ and the fact that she’s had abortions herself _ in another. She does not apologize.

And that, if I had to make an educated guess, is going to get her into trouble. Again.

“The fundamentalists get to say what their experience of truth is, and I get to say what mine is,” she tells me with not a hint of bitterness. “All I can do is really share my experience and strength and hope and my understanding of these things.”

I love Lamott because she is “a bad girl of Christianity,” because she doesn’t try to hide the cracks in her vessel or say the right things. I find her stories faith-affirming in large part because she understands that affecting a false piety isn’t doing Jesus _ or his motley band of imperfect followers _ any favors.

“People are just starved for more of your humanity as a seeker,” she told me before we hung up the phone. “I thought I was supposed to be getting more esoteric or to be able to understand more and more complicated aspects of faith or grace. But people are just so hungry for just a little bit of your own truth.

“When you say the truth, something inside of them just comes alive,” she says. “People listen and they go, `Oh my God, you know what? Me too!’ And then you’re home.”

And then you’re home.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

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KRE/PH END FALSANI