Why I Make Sam Go To Church
Sam is the only kid he knows 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 young boy would rather be in church on the weekends 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 bring along 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 among his colleagues is forced to spend Sunday morning in church.
You might think, noting the bitterness, the resignation, that he was being made to sit through a six-hour Latin Mass. Or 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 seventy-five pounds.
But that is only part of it. The main reason is that I want to give him what I have found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want — which is to say purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy — are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community who pray or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians — people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful. I saw something once from the Jewish Theological Seminary that said, “A human life is like a single letter of the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be a part of a great meaning.” Our funky little church is filled with people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and they are home writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.
When I was at the end of my rope, the people at St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The church became my home in the old meaning of home — that place where, when you show up, they have to let you in. They let me in. They even said, “You come back now.”
My relatives all live in the Bay Area and I adore them, but they are as skittishly self-obsessed as I am, which I certainly mean in the nicest possible way. Let’s just say that I do not leave family gatherings with the feeling that I have just received some kind of spiritual chemotherapy. But I do when I leave St. Andrew.
“Let’s go, baby,” I say cheerfully to Sam when it is time to leave for church, and he looks up at me like a puppy eyeing the vet who is standing there with the needle.
Sam was welcomed and prayed for at St. Andrew seven months before he was born. When I announced during worship that I was pregnant, people cheered. All these old people, raised in Bible-thumping homes in the deep South, clapped. Even the women whose grown-up boys had been or were doing time in jails or prisons rejoiced for me. And then, almost immediately, they set about providing for us. They brought clothes, they brought me casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance that this baby was going to be a part of the 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 stuffed bills in my pocket — tens and twenties. It was always done so stealthily that you might have thought they were slipping me bindles of cocaine. One of the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams, who is in her mideighties now, so beautiful with her crushed hats and hallelujahs; she always brought me plastic baggies full of dimes, noosed with little wire twists.
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I remembered that wonderful line of Blake’s — that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love — I took a long, deep breath and forced these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”
I first brought Sam to church when he was five days old. The women there 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 that baby now!” “Hey, you’re hogging our baby.”
I believe that they came to see me as Sam’s driver, hired to bring him and his gear back to them every Sunday.
Mary Williams always sits in the very back by the door. She is one of those unusually beautiful women — beautiful like a river. She has dark skin, a long broad nose, sweet full lips, and what the theologian Howard Thurman calls “quiet eyes.” She raised five children as a single mother, but one of her boys drowned when he was young, and she has the softness and generosity and toughness of someone who has endured great loss. During the service she praises God in a nonstop burble, a glistening dark brook. She says, “Oh, yes. . . . Uh-huh. . . . My sweet Lord. Thank you, thank you.”
Sam loves her, and she loves him, and she still brings us baggies full of dimes even though I’m doing so much better now. 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 smells most like sweet, unwashed new potatoes. This is, in fact, what I think God may smell like: 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 most of the way so that she looks blind; because she is so unselfconscious, you get to see someone in a deeply interior pose. You get to see all that 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.
It’s funny: I’d always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up, I found that life handed you these rusty, bent old tools — friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty — and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.
Not long ago, I was driving Sam and his friend Josh over to Josh’s house, where the boys were going to spend the night. But out of the blue, Josh changed his mind about wanting Sam to stay over. “I’m tired,” he said suddenly, “and I want to have a quiet night with my mom.” Sam’s face went white and blank; he has so little armor. He started crying. I tried to manipulate Josh into changing his mind, and I even sort of vaguely threatened him, hinting that Sam and I might cancel a date with him sometime, but he stayed firm. After a while Sam said he wished we’d all get hit by a car, and Josh stared out the window nonchalantly. I thought he might be about to start humming. It was one of those times when you wish you were armed so you could attack the kid who has hurt your own child’s feelings.
“Sam?” I asked. “Can I help in any way? Shall we pray?”
“I just wish I’d never been born.”
But after a moment, he said yes, I should pray. To myself.
So I prayed that God would help me figure out how to stop living in the problem and move into the solution. That was all. We drove along for a while. I waited for a sign of improvement. Sam said, “I guess Josh wishes I had never been born.”
Josh stared out the window: dum-de-dum.
I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something — that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook. I imagined gently lifting him off the hook of my judgment and setting him back on the ground.
And a moment later, he changed his mind. Now, maybe this was the result of prayer, or forgiveness; maybe it was a coincidence. I will never know. But even before Josh changed his mind, I did know one thing for sure, and this was that Sam and I would be going to church the next morning. Mary Williams would be sitting in the back near the door, in a crumpled hat. Sam would hug her; she would close her eyes and smell the soft skin of his neck, just below his ears.
What I didn’t know was that Josh would want to come with us, too. I didn’t know that, when I stopped by his house to pick up Sam the next morning, he would eagerly run out ahead of Sam to ask if he could come. And another thing I didn’t know was that Mary Williams was going to bring us another bag of dimes. It had been a little while since her last dime drop, but just when I think we’ve all grown out of the ritual, she brings us another stash. Mostly I give them to street people. Some sit like tchotchkes on bookshelves around the house. Mary doesn’t know that professionally I’m doing much better now; she doesn’t know that I 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.
Forgiveness
I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness — that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to become too painful to stay this way. They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. By the time I decided to become one of the ones who is heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving various people who had harmed me directly or indirectly over the years — four former Republican presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree. It was “The Twelve Days of Christmas” meets Taxi Driver. But in the end, I could only pretend that I had. I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”
So I decided to put everyone I’d ever lived with, slept with, or been reviewed by on hold, and to start with someone I barely knew, whom I had hated only for a while.
I’d had an enemy — an Enemy Lite — for some time: the parent of one of the children in Sam’s first-grade class, although she was so warm and friendly that it might have astounded her to learn that we were enemies. But I, the self-appointed ethical consultant for the school, can tell you that it’s true. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew she was divorced and maybe lonely, but she also had mean eyes. In the first weeks of first grade, she looked at me like I was a Rastafarian draft-dodger type, and then, over time, as if I were a dazed and confused alien space traveler.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I had a certain amount of trouble adjusting when Sam started first grade. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of things; there was too much to remember, too much to do. But Sam’s first-grade teacher was so kind and forgiving that I just didn’t trouble my pretty head about schedules, homework, spelling lists, and other sundry unpleasantries. Nor was I able to help out in the classroom much. There were all these mothers who were always cooking holiday theme-park treats for the class; they always drove the kids — including mine — on field trips, and they also seemed to read all the papers the school sent home, which I think is actually a little showoffy. Also, it gave them an unfair advantage. They knew, for instance, from the first day of school that Wednesdays were minimum days, when school let out nearly an hour earlier than usual, and they flaunted it, picking up their kids at just the right time, week after week. I somehow managed to make it into October without figuring out this little scheduling quirk.
Finally, though, one Wednesday, I stopped by Sam’s classroom and found him — once again — drawing with his teacher. The teacher said gently, “Annie? Did you not know that school gets out an hour early on Wednesdays?”
“Ah,” I said.
“Didn’t you get the papers the school mailed to you this summer?”
I racked my brain, and finally I did remember some papers coming in the mail from school. And I remembered really meaning to read them.
Sam sat there drawing with a grim autistic stare.
Well, my enemy found out.
She showed up two days later all bundled up in a down jacket, because it was cold and she was one of the parents who was driving the kids on their first field trip. Now, this was not a crime against nature or me in and of itself. The crime was that, below the down jacket, she was wearing spandex bicycle shorts. She wears spandex bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. She weighs about eighty pounds. She has gone to the gym almost every day since her divorce, and she does not have an ounce of fat on her body. I completely hate that in a person. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had our kids.
Oh, and one more thing: she still had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on her white Volvo, seven years after he left office.
The day of the field trip, she said sweetly, “I just want you to know, Annie, that if you have any other questions about how the classroom works, I’d really love to be there for you.”
I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
It drove me to my knees. I prayed about it. I prayed because my son loves her son, and my son is so kind that it makes me want to be a better person, a person who does not hate someone just because she wears spandex bicycle shorts. I prayed for a miracle; I wrote her name down on a slip of paper, folded it up, and put it in the box that I use as God’s in-box. “Help,” I said to God.
There wasn’t much noticeable progress for a while. On the last day of first grade, I was asked to bake something for the farewell party. I couldn’t do it. I was behind in my work. Also, I was in a bad mood. But I at least went to the party, and I ate the delicious cookies my enemy made, and we mingled a little, and I thought that this was progress. Then she had to go and wreck everything by asking, “Did you bake anything?”
I don’t bake. I baked for Sam’s school once, and it was a bad experience: Sam was in kindergarten at the little Christian school he attended, and I baked a dozen cupcakes for his class’s Christmas party and set them out to cool. Sam and I went outside to sweep the AstroTurf. (OK, OK, I also don’t garden.) Suddenly Sadie came tearing outside — our dog who is so obedient and eager to please. But there was icing in the fur of her muzzle and a profoundly concerned look on her face. Oh, my God, she seemed to be saying with her eyes: Terrible news from the kitchen!
Sam looked at me with total disgust, like “You ignorant slut — you left the cupcakes out where the dog could get them.”
The next morning I bought cupcakes at Safeway. Like I said: I don’t bake.
I also don’t push Sam to read. There wasn’t much pressure for anyone to read in first grade, but by second grade, it was apparently critical to national security that your kid be reading. He brought home bulletins from time to time to this effect. My kid was not reading. I mean, per se.
My enemy’s child was reading proficiently, like a little John Kenneth Galbraith in a Spiderman T-shirt. He is what is referred to as an “early reader.” Sam is a “late reader.” (Albert Einstein was a “late reader.” Theodore Kaczynski was an “early reader.” Not that I am at all defensive on the subject.)
Sam and this woman’s child were in the same class, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a special interest in Sam’s reading.
She began the year by slipping me early first-grade books that she thought maybe Sam could read. And Sam could certainly read some of the words in these books. But I resented her giving them to us with a patronizing smile, as if to say her child would not be needing them because he was reading the new Joan Didion.
I went to the God box. I got out the piece of paper with her name on it. I added an exclamation mark. I put it back.
One day not long after, she sidled up to me at school and asked me if I had an extra copy of the book I wrote about being a mother. It is black-humored and quite slanted: George Bush was president when Sam was born, and perhaps I was a little angry. I had these tiny opinions. I wrote an anti-George Bush baby book.
So when she asked for a copy, I tried to stall; I tried to interest her in my anti-Reagan, anti-Bush writing book. But she insisted.
So a few days later, filled with a certain low-grade sense of impending doom, I gave her a copy, signed, “With all good wishes.”
For the next few days, she smiled obliquely whenever I saw her at school, and I grew increasingly anxious. Then one day she came up to me in the market. “I read your book,” she said, and then she winked. “Maybe,” she whispered, because my son was only a few feet away, “maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t read.”
I wish I could report that I had the perfect comeback, something so polite and brilliantly cutting that Dorothy Parker, overhearing it in heaven, raised her fist in victory. But I could only gape at her, stunned. She smiled very nicely and walked away.
I called half a dozen people when I got home and told them about how she had trashed me. And then I trashed her. And it was good.
The next time I saw her, she smiled. I sneered, just a little. I felt disgust, but I also felt disgusting. I got out my note to God. I said, “Look, hon. I think we need bigger guns.”
Nothing happened. No burning bush, no cereal flakes dropping from heaven, forming letters of instruction in the snow. It’s just that God began to act like Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham. Everywhere I turned were helpful household hints on loving one’s enemies, on turning the other cheek, and on how doing that makes you look in a whole new direction. There were admonitions about the self-destructiveness of not forgiving people and reminders that this usually doesn’t hurt other people so much as it hurts you. In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. Fortune cookies, postcards, bumper stickers, everything but skywriting — yet I kept feeling that I could not, would not forgive her in a box, could not, would not forgive her with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain.
One Sunday when I was struggling with this, the Scripture reading came from the sixth chapter of Luke: “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Now, try as I might, I could not find a loophole in that. It does not say, “Forgive everyone, unless they’ve said something rude about your child.” And it doesn’t even say, “Just try.” It says, “If you want to be forgiven, if you want to experience that kind of love, you have to forgive everyone in your life — everyone, even the very worst boyfriend you ever had — even, for God’s sake, yourself.”
Then a few days later, I was picking Sam up at the house of another friend and noticed a yellowed clipping taped to the refrigerator with FORGIVENESS written at the top — as though God had decided to abandon all efforts at subtlety and just plain noodge. The clipping said forgiveness means that God is “for giving,” and that we are here “for giving,” too, and that to withhold love or blessings is to be completely delusional. No one knew who had written it. I copied it down and taped it to my refrigerator. Then an old friend from Texas left a message on my answering machine that said, “Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”
Only, I think she must have misquoted it, because she said, “God loves you too much to let you stay like this.”
I looked nervously over both shoulders.
A couple of days later, my enemy’s boy came to play at our house, and then she came to pick him up just before dinner. And for the first time, while he gathered his things, she sat down on the couch, as if she had done this before, as if it were the most natural thing. I felt around inside my heart, and it was not so cold or hard. In fact, I even almost offered her a cup of tea because she seemed sad or maybe tired. I felt a stab of kindness inside, until her son came bounding out of Sam’s room, shouting that he’d gotten 100 percent on his arithmetic test, and Sam had gotten two wrong.
"Traitor!” Sam shouted from his room, and slammed the door.
By bedtime, Sam said he had forgiven him but didn’t want to be friends anymore. I said he didn’t have to be friends, but he did have to be kind. At breakfast, Sam said he still forgave him, but when we got to school he said that it had been easier to forgive him when we were farther away.
Still, several days later, when the mother called and invited Sam to come play that afternoon, Sam desperately wanted to go. She picked him up after school. When I went over to get him, she offered me a cup of tea. I said no, I couldn’t stay. I was in my fattest pants; she wore her bicycle shorts. The smell of something baking, sweet and yeasty, filled the house. But Sam couldn’t find his knapsack, so I got up to look around. The surfaces of her house were covered with fine and expensive things. “Please, let me make you a cup of tea,” she said again, and I started to say no, but this thing inside me used my voice to say, “Well . . . OK.”
It was awkward. In the living room, I silently dared her to bring up school, math tests, or field trips; I dared her to bring up exercise or politics. As it was, we had very little to talk about — I was having to work so hard making sure she didn’t bring up much of anything, because she was so goddamn competitive — and I sat there politely sipping my lemon-grass tea. Everywhere you looked was more facade, more expensive stuff — showoffy, I-have-more-money-than-you stuff, plus-you’re-out-of-shape stuff. Then our boys appeared, and I got up to go. Sam’s shoes were on the mat by the front door, next to his friend’s, and I went over to help him put them on. And as I loosened the laces on one shoe, without realizing what I was doing, I sneaked a look into the other boy’s sneaker — to see what size shoe he wore. To see how my kid measured up in shoe size.
And I finally got it.
The veil dropped. I got that I am as mad as a hatter. I saw that I was the one worried that my child wasn’t doing well enough in school. That I was the one who thought I was out of shape. And that I was trying to get her to carry all this for me because it hurt too much to carry it myself.
I wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, apologize for all the self-contempt I’d been spewing out into the world, all the bad juju I’d been putting on her by thinking she was the one doing harm. I felt like J. Edgar Hoover peeking into the shoes of his nephew’s seven-year-old friend to see how the Hoover feet measured up, idly wondering how the kid’s parents would like to have a bug on their phone. This was me. She was the one pouring me more tea. She was the one who’d been taking care of my son. She was the one who seemed to have already forgiven me for writing a book in which I trashed her political beliefs; forgiven me, like God and certain parents do, almost before I’d even done anything that I needed to be forgiven for. It’s like the faucets are already flowing before you even hold out your cup to be filled. Before, giveness.
I felt so happy there in her living room that I got drunk on her tea. I read once in some magazine that in Czechoslovakia, they say an echo in the woods always returns your own call, and so I started speaking sweetly to everyone — to the mother, to the boys. And my sweet voice started getting all over me, like sunlight, like the smell of the Danish baking in the oven, two of which she put on a paper plate and covered with tinfoil for me and Sam to take home. Now, obviously, the woman has a little baking disorder. And I am glad.
“Why I Make Sam Go to Church” and “Forgiveness” are excerpted from Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. © 1999 by Anne Lamott. They appear here by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
