Anne Lamott on the Election
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Originally posted on Salon.com.
From every mountainside
The miracle of this year’s Thanksgiving.
By Anne Lamott
Nov. 27, 2008 |I watched “Mississippi Burning” tonight to honor the election, the miracle. I use the word “miracle,” because you cannot get from the South in 1964 to where we are, Thanksgiving 2008. The grace of this is amazing. Grace is when God makes a way out of No Way, and it feels like that is what happened. Eugene O’Neill wrote that we are born broken, and that the Grace of God is glue. That’s how it feels, this miracle — and I was for Hillary in the primaries.
You can’t exclaim too many times, you cannot sing the anthems too many times: They will never lose their power. If you’re a nice Christian girl, you’re supposed to say that only Jesus’ blood will never lose its power, and perhaps I will get a shitty place in heaven specially reserved for the blasphemers, with only aerosol cheese and Tang at every meal, but I do believe it to be true.
The people of my church sang “Lift Every Voice” to begin our service on the Sunday after the presidential election, and people sang it from the very mountains, thrusting their fists into the air, clapping, clapping not to try to beat he devil, like the old saying goes, but because we already did beat the devil.
I am not sure I know any other over-informed, middle-aged white people who believe in the devil, but I do: There! I’ve said it. I believe in evil and the devil. However, I am not going to name names.