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When she first sensed Jesus' physical presence during her conversion 17 years ago, some people dismissed the experience because she was hungover.

By the second time she met up with Jesus, she had been sober for over 10 years. She ran into him in an airplane lavatory. The so-far unpublished event happened a few years ago. She was flying to the East Coast to give a sermon and a lecture at a church. Disturbed by her fear of flying, she couldn't concentrate on writing the sermon she was about to deliver. (It's normal for her to prepare her speeches on the way to her speaking engagements. "I just totally trust the Holy Spirit to help me.")

All of a sudden, she felt the urge to go into the restroom—but not for the usual reasons. She went to the bathroom and closed the door. "I started hearing this song, 'Just As I Am,' " she says. "I sat on the toilet, with my knees pulled up, and I started to sing it. And I absolutely, as clearly as I hear your voice now, felt Jesus. I opened my eyes and he didn't go away. I didn't see him like I'm seeing photographs on the wall, but I saw him with my spiritual eyes."

She sat there for about ten minutes mumbling, "Hi, Lord Jesus, hi." ("I've heard various preachers say that Jesus is only as far away as his name," she says.) Then she got quiet and felt Jesus holding her "like a little worried kid."

"Could you describe what he looked like?" I ask.

She says she could only vaguely see "flickers of the face. What I felt was an absolute physical sureness of his presence," she says. "I thought, either I'm having a breakdown or I'm just having a moment where the veil is down between us."

When she returned to her seat, a sermon poured forth from her fingertips. After her flight arrived, Lamott told a pastor who was there to greet her about her tête-à-tête. Lamott said she needed a copy of the lyrics to "Just As I Am" because she was going to quote from it.

"She looked at me and said, 'But that's the song we're singing!' " Lamott says. "And of course I didn't have any program or anything." Later that day, she preached the sermon she wrote in the airplane. Its title was, fittingly, "Just As I Am."

To top off the list of her surprising attachments, what other pro-gay, white member of a black church tunes in to Harold Camping when she's stuck in traffic? Yes, the old-fashioned radio preacher who discredited himself when he began predicting time frames for the Second Coming (all missed so far). The guy who recently said the church era is over.

She explains, "I think he's just mad as a hatter, but sometimes when I'm driving, I just want to hear the Word!" Camping's Family Radio network also airs readings of the Scripture and hymns in the afternoon, "and that to me is literally heaven," she says. So she sings along. But don't for a moment let the picture of Lamott intoning to Family Radio give you the wrong impression.

Here is one of her favorite jokes. "A man dies and goes to heaven," she says. "He is being shown around by an angel. Everything is just so sweet and gentle, the total golden tender presence of God everywhere, a pond over there, a beautiful field there, and some hills for people who like to hike, and this expansiveness in every direction of sky and light and physical beauty. And there is this section separated from the rest; it has beautiful high walls. The man who's just come to heaven says, 'What's over there?' The angel says, 'That's for the fundamentalists. They don't consider it heaven if anyone else got in.' "

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January 2003, Vol. 47, No. 1