Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

Prayer is private, even when we pray with others. It is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding. Let’s say it is communication from one’s heart to God. Or if that is too triggering or ludicrous a concept for you, to the Good, the force that is beyond our comprehension but that in our pain or supplication or relief we don’t need to define or have proof of or any established contact with.

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence. We can pray for things (“Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz”). We can pray for people (“Please heal Martin’s cancer.” “Please help me not be such an asshole”). We may pray for things that would destroy us; as Teresa of Ávila said, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, “Hello? Is there anyone there?” We can pray, “Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?” We can say anything to God. It’s all prayer. Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy—all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly. Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together befo...

So prayer is our sometimes real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with Truth, with the Light. It is us reaching out to be heard, hoping to be found by a light and warmth in the world, instead of darkness and cold. Even mushrooms respond to light—I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.

Light reveals us to ourselves, which is not always so great if you find yourself in a big disgusting mess, possibly of your own creation. But like sunflowers we turn toward light. Light warms, and in most cases it draws us to itself. And in this light, we can see beyond shadow and illusion to something beyond our

modest receptors, to what is way beyond us, a...

When I pray, which I do many times a day, I pray for a lot of things. I ask for health and happiness for my friends, and for their children. This is okay to do, to ask God to help them have a sense of peace, and for them to feel the love of God. I pray for our leaders to act in the common good, or at least the common slightly better. I pray that aid and comfort be rushed to people after catastrophes, natural and man-made. It is also okay to ask that my cat have an easy death. Some of my friends’ kids are broken and the kids’ parents are living in that, and other friends’ marriages are broken, and every family I love has serious problems involving someone’s health or finances.

There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.

Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.

Help. Hold my friends in Your light. There are no words for the broken hearts of people losing people, so I ask God, with me in tow, to respond to them with graciousness and encouragement enough for the day. Everyone we love and for whom we pray with such passion will die, which is the one real fly in the ointment, so we pray for miracles—please help this friend live, please help that friend die gracefully—and we pray for the survivors to somehow come through. Please help Joe survive Evelyn’s dementia. Please help this town bounce back. Please help those parents come through, please help these kids come through. I pray to be able to bear my cat’s loss. Help.

Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell.

prayer and my friendship are pretty much all I’ve got to offer.

I’ve seen grace manifest as spiritual WD-40, as water wings, as ribbons of fresh air in tight, scary rooms.

Love flowed to them from their closest people, and from their community, surrounded them, sat with them, held them, fed them, swept their floors. Time passed. In most cases, their pain evolved slowly into help for others. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, “You wouldn’t understand.”

But we learn that people are very disappointing, and that they break our hearts, and that very sweet people will be bullied, and that we will be called to survive unsurvivable losses, and that we will realize with enormous pain how much of our lives we’ve already wasted with obsessive work or pleasing people or dieting. We will see and read about deprivation and barbarity beyond our ability to understand, much less process. Side by side with all that, we will witness transformation, people finding out who they were born to be, before their parents pretzelized them into high achievers and addicts and charming, wired robots.

We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering.

Her Rolodex when She has a certain kind of desperate person in Her care, and assigns that person to some screwed-up soul like you or me, and makes it hard for us to ignore that person’s suffering, so we show up even when it is extremely inconvenient or just awful to be there.

If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.

Of course it wasn’t our fault that we ended up so ruined or felt so undeserving of love, and that if people knew our true selves better or if our minds had PA systems, they would run for their cute little lives.

When he and my other friends and I have run out of good ideas on how to fix the unfixable, when we finally stop trying to heal our own sick, stressed minds with our sick, stressed minds, when we are truly at the end of our rope and just done, we say the same prayer. We say, “Help.” We say, Help, this is really all too much, or I am going slowly crazy, or I can’t do this, or I can’t stop doing this, or I can’t feel anything.

There’s a slightly comic version—“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the weaponry to make the difference”—but let’s stick to the first. A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

It is a reset button prayer.

Thomas Merton’s famous prayer, the beginning of which reads, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.” You can look up the rest.

Help for the sick and hungry, home for the homeless folk, peace in the world forever. This is my prayer, O Lord. Amen.

Hi, God. I am just a mess. It is all hopeless. What else is new? I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not. I know I have no control over other people’s lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I accept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am. Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon—say, two-ish? Thank You in advance for Your company and blessings. You have never once let me down. Amen.

Most good, honest prayers remind me that I am not in charge, that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped by something, some force, some friends, some something.

“Dear Some Something, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t see where I’m going. I’m getting more lost, more afraid, more clenched. Help.”

These prayers acknowledge that I am clueless; but something else isn’t. While I am not going to go limp, I am asking for the willingness to step into truth. It’s like the old riddle: What’s the diff...

We learn through pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you’ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you’ll see at least one next right step you can take.

It means I stop trying to figure it out, because trying to figure it out is exhausting and crazy-making. Doping it out has become the problem.

So when we cry out Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling so hopeless that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own—or other people’s—higher powers.

Praying “Help” means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else:

(Actually, under no circumstances should you ever say or even think that the worst is over. You will bring the evil eye down on yourself so fast it will leave you keening. But it is okay to say, “That could have been so much worse,” which is always the case.)

“Thanks” can be the recognition that you have been blessed mildly, or with a feeling as intense as despair at the miracle of having been spared.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

You can’t have gotten from where you were—gripped by anxiety, tiny with fear—to come through to freedom, for God’s sake. To have been so lost that you felt abducted, to feeling found, returned, and set back onto your feet:

You say, Thank you for lifting this corner of the curtain so I can see the truth, maybe for just a moment, but in a way that might change my life forever. And that moment is astonishing, because everything is taking place all at once, the micro and the macro.

“Thanks,” because revelation has shown me things that are miserable that somehow I may get to sidestep; or that are miserable but that prayer and friends help me find a way through; or that are painful and beautiful in ways that make your heart ache, that draw you closer forever to the comrades who have walked with you.

radical gratitude in the face of whatever life throws at you.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.