Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

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.

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. Hold my friends in Your light.

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.”

My personal belief is that God looks through 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.

There is 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.

home. In many cases, breath is all you need. Breath is holy spirit. Breath is Life.

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.

You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable.

Rumi said, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and

Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth.

Gratitude is peace.

“Wow” means we are not dulled to wonder.

Wow, because you are almost speechless, but not quite.

when all we can say in response is “Wow,” that’s a prayer.

Poetry is the official palace language of Wow.

Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That’s why they call it breathtaking.

Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you’re dying. You’re saying: Leave me alone; I don’t mind this little rathole. It’s warm and dry. Really, it’s fine.

The Amen is only as good as the attitude.

pray for deeper faith and a greater sense of oneness with God.

it’s too late for beggy prayers. It’s time for trust and surrender.”

The hard part. Trust. Surrender. It is in His hands and mine to confront and manage.

“More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth.