Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

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.” And we don’t understand a lot of things. 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.

But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me. My friend Tom goes through the neighborhood and picks up litter, knowing there will be just as much tomorrow. We visit those shut-ins whom a higher power seems to have entrusted to our care—various relatives, often aging and possibly annoying, or stricken friends from our church communities, people in jails or mental institutions who might be related to us, who benefit from hearing our own resurrection stories. My personal belief is that God looks through Her Rolodex when She has a certain kind of desperate person in Her care, and ...

The Serenity Prayer is one of the most famous institutionalized prayers of the world, a Greatest Hits prayer. The best-known version says: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” 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. I hate this insight so much. My experience is that when I use this prayer to God, I am at the same time alerting the person inside me that I need to rein myself. It is a reset button prayer. In certain ways it serves the same function that sitting down at my desk at the same time every day does for my creative self: it alerts my subconscious to the fact that it is time for it to kick in. It looks at its little watch and says, “Oh, for God’s sake, is it nine o’clock already?” It is prayer as memo to self.

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: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes—someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle.

You can manage, barely, this one syllable. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is “Wow,” that’s a prayer.