Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

by Anne Lamott

We were raised to believe in books and music and nature.

I bowed my head in bed and prayed, because I believed—not in Jesus—but in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed and that I did not tell a soul.

I don’t remember much of his response, except that when I said I didn’t think God could love me, he said, “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.”

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “Fuck it: I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.”

Here are the two best prayers I know: “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, “Whatever,” and then for the evening, “Oh, well,” but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.

It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.

Traveling mercies: love the journey, God is with you, come home safe and sound.

Dylan Thomas said an alcoholic was someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

Also, perhaps, like many female alcoholics, tiny boundary issues.

So now I was noticing beautiful little fish and dreamy underwater plants, and shells lying in the sand. I started getting along with myself pretty well for the first time in my life.

I felt a strange loneliness at first, but then came upon a great line in one of Geneen Roth’s books on eating, which said that awareness was about learning to keep yourself company.

The sound of the surf, the big washing machine of ocean, sometimes seems to rinse out my brain, or at any rate, it expands me and it slows me down.

She loves God in the guise of kindness and nature, although she calls God “Howard,” as in “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”