Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

by Anne Lamott

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

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will

lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”

I usually feel deeply and philosophically that Sam is not mine, or at any rate, that he is not my chattel—that he is on loan, he belongs to God, but for whatever reason, he has been entrusted to my care—entrusted, rather, to my clutches.

I always thought that was heroic of her, that it spoke of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you’re doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss.

have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews,

Christians—people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.

Blake’s—that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”

when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born—and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

we are not punished for the sin but by the sin,

I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don’t know why it’s not more like it is in the movies, why things don’t come out neatly and lessons can’t be learned when you’re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.

People came by, and sometimes they sat with me on the floor of my bathroom. It was like the old days when we were all on LSD and sat close and breathed together. It would be great if we could go in and out of this place without needing drugs or Ahab on our trail—go into the mystic or the eternal present or whatever we might call it out here in California. But mostly it seems like we can’t do it when we have our act together, because we can’t do it when we’re acting.

“To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror.”

what I am going to do instead is to begin practicing cronehood as soon as possible: to watch, smile, dance.

You don’t want to die when you’re this upset—you get a bad room in heaven with the other hysterics, the right-to-lifers, and the exercise compulsives.

So I wrote God a note on a scrap of paper. It said, “I am a little anxious. Help me remember that you are with me even now. I am going to take my sticky fingers off the control panel until I hear from you.” Then I folded up the note and put it in the drawer of the table next to my bed as if it were God’s In box.

When I was a kid and my father got depressed, we all frantically tried to pump him out of it. The theory was that if Dad was OK, it would be like Reaganomics: there would be trickle-down, and everyone’s needs would be met. But if Dad was not OK, we were all doomed.