“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.” (82)
“…early on I heard a sober person say, ‘Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there’…” (188)
“Who was it said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?” (213)
Anne Lamott. Travelling Mercies. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
I expected Anne Lamott’s life to be fairly orthodox and her faith fairly unorthodox; instead it seemed the other way round. I am grateful for her humour, her confession and her celebration of the ordinary, in which god seems to loiter. One of my favourite pages was the one she devoted to a Rumi quotation. I am posting this in Oregon, where I am traversing the strange terrain of American suburbia. Alongside the Dairy Queens, Taco Bells and 7/11s, his words resonate in unexpected and sustaining ways:
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
(amen)
