"I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine." Anne Lamott
I have a confession. I have generally thought that the more intelligent a person is, the more articulate, the more capable of knowing and articulating their inner selves, and the more able to read and learn from others they are – the less dysfunctional their lives are likely to be. But this is not always so. And sometimes it is just refreshing to read an autobiographical work by someone who is all of the above but who has a life of experiences that mirrors the lives of millions of people who go from tragedy to drama to tragedy without being able to give voice to what it is like.
Anne Lamott knows what it is like to be lost, to be an alcoholic, to be a struggling broke bolemic single mom, to be adrift in a sea of dysfunction. But she knows how to describe it with sharp wit, irony, literary allusions, and profoundness at times. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith is like reading a contemporary Augustine’s Confessions. It is not so much like John Newton’s “I was lost but now I’m found. Was blind but now I see.” It is more like “I was lost but now I am finding myself, Was blind and now I sometimes see.” Its honest, transparent, visceral, human, real.
Like Augustine, her journey into a life of faith is not some sort of journey into a life of perfection. And it involved a series of transitional moves "... a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew." She describes her spiritual life as a mélange of unassimilated ideas. "Mine was a patchwork God,” she says, “sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus."
I think what she wants to give her readers is what she says that she wants to give her son. “I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people who have what I want – which is to say purpose, balance, heart, gratitude, joy – are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community who pray or practice their faith … They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; They are part of something beautiful. I saw something once from the Jewish Theological Seminary that said, “A human life is like a single letter of the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be a part of great meaning.”
“We are here to endure the beams of love,” she says, quoting
the words of William Blake. Like lizards who fear the pain of bright light in
their eyes too much to come out and be warmed, she uses this book to expose
herself to the world, the parts she is proud of and the parts that she isn’t.
And in so doing, places herself in the path of those beams of love which, it
seams, shine equally down upon us in our human entirety. “God isn’t there to
take away our suffering or our pain,” she writes,” but to fill it with His or
Her presence.”
Question for Comment: What is the most transparent you have ever been with people you do not know?
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