Book Review
In Traveling Mercies Anne Lamott shares experiences from her life. Having looked deeply into them with a lot of love, faith, hope and joy, she gifts the reader in a two fold way with these delightful essays. There is the gift of herself. The book is a generous look into a very giving life. And in that gift, the reader will soon find a renewed sense of the gift that is his or her own life. I so often found that her words were like so many keys opening door after door to my own experiences. Her prose warmly works its way into that place where faith seeks to give light. The book will move you to tears, to joy, to sorrow, to wonder, to gratitude, to pleasure, to hope. All of these are given in these pages. How well she has learned to take the mercies given her along the way of her life and to share them. The essays reveal Anne Lamott's delights and struggles with the ordinary stuff of life - the medium through which grace moves and hits us. Traveling Mercies is a moving portrait of friends, loves, her family, her hopes, her ups and downs.

There are twenty-five essays in the book. With her desire for God and her openness to finding that Presence, every day events reveal with a luminosity: a sick child, a man who mistreats his dog on a beach, an old lady who gives Anne bags of dimes, an invitation to her son Sam to ride the sky as a paraglider. The magic of the book has much to do with how these stories illumine similar ones in any seeking human life.

In one section, Ms. Lamott quotes Rumi: "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

It is obvious that Anne Lamott has found her beauty by writing - and this collection will bring you to your knees in gratitude.

Recently, a friend wrote to me and in her letter was another quote by Rumi: "Look carefully around you and recognize the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those who draw you to that."

And tell them about Traveling Mercies.

Note: Fr. James Stephen Behrens, OCSO served as a priest of the Archdiocese of Newark for over twenty years before becoming a Trappist monk at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. He is the author of Grace Is Everywhere: Reflections of an Aspiring Monk and Be Gentle, Be Faithful: Daily Mediations for Busy Christians. He conducted this interview of Anne through an exchange of letters.

Hi Annie,

Hope you are feeling better. I got food poisoning once, at a very chic London restaurant. I was sick for days.

When we spoke on the phone, a word that has been resonating with me ever since is your love for and longing for things "ordinary." There is something very beautiful to that. I would like that to be the heart of the interview, if that is okay with you. I think that spirituality brings us back to what is ordinary. It redeems it "all."

I tried to think of a series of questions but then realized that the questions will come more readily as you respond to this one. Is that okay? Just "go" for it.

Hope your Mom is okay. Hi to Sam...Jeff

What is the relationship between spirituality and the ordinary?

Dear Jeff,
Spirituality takes place for us right in the center of the ordinary, outside and with friends and doing laundry and puttering and raking leaves and taking the dog for a walk and helping your kid find a lost ball, because the ordinary is the water in which we swim.

Moments are what make up the ordinary, and moments shining for their own moment-ness are all we have. The ordinary is so touching and dumb and routine and absolutely filled with tiny miracles if we pay attention.

When I try consciously to seek a deeper spirituality in some brilliant writing or stunning cathedral, it can be very beautiful but I sometimes feel like a tourist of the spiritual. But when sometime in life, like a sound or a certain smell or a taste-memory makes me STOP, and pay attention, then I am drawn into a deeper bigger sense of what our lives are made out of: nature, awareness, other souls, and the temple of noise that we are, all heart beat and breath. It's as if my attention is a pebble in a pond, and the ordinary can take me several concentric circles out from where the pebble dropped, so I am not caught in Big Me or Little Me; I get lost for a moment. And in being lost from the radar screen of Thinking, Worrying, Figuring Out, the ordinary pond shimmers me into the world of light and oxygen and greens and algae and bulrushes and tiny fish. All biblical images, springing from the most ordinary ingredients of natural life.

Anything that helps me stop THINKING is useful spiritually, meditative and enlivening. It's like being in a pretty place but with staticky radio on in the room or meadow; paying attention to the ordinary, getting lost and floaty in the wonder of really noticing how interesting life's little mosaic chips each are, is the way for me to turn off the staticky radio.

And then my mind is just blown with amazement instead of fear and me me me. Ordinary helps me escape from the Nurse Ratchett of me me me me me me. The ism--I, self, me--gives way all that God is in the great I Am; to the majesty of nature, to the poignancy of us, to the now, to a softer tenderer heart.

Annie,

Your response is so beautiful. Many thanks. Here is question two and maybe three if the last paragraph can be taken as two questions. I guess what I am looking at is the assumption that spiritual "gurus" have some extra wisdom to overlay on the lives of the "unspiritual." I have long had trouble with that idea. Spirituality discloses or reveals what we "are," no? I am sure that much of the appeal your writing has for so many people is the warmth you shine on many a life through an honest look at your own. So....

Jeff, It's a good question and I am not sure I can answer it.

I guess, only some people are going to be willing to do the work that it takes to heal; by which mean to death with the shame and grief, in order to slowly learn love and forgive yourself so when you love your neighbor as yourself, it means something. So if you feel the call to get real, to find out who you are and learn to love that inadequate beautiful self, ANSWER IT. Say Okay. Plug your nose and get into that cold water any way you can.

Only a few people are going to be willing to be exposed, to stand there with their flabby spiritual thighs and big droopy emotional tummies for the cellulite to show, for what is covered up, the packaging and good taste and fancy apparel to show. Most of us have been taught to hide who we really are. Like the five rules Father Tom Weston talks about, of being a person in America: 1) you must not have anything different about you or wrong with you 2) if you do , you should correct it or get over it 3) if you can't, pretend that you have 4) if you can't even pretend to have gotten over it, please just don't show up because it is painful for the rest of us and 5) if you are going to insist on showing, you should have the decency to be ashamed.

So I guess the beginning of the healing is to insist on showing up in whatever condition you are in, as a radical act. As the great NO to all the insistence of surface, on domination and masks. Insisting on the right to go in. Insisting on the right to claim the beautiful--sometimes enveloping, sometimes bracing-- water of God's love even though you do not look like the fantasies you were fed on--the images of the culture you held yourself up against (and against which you found yourself so lacking.) But I think only a small percentage of people ever decide to do whatever it takes to burn through the shame that so holds that back. That so keeps them holding their breath and putting all their energy into trying to look good, instead of being available for the mother and child reunion with God.

Sometimes the willingness comes from the pain, so that's why its such a blessing to be an alcoholic. I was going down down down the escalator and was more or less forced to get help. To let people hold the light for me while I did the digging, and found out who I was, and what happened to me when I was young, and how devastating that turns out to have been. I did an event tonight with a man named David Roche who has severe facial deformities, who basically says his shadow SHOWS, and he was forced to find out who it was inside of him who was created in God's image. And that his deformities were an elaborately disguised gift from God; one that he wished he could give back but that since he couldn't, forced him to deal with finding out about his soul.

I think to want to find out who you really are, is to begin finding that out. You need people to help you, so you don't lose faith; you go to a kind of nautilus of the spirit, where you develop muscles to bear sadness and work through the shame and self loathing; people are in the boat beside you while you have to be the one in the cold scary water, and they hand you cups of warm tea; and they say, "we are still here, and you are doing great; and you will reach land again soon and until you do, we will be beside you." But it means letting people see you at your least presentable. It means letting people love weak, floundering you.

It's so radical, so against everything we were taught to do, which was to fake it and take it and not cry.

Crying is a big part of the answer. Crying waters the ground at our feet. Crying rehydrates us.

Everything we thought would keep us safe just kept us faking it. Keeps us holding our breath.

You need cool friends who are doing this same work. Of getting real. Of being brought back to LIFE from the death of inauthentic self. Of being brought back to life from the rat exercise wheel of achieving, performing, out of terror and shame of exposure.

Hey, thanks for the jam. YUM.

Hi Annie, Here are the last questions - what you have thus far shared with me is beautiful - and I thank you. These should "round it out." No need to answer them one at time - I think that you could respond in a general way. When person is yearning to cross the line into healing, what is it that gives them the final shove? Are there steps they can consciously take or do they have to keep plodding along until it falls into place? We are, as a society, becoming more and more painfully aware that our children need healing. (I am thinking of school shootings, the anger many kids feel, their "aimlessness," hunger for meaning, etc.) How can we help them see healing as good, necessary, and normal? Again, thanks for more than you know. You are special. Hi to Sam and a blessed Easter to you. Love, Jeff

Dear Jeff,

I think today's questions are related, in that the answer to both has to do with releasing people to their own process. I don't think you can noodge people into that desperate willingness to pursue a spiritual path. The willingness comes from the pain. People have to use up all the other options first in trying to fill the God-shaped hole. So they will try relationships, success, weight loss, etc, anything to avoid that quiet inside place where one's relationship with God grows.

I think people who have been saved by their faith need to be out there in the world giving off a little life, a little light, an ability to keep a sense of humor during bleak times. It's the image I used in "Bird by Bird," that we need to be little lighthouses on the island of humanity; and that lighthouses don’t go running around the island looking for boats to save. They just stand there, shining.

When people are desperate and have tried every possible avenue of escape and salvation except turning to God, they are ripe for the information we have--that we are loved, wanted, accepted just as we are, and adored--but it is grace that determines who will tip over towards God, and who will lurch in the other direction.

Those who lurch towards God, including me, then want everyone in the world to find God too, because we know God is our only hope. But boy, there's no bigger turn off for me than someone who is proselytizing. I can't get away from them fast enough.

But when people are in the world and are manifesting a mix of equilibrium and care for others, a tenderness and a calm and a sweetness and sense of humor and the other gifts of faith, it draws me to that person like a moth to flame. And then I ask the questions--How did you get to BE that way? How do you pray? What is the answer, what is the question, what is the first step?

In the 12 step tradition, they say it all begins with Step Zero--which goes, "This sh-- had got to stop." Then you are ready for Step one, the admission of powerlessness.

This has been true for me whether the chaos and lostness has involved alcohol, drugs, relationships, bulimia, whatever. It's like a little kid trying to fix a broken toy by mashing one part into another, using force and so on until utterly thwarted. And then, maybe the kid's shoulders sag, and he or she cries, and then--comes to the parent for help.

I think you can also do a very gentle subversive offer of being there for a troubled person if and when they ever would like to try prayer, or just getting together to talk about the path of devotion. I used to give people my card, with a quarter taped to it, and say, "I don't expect you to be interested in my faith or church, but if you think it would ever help to talk about either, give me a call. I personally don't know any other way." A few people called.

I write about my own faith wherever possible, and I think it tips some people towards God, that some oddball left wing artist type like me would be a Jesus freak; and would clearly have been given a second chance at life because of the Lord's profound gift; the Lords' profound commitment to her and her healing.

In terms of your second question, with my own child, I make him come to church, and he doesn't want to; but I think there are worse things than to make your child show up for an hour a week to give thanks for what has been so freely given to him and his mama. I think Bible study is chemotherapy. I think Bible stories are marvelous. And even though Sam doesn't like church, he does love our lord. And we pray every night, and when we are in special need. Our dog Sadie has very bad cancer and we pray pray pray, for her to do better, and for us to bear the loss of her friendship. And prayer is seeing us through.

I believe Sam will leave the church as soon as he can--as soon as I stop making him go, when he is say, 12 or so. But the garden of my child will have been mulched with a beautiful interracial devout activism church. His mind's vault will have all these stories in it from the bible and from the lives, survival, and redemption of the people he's been worshipping with all these years.

So I take the footwork--dragging him to church, creating a church school so it will be more creative for him to worship, bribe him with Smoothies before church, an occasional trip to the bicycle store afterwards. And then I have to let go of the results. Release him to his own process.

Hope this is helpful, love and God's blessings, praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus. (I've given a sermon lately called, "Even Me." Or Even ME! Me! Even me in my current condition. It blows my mind. I just say, "help me Lord, help me, help me with my mind, or, "Help me know what to do," and he says, "Okay, Hon."

Reading Guide

Note: This reading guide has been prepared by the publisher. For additional information on conducting reading groups and the services and resources from the publisher go to the Vintage Reading Group Center. http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/rgg.html

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your reading of Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. We hope that they will suggest a variety of ways to talk about this delightful and moving story of one woman's journey in faith. When Anne Lamott was twenty-five, her father died after a long struggle with brain cancer. Over the next few years she herself began to suffer from an overwhelming sense of desperation and fear, which she tried to suppress with alcohol and pills. Although she was managing to write and publish successful novels at the time, it was clear that her life was spinning out of control. In Traveling Mercies, a memoir that sparkles with wry wit and compassion, she now writes about this dark period of her life, and of her turn--to her own great surprise--to the community of Christian faith and love she found in a neighborhood church called St. Andrew's.

In a book that will be cherished by anyone who has pursued a spiritual search down all sorts of unlikely paths, grieved at the death of friends, or felt bewildered at the challenges that daily life presents to love and courage, Anne Lamott gives us a wise and often humorous account of living in faith.

For Discussion

1. Lamott quotes a Leonard Cohen song that goes, "There are cracks, cracks in everything, that's how the light gets in" (p. 39-40). Are people who are more "cracked"--more troubled or in pain--more likely to make the leap of faith than those who are outwardly more secure, more in control of their lives?
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2. Lamott explains, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. . . . Yet each step brought me closer to the ample verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today" (p. 3). Yet on page 50 she notes that there was actually a moment of "conversion." How would you describe the process by which she came to religion? Is there necessarily a spiritual component to emerging from an addiction?
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3. Lamott writes of her parents and their friends: "They were fifties Cheever people, with their cocktails and affairs" (p. 10). Is this the reason for Anne's powerful girlhood desire to escape from her family and to be "adopted" by the mothers of her friends? Judging from the evidence she offers in the section called "Lily Pads," what was lacking in her own home that she needed?
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4. In her earlier book Operating Instructions, Lamott explored the enormous changes that the birth of a child brings to a woman's life. What do you think of her decision, after terminating an earlier pregnancy, to have this baby on her own, and what do you think of the response of the people at St. Andrew's? What does Traveling Mercies tell us about the role of community in raising children? How does it expand our notions of what a family is?
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5. What particular challenges does raising a child bring to Lamott's life as a Christian? How does she handle some of the crises of maternal decision-making, such as the episode of Sam's desire to go paragliding on his seventh birthday?
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6. Lamott says: "At some point you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon everyone." Do you agree with Lamott's position on forgiveness?
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7. If Lamott had not been an alcoholic, do you think she would eventually have found faith anyway? Is coming to faith a matter of fate for certain people, or is there a large element of chance involved?
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8. At several moments in this story Anne Lamott speaks of the events she is describing as miraculous. What is a miracle? How does she take the miraculous out of the realm of the extraordinary and return it to common life? What is the effect, for you, of her doing so?
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9. Of her spirituality before becoming a Christian, Lamott writes, "Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus" (p. 42). Do you find that, even after her conversion and formal baptism, her approach to Christianity is unorthodox? What do you think of her continued unwillingness to exclude the wisdom of other religions?
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10. What rituals, celebrations, and memorial occasions are most significant in this story? Why are such occasions necessary in our lives?
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11. Consider the structure of this memoir. What decisions has Lamott made in consciously shaping the story of her own life? What does she leave out? Are the choices a writer makes in writing a memoir different from those made in writing fiction?
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12. Anne Lamott gives the work of other writers an important role in Traveling Mercies. Verses of poetry or excerpts of prose are placed at the beginning of each of the book's seven parts, and the book as a whole opens with a poem by W. S. Merwin. How do these other voices contribute to what Lamott is trying to share with her readers? Which of these additional voices did you find most moving, most resonant?
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13. Lamott is often preoccupied with her aging body and the cultural expectations of beauty. When she is worrying about whether a certain dress makes her hips look too big, her dying friend Pammy remarks, "Annie, you really don't have that kind of time" (p. 239). Why is this such an important insight for Lamott? What sort of sense is necessary to step away from an obsession with physical beauty in contemporary American culture?
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14. What role does Pammy play in Lamott's life? How does one adjust to losing a friend to cancer? How does Lamott arrive at the crucial insight that we should live joyfully in the face of death?
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15. What is amusing about Lamott's efforts to impress upon her son, Sam, the importance of Ash Wednesday? Do you think that she was right in taking Sam to the ceremony upon the death of their friends' baby? How and when should we try to teach children about the painful reality of death?
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16. What do you find most appealing about Anne Lamott's voice as a writer? Which aspects of her character do you most and least identify with?
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17. What is the relationship between humor and faith in Anne Lamott's life? Is humor a necessary component of faith?
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18. Why is community so important in Anne Lamott's life as a Christian? Is there a qualitative difference in a spirituality that is primarily private, and one that is part of an ongoing commitment to a group of fellow believers?

Also by Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Crooked Little Heart
All New People
Hard Laughter
Joe Jones
Rosie
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
 

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