It feels much better when you are, but even when you can’t fake it, God still listens to your prayers.Īnd then there’s “Forgiveness,” in which she writes about how resentful and competitive she feels toward the mother of one of Sam’s classmates: (Though it was an ice-pick headache.) But the way I see things, God loves you the same whether you’re being elegant or not. I hate being the kind of person who tries to get someone with stage-four metastatic cancer to feel sorry for her just because she has a headache. In the essay titled “Fields,” for example, she tells how she’d been dealing with bad colds and flu for several weeks and finally asked her friend Rick, who had stage-four cancer, for help: But she manages to keep a sense of humor about it and to remember God is with us even when we’re a big mess. She lives in the world and experiences all the mess that the rest of us do, and like everyone, she doesn’t always react appropriately. There’s no sense of holier-than-thou guru wisdom here.

She’s open about the things she’s done wrong and about unfortunate thoughts that creep into her lizard brain.

When I think of Anne Lamott’s writing, her honesty and humor are the first qualities that come to my mind. I doled the essays out slowly, just one at a time, more of a daily-ish foot-washing than an actual bath. But it had been a while since I read the whole thing, and after attending Anne and her son Sam’s recent book-signing in DC, I thought this Easter season would be a good time to reread it. I’ve read Traveling Mercies in its entirety at least twice before, and I’ve dipped into it to read an essay here or there many other times. It was peaceful and cleansing, and the scent helped take my spiritual headache away. (And even the how of following those rules is vexatiously unclear.) Reading Lamott’s confessional and irreverent essays about life and faith felt like stepping into a warm lavender-scented bath. I felt surrounded by people who believed in easy answers and straightforward rules, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that life is messy and once we get beyond the basics, like “do unto others” and “love God and your neighbor,” the rules are never as clear as we think. I first encountered her writing at a time when I was feeling conflicted about how the way I thought and felt about life didn’t seem to jibe with the way so many other Christians felt. I’ve written before about how important Anne Lamott’s writing has been for me.

Traveling mercies book