Hallelujah Anyway

by Anne Lamott

  Terry asked a couple of guys to go with the greeter to the men’s room and help the greeter get cleaned up. Other people started cleaning the meeting room. Terry approached the drunk man.

  “My friend,” he said gently, “it looks like you have trouble here.”

  The man nodded.

  “We’re going to give you a hand,” said Terry.

  As Tom told it to me: “Three men from the recovery house next door helped him to his feet, walked him to the halfway house, and put him in the shower. They washed his clothes and gave him their things to wear while he waited. They gave him coffee and dinner, and they gave him respect. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one pretended he hadn’t been covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about mercy. I thought I would recover with men and women like myself—overeducated, fun to be with, and housebroken—and this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. God or life sets up a makeshift tent among us, and helps us work together on our stuff. This will only happen together, slowly, over time.”

  • • •

  These men Tom told me about were common people, reached by a goodness outside or a visitation from within. Something merciful found them where they were. It has found me over the years, even when I have been most desperate. Singing is sometimes involved. I’ve found it at protest rallies, and when I first entered my church, drunk and bulimic; and impossibly, in groups singing with lost or grieving parents; singing somehow lifted them back to their feet, and eventually gave them hope, which is quantum, and leads to generous action. Singing is breath that is larger than yourself, so it joins you with space, with community, with other realms and our deepest inside places. You are joining your strand to everyone else’s, weaving something with the whole, and this extends the community outward into a force bigger than itself. Think Soweto, Selma, Bread and Roses.

  Paradoxically, shared silence also creates harmonies. Silences in our culture and families are often a bad sign, that we’re not speaking to each other, and silences can be hollow, as in childhood when we were sent to our rooms, or as in adulthood, with words that cannot be spoken. The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one’s own annoying self. During congregational silences, in meditation rooms or halls, in prison cells and meeting rooms, in silent confession at church, all these screwed-up people like us, with tangled lives and minds, find their hearts opening through quiet focus. In unfolding, we are enfolded, and there is a melding of spirits, a melding of times, eternal, yesterday morning, the now, the ancient, even as we meet beneath a digital clock on the wall, flipping its numbers, keeping ordinary time in all that timelessness.

  FOUR

  Destinations

  Maps can change a life, a person, returning us to dreams, to our childhood, to the poetic, to what is real. They can move us forward to what we didn’t even know we were looking for. A map can change a god-awful day or month, ruin a rut, give us directions home and to everywhere else, near and far, to the golden past and today, to the center and then back to the periphery, to our true selves, our lost selves, the traveler, the mystic, the child, the artist. The point of life, a friend said, is not staying alive, but staying in love, and maps give us a shot at this, taking us to the wild brand-new, the old favorite, and back home. Love, maps, nature, and books are all we have to take us out of time—along with, of course, drugs and shopping, which do the job way more quickly.

  Too often we choose the latter, or at least I do, in the dark isolated night of the soul or a bright mess with someone dear. If we stayed in the pain, there would be insight, maybe spiritual progress, but who has the time? Google search Cost Plus, MapQuest, IKEA. Go buy a lamp, some candles. Let there be light.

  A few years ago, within the same week I landed in two of the strangest, most incongruous places on earth—the local Zoologie franchise, for your upscale bohemian professional woman, and Hiroshima.

  I won’t say Zoologie was harder, but it made me feel more acutely that the world is going to hell, so let me begin there.

  It is a destination store selling boho-chic clothes and housewares that describes itself as a lifestyle brand that imparts a sense of beauty, optimism, and discovery to the customer. This was two days after I had exchanged horrible words with my son, after a month of mutually held breath, when we both had seen the worst of the other and ourselves. My every attempt at white-flag waving was shot down, so I went to Zoologie to escape, to wallow, to move from agitation to animated trance.

  Also, I needed a cute sweater for Japan, where my Jesuit friend Tom and I were headed in a few days. We had many reasons for going, mostly that we like to travel together, and two main destinations: the church where my grandfather was a minister in the 1920s and 1930s in Tokyo, where my father was born and raised; and Hiroshima. Nights would be cool, and I might need a light wrap.

  Thus my field trip to Zoologie. I felt lost in the commercial, the anonymous, the corporate, the lovely scent. Luckily there was a map on the wall. It was a beautiful golden antique map, the kind your grandparents might have used, and it put me in a spending frame of mind: it would look great in my study. I dragged myself away to the blouse racks. There was an incredibly pretty T-shirt that I desperately needed, for only eighty-nine dollars. Sigh: who was it who said that to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor? What a buzzkill. The clothes really were beautiful. They would definitely help you feel better about yourself, and would almost certainly help you get laid this week. I shook my head to clear it.

  Things are not the problem. Things are sometimes the only solution to existential dread, and the five Buddhist remembrances: I am sure to become old; I cannot avoid aging. I am sure to become ill; I cannot avoid illness. I am sure to die; I cannot avoid death. I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me. I am the owner of my actions; I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. Except, I might add as a nice Christian girl, through mercy—and things.

  There are the things we need to stay alive, and the more numerous things we acquire to feel better about ourselves, more festive things. People have always made things as craft, as creative expression, and bartered for them with one another. Consumerism is not a bad thing, it’s very human. But in these high-end retail stores, we are prisoners, which is not so great; these kinds of stores give slavering a good name. Consumerism feels great while we’re still in the store—the enchantment, the potential for change, the promise of vast improvement. The store is a temple festooned with our most treasured symbols, those that make us ache for an easier time, the world of childhood, when we were seeing things for the first time, and the magic of that hadn’t worn off. What’s wrong with this, aside from its being expensive, squandering our time and money, distracting us from life, and wearing off?

  I’m easily seduced, a drowsy sitting duck. Zoologie pimps off the ineffable poetic impulses that the artist Joseph Cornell evoked in his dream boxes, shadow boxes with antique silverware, maps, feathers, and shards of pottery. Zoologie’s ambience creates this with similar images of old brooches, children playing, stars, doorknobs, and the ephemeral. It’s like an ATM version of Yeats’s golden apples of the sun, silver apples of the moon.

  And wandering the racks, wishing my son would call, I felt even more vulnerable to the promise of the ephemeral. I so wanted to change reality. One of our aged saints at St. Andrew, my church, who had the hardest life, also had the deepest faith, and no matter what happened in her life she would say, “I know my change is gonna come.” I w
anted to believe that now. My son had texted earlier to say I didn’t trust or support him. I texted that this was completely untrue; it was just that perhaps I was a bit worried about his future. I was charged with being controlling. Moi?

  He said, “You’re too anxious for me to deal with.” He knows where the cracks in my turtle shell are.

  To have texted, “You might be right,” would have been wonderful aikido. Sadly, this did not cross my mind. I had pled for mercy and forgiveness. Silence. I didn’t want to sit at home with my depressing used furniture, used drawer pulls, and used dogs.

  I tried to will myself into feeling more merciful toward him: Many times when he was an older teenager, I marveled that I hadn’t killed him in his sleep, not because he hadn’t deserved it—trust me on this—but because I didn’t deserve it, either. God wouldn’t have a hard time finding plenty of examples from my own life when I was just as awful, if perhaps a bit less mouthy. Pride prevents us from admitting this, which also prevents its healing. As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don’t know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all. We try to come from a place of mercy because it is good practice; no one is very good at it, especially when someone doesn’t deserve it and knows exactly which of our buttons to push.

  People try to goad you into seeing that hostile actions are far more a reflection of the hurt the antagonist is feeling than pettiness or meanness of spirit. This is not always helpful, as now you have two resentments. What does help is to pretend to have gotten over the injury—acting as if—and then radical self-care: M&M’s, for instance, or shopping.

  The right cardigan would lift my spirits, if not heal me of a lifelong isolation, an existential homesickness. Carl Jung said that most painful issues can’t be solved—they can only be outgrown, but that takes time and deep work. Nothing in our culture allows us to do that anymore: Don’t sit with pain! Go to eBay, the gym, Facebook, Zoologie. Outside, the world is in such a frenzy, megabyte-driven, alien, dehumanizing.

  Zoologie smells like childhood would have smelled if you’d had a better family. It is transfixing, like the Sirens. I love their silky voices. They sing to me, whereas almost everything poetic has been squeezed out of the world. But it appears to be alive in here, in the blink of an eye, while with poetry, you have to take your time and meander. Jeez, what a waste of time.

  At the makeup display, apparently all I had to do was apply a light new foundation, from a beautiful bottle, to become dewy again in just minutes. How great. But two small problems existed: For one, I was last dewy at ten years old. And two, even I know that real things take real time. Still, I used the tester. The makeup highlighted my wrinkles, settled into the lines beside my mouth, like ink. I looked like I’d been hennaed at a street fair.

  I found a cotton cardigan, perfect for Japan, lilac with light green buttons. Even the coat hanger from which it hung created feelings of longing in me. Maybe it was the equivalent of the drug soma in Brave New World, but I always thought that sounded good. Every inch of space in the store that was authentic and dreamlike was being used against me, for consumer manipulation. So what—you spend an hour with a sense of gentle touch, meaning, authenticity, connection, an earlier time, a slower, gentler time. How can that be wrong?

  But it wasn’t working: despite my best efforts to be merciful and unruffled, I was too unsettled. It’s rock bottom for me when my son and I are at odds, in self-esteem and confidence. And God loves rock bottom. God was trumping Zoologie. I felt a hollowness, a racing heart, a jaw-sagging disbelief, because I had no answer, whereas I almost always have an answer for everything.

  This was the rosary of loss. My son, my youth, my parents, a best friend, the last boyfriend, all gone.

  Is there anything that can help at rock bottom? No. Only a friend.

  I dialed, and she was there, my old friend who has even more problems than I, and she listened; she got it. That was all. I sighed. This is the greatest mercy I know, a loved one hearing and nodding, even if over the phone. Thomas Merton said, “No matter how low you may have fallen in your own esteem, bear in mind that if you delve deeply into yourself you will discover holiness there.” But this is not my experience. I find silt and mental problems. My only hope is to delve deeply into a friend.

  She said, “Put the sweater down.” I did. “Now back away slowly.” I walked across the store to the world’s cutest rattan chair, that would look so fabulous in my bedroom. I plopped down and listened to my friend’s voice. It was clear, cool water on a sunburn. After a while, one of the thin salesgirls came by. I thought for a moment it was to get me back on my feet to shop, like in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the movie about a Depression-era dance marathon. When I told my friend this, she said, “You may be too far gone this time.” I had to laugh. I looked at the woman. Up close she looked about twenty, innocent beneath a thick layer of makeup, while I felt so old and crazy. Did she have the map back home?

  No, but she had brought me the tiniest paper cup of water, like one you might serve to a cat. I received it. That’s the hard part, not taking but receiving. She turned away, so friendly and content, while I was so off. What did she have that I didn’t, beside beauty and youth? I thought, and thought, and then I almost smote my own forehead: She had kindness. She was doing kind things, helping people. The map is kind action. If people are patient and kind, that’s a lot—something of the spirit is at work. The result of grace. It doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is, Shoot the mother. So I decided to be like the salesgirl when I grew up, patient, friendly, kind. I got off the phone. In two minutes, I was happy.

  And I suddenly understood that Jung would have loved this ridiculous place with all its symbols. Oh, honey, he’d have said, we’re just silly fools. We can laugh at ourselves. We have to. We have to harvest humility. Who do we think we are? Rats who are into cosmetics. He’d say, You don’t need this. We’ll pull through. You’re going to be okay. Let’s sit down right here on this Flutter Pattern Dream Menagerie Rug, and write a poem together.

  I still didn’t know how things with my son would bounce. I have a quote taped to my office wall from an anonymous source that says, “Love is hard. Love is . . . seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.” I prayed for both of us. And now there was some visible mercy, in the teeny cup of water and in my friend’s helping me off the hook of trying to fix the unfixable. I was free again, ish; back on the ground with tired feet instead of with one on a sailboat pulling away, where I might fall into the drink. I was dry and loved. It was a glut of mercy, actually. There are so many ways for a life to go bad, for a person to end up permanently isolated, thwarted, blaming. I had genetic and cultural preconditions for just such a life. But instead, I had a great friend and a sip of water. Also, in a way I can’t account for, which had nothing to do with what I knew or thought I could manage, I had found an off-the-beaten-track means to a redeemed life, with friends whose love saves me. The odds were so against it that I can only call it mercy.

  It brought me home. I accidentally bought the sweater on my way out.

  • • •

  A week or so later, wearing my light lilac sweater, I went with Tom to see the neighborhood in Tokyo where my father lived from 1923 until 1938, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, God’s frozen chosen, and the reason my father so loathed Christianity. I wanted to see my grandparents’ church, where my grandfather taught, where they worshipped, where my father and aunt were children. Tom, who can read foreign subway maps, had gotten us to the hilariously nondescript church in my dad’s formerly crummy neighborhood, which was basically now Rodeo Drive, except for the church.

  People say that expectations are resentments under construction, and even though I have found that to be true, I had high expectations of my welcome at my grandfather’s church. I thought the ministers would be amazed at my intergenerational story. But th
e Japanese ministers I explained myself to were friendly, important, and busy.

  They kind of blew me off. What had I expected? “Oh my God, we named our kids after your grandfather!” Or, “Thank God for white people.”

  I laughed and said to God, “Thank you for getting me here, with my dear and cranky friend.” Talk about anticlimactic. But because of God, Tom, grace, and a map from our hotel, I got there, to my grandfather’s church.

  • • •

  Two days later, we were at a small lecture hall in Hiroshima, and I was reading a poem that a Japanese girl had written two weeks after the bomb blast in 1945. Her teenage sister was dying; she and her mom went to the market to buy the sister tomatoes, but while they were gone, the sister died. An ancient, very sweet survivor in a kimono had read the poem to a dozen of us guests at the end of her presentation, movie footage of the bombing and its aftermath. Then she bowed to us and flutteringly asked if one of us would read it to her and our group. I had no idea why, but because it was absurd and charming, when no one else volunteered, I did. She nodded encouragingly as I read, as if we were at a piano recital. It made as much sense as anything does here, her polite inclusion. Polite inclusion is the gateway drug to mercy.

  We had taken the bullet train from Kyoto. Tom was even more cranky than usual, because his feet and hands hurt, and he would not admit he was hungry; also, it was a bit cold for people who had forgotten sweaters. I had a broken toe and a healthful snack of toasted soybeans, and was wearing a walking boot but trying not to mind my toe or Tom, although I felt put upon by his mood. I was pretty sure, as usual, that if he had done what I had had the sense to do—snack, sweater—he could just snap out of it. Then we would have a rich and touching day at this most astonishing war memorial. Life would be better for almost everyone. What is so scary is that I live by this belief. Tom, who doesn’t, was distant, quiet, and watchful.