Hallelujah Anyway

by Anne Lamott

  SIX

  Planes

  My six-year-old grandson often calls to me, as he drifts off to sleep down the hall, with both our doors wide open, “That was the best day ever.” Then he wakes in the dead of night and calls out, “Nana, will you ever get sick or die?” Terrorized, he cries in the dark, until I go fish him out. He is like a pond, a self-contained waterbody with long brown legs, teeming with every manner of life, rooted water plants and flowers, fish, turtles, tadpoles, ducks, but also, hidden in the silt, piranhas, stingrays, great white sharks. I put him back to sleep in my bed. A few hours later, when the sun rises, he wakes and says, “This could be the best day ever.” He can fly again.

  No matter how bad or lovely one’s childhood, almost everybody walking around was somehow held, fed, and cared for, at least enough to still exist. The universe gave us sunlight, water, and milk, and we grew. The human condition brought with it terror, and we wept. The human family held us, the best it could. Then it inadvertently destroyed us: we were taught the exact opposite of what Mark Yaconelli calls the Rule of Love. He wrote a letter to the teenagers in the Sunday-school class I teach that said, “Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow the Rule of Love—and you should stop doing it.” But while I was growing up, most things left me fearful and isolated.

  Every so often we drop down into another plane, to that trusting spirit that knows that, underneath all things, we are held, that we are children, born into this world in tender innocence. This can be experienced while doing the child’s pose in yoga, snorkeling, and, I would guess, while hang gliding, safely suspended and held. But then we have to snap out of it, snap to it, get back up to the video game of life, get back to work, or traffic, get back to everyone whose calls we missed.

  Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can’t be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.

  Years and years ago, a writer named Lynne Twist, a lifelong activist for global hunger causes, wrote of an African village in existential crisis; its water supplies were gone, its shallow wells were running dry. The village was several hours into the desert in Senegal, on the western tip of Africa, in the harshest imaginable environment, where almost nothing grew but baobab trees, with their leafy branches for shade. The village was not eligible for government help, being outside the census, and even thousands of gallons of donated water would not help for long. So Twist took some Hunger Project leaders and volunteers to the village. Saint Francis said we begin with what is necessary: water, food, shade, and a way in. Someone had somehow arranged a meeting with the tribal leaders of the community.

  Twist and her colleagues drove across hundreds of miles of silty orange sand that stung their eyes and throats, expecting to find hopeless, hungry, lethargic people in despair. But when the group neared the village, they heard drums, and driving toward the sound of the drums, they found themselves welcomed by ecstatic children, and women in beautiful tribal dresses, and men seated, drumming. Everyone was scarily thin, covered with orange dust, but joyous, and the women and children danced around a fire: the partners had arrived.

  We who have not yet made it to deserts in Africa hear of hunger not far away, see it at intersections and under bridges, and good people respond. We take food to shelters, show up at soup kitchens. My church school kids pass out water and granola bars to street people, and say, “How are you?” And to their children, “What grade are you in?” and “What’s your teacher’s name?” Is this the same as the Hunger Project? Of course; suffering is suffering. As the mystics would have us believe, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” So yes, if we slow down and stick around for the resurrection part of the story, the rising, which, granted, can be very inconvenient and time-consuming.

  The village men, who were Muslim, sat in a circle with the Hunger Project people, in the baking orange sand. The women sat in a circle behind them, close enough to hear.

  The men thanked the Hunger Project people for offering to help them find new water sources, or to relocate somewhere less harsh: their wells were nearly dry, as were the wells of sixteen other nearby villages.

  How do you go on, let alone dance, when there is next to no food or water for your children? Saint Francis says that after doing what is necessary, we move on to what’s possible. We pay attention, listen, open our hearts. How could those be enough? Mr. Einstein said everything is moving and we’re all connected, and maybe never more so than when we listen, so that is one connection, one bridge. Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable. We end up looking into other people’s eyes, and see the desperation, or let them see ours. This connection slips past the armor like water past stones. Being slow and softened, even for a few minutes or seconds, gives sneaky grace the chance to enter. There won’t be something waiting that you can put on a bumper sticker, and it will not just be one cute thing, although I would very much prefer this. It may be loud or silent, textures, colors, breath, salty, sweet, sour; probably a weave. The paradox is that in dropping down, letting down like nursing mothers, we rise, to the higher tiers of our existence. We relax down into higher rungs of awareness, immediacy—being. Just humanly being.

  In this village, when people sat together, with gratitude, relief, flies, starvation, truth-telling, hope, listening, a vision, and even the grumbling, they reached a new stratum.

  There is such depth to listening, and an exchange, like an echo from inside a canyon, when friends have listened to me at my most hopeless. They heard. Someone heard, heard what was happening, what was true and painful, when the center would not hold. They sat, listened, and breathed with me, like doulas.

  Breath is a koan: both a resting place and enlivening. To take a deep breath is a thirsty person sipping water, both ease and nourishment. The person said, “I hear you, it completely sucks. I’m here for you, and will be, no matter what.” You sat together breathing. Maybe the friend trotted out the excruciating absurdity of the situation, laid it on the table so we could observe it together, with amazement and eventual amusement. The friend let us go again to every place we have ever wallowed, and helped make it funny. We described hell—expensive custody battles, betrayal, a dying pet—and didn’t have to hear about silver linings. The friend just got it. We felt like a failure, but were helped to see that we were doing everything we could, as well as we could. Maybe we won’t step in that same hole again now. (Maybe we will.) No one, not even God, has a magic wand, so what awaits is probably still going to be hard sledding, but at least we’re out of the ditch and on the hill in the slush. There had been no hope of this, when we were stuck in me me me, hurt hurt hurt. Now, as Rumi said, “someone opens our wings . . . someone fills the cup.” My pastor puts it: “God makes a way out of no way.” We will somehow be cared for by that someone—a dear neurotic friend, minister, mullah—or something or a shift that helped release a bit of what tortured you an hour ago, or what you tortured yourself with, a space you’ve populated with demons, now opening from that trance out to what is really there: a cup of tea, kind eyes, paper whites, orange sand.

  • • •

  The women, who sat obediently behind the men and the Hunger Project people, seemed eager to communicate, so Twist asked the men for permission to speak with them.

  The women told her that there was an underground lake below them, beneath the sand; they had seen it in their visions. There was no doubt. But the men wouldn’t let them dig for it. Making tribal decisions was not women’s work—they could only weave, cook, farm, and care for the children—and the men did not want to waste their energy on visions.


  Twist and her colleagues believed in the women’s vision, and eventually persuaded the mullahs to let the women give it a try. The men were not happy, but they let the women begin digging, in partnership with the Hunger Project people.

  A huge shift like this one, in a culture of such rigid traditions, often begins with desperation, the gateway to the movement of grace. There can be no force. Force is self-will externalized. We can be only so beaten down, so thirsty and worried, that somehow, like the mullahs, we become willing to receive.

  Over the next year, the women dug, with their hands and small shovels, while singing and taking care of one another’s children. The men rationed water, drummed, and watched dubiously from a distance as they did their own work. I imagine them muttering, rolling their eyes. The women never gave up. They had seen water in their visions, just as the apostle Luke writes—that our young will have visions, and our old will dream dreams. And our women will—well, buckle up.

  They dug deeper, and deeper. Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.

  Deeper and deeper the women dug. The men took over some of their chores. This is not possible, although Saint Francis says that after we do what’s necessary, and then do what is possible, we find ourselves doing the impossible: men watching the children.

  The women dug for more than a year, singing and helping take care of one another’s kids, the men drumming in the background, until they came to an underground lake in the sand, as the women had seen in their visions.

  This is one of those moments, in one of those stories, that makes me want to dance around the fire, if I had one, to the rhythm of the drums, if only friends would come drum for me, in my colorful tribal frocks, because it gets in so deep, as usually only music and poetry can. The mercy of baobab trees giving shade, the hydrating grace of their new lake, their ancient lake, there all along. The mercy of the men letting go of their rigid roles. The mercy of sweet water and song in the harsh desert. The mercy of the helpers, the grace of second winds.

  Maybe mercy and grace belong together, like cream and sugar.

  We might call the presence of mercy “soul,” some sort of life principle within, behind my eyes, that helps me notice things, be sensitive, feel the kick or salve of love. The energy that makes me me. I don’t believe the body and soul are separate while we are alive on earth: the body is how we care for the soul, with protein or manicures and lotion, so it is all part and parcel—the soul, the human heart, feelings, sweat glands, eyes. The basal cell carcinoma they just removed attractively from the tip of your nose is not soul, but part of your story, and our response of compassion is soul (and not poking fun at you is mercy).

  In rare friendships we know soul reaches out to soul, like deep calling to deep. The Psalmist wrote: “Deep calls to deep, in the roar of your waterfalls.” He was referring to floods of trouble and sorrow, but we know there is opposite and equal reality. What about our deepest, nethermost selves, beneath the part of us that can be sedated, stupid, reactive, observed, that cries out to that truer place in others? The part that hears strange yet familiar notes at a concert, in a voice or a forest, the part that can be as giddy as a child holding a large shell to her ear? There is no need for a pilgrimage to Varanasi. Go to the park. I saw it once on TV, because I was paying attention: A mean, addicted doctor was treating the physical pain of a severely autistic boy named Adam. Adam’s connection, his touchstone or talisman, was a handheld Game Boy, which provided repetition, consistency, safety. After the doctor healed the boy of his physical pain, and the boy was leaving the office, he handed his Game Boy to the doctor. Something in the boy’s soul knew that the doctor was even more far gone and isolated than he was; deep calling to deep; an autistic soul talking to another autistic soul; the waterfall calling to the cosmos.

  Now the people in that Senegalese village have a well and a water system, with storage facilities, pumps, and irrigation, not only for their families but for all sixteen villages in the region. There are crops, batik industries, chicken farming. People are learning to read and write, and are getting their stories down, which is the best chance to get help for the nearly helpless. I hear your story, and respond. CEOs hear stories, and respond. Thousands of years ago and all this year, word went out about refugees, and many were taken in. It is who we really are, or at least who we began as, and who we can be again by remembering.

  Pope Francis says the name of God is mercy. Our name was mercy, too, until we put it away to become more productive, more admired and less vulnerable. We tend to forget it’s still there. It’s our unclaimed selves, in the Lost and Found drawer, access to another frequency, like a tuning fork. It startles you when you hear it. You look up and around and respond. It’s part of human nature, the startle reflex. Grace and mercy build on this, on nature. We startle awake. This is part of the mystery, that the humane, humanity, human bodies, are where we experience transcendence and God, restoration, the inclination to serve those who are suffering. We reach out as we are reached out to.

  This all looks so ordinary that you might miss it. It’s so daily. You don’t need special music and a Hollywood production and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You don’t need the Canadian fjords, the Grand Canyon, a newborn baby, although these can be helpful. You don’t need to go to Senegal. Immediacy and inspiration can be found in the dairy aisle at Safeway. It probably looks like people saying hello, making eye contact, letting others go first. Ordinary human daily ways, but moving more slowly. It looks like me with a few free minutes, deciding not to fill something in. Instead, I may close my eyes, drop to a quieter plane, or look up into a tree or the sky. Even a moment’s transcendence changes us. Everything is different afterward because we deep-dove, were there in downward, inward, higher places. So we know now. We remember.

  SEVEN

  As Is

  What is the medicine for one’s own awfulness? There is evidence of its existence, in a salty energy that periodically causes a holy thirst, to be healed, or to help heal, to extend ourselves, to receive. After rare harsh words with a dear friend, it’s hard to imagine ever getting back the same ease and devotion we once had. Yet we have gotten them back. Anyone who has gotten sober has been given the medicine, not, unfortunately, by single dose in a tiny paper cup, but bit by bit, over time, with a lot of writing involved. Something is at work mending the cut on my hand right now, as if hidden in the skin with atomic knitting needles. Over the years, when it has been in the mood and has its nursing cap on, this something has imperfectly patched up the rifts in my damaged family, the deeper dents in my heart, let alone evil in South Africa, has transformed us from clenched, victimized, and shut down, to taking gulps of fresh air like a baby pinking up.

  Horribly, it does not issue printed schedules. When Julian of Norwich wrote that all will be well—and all will be well—she meant that things will be well at some point, in the infuriating fullness of time, when sick bodies dissolve back into light and spirit, or when God restores much of what the locusts have eaten, someday down the road. But what about this lifetime? What about sub-Saharan Africa, and the severely depressed teenager in my family? What about poor old Earth? What about me?

  If only the answer were anything but time and the willingness to be changed. I desperately want to stop minding so much about other people, life, and myself. Krishnamurti, the great Indian teacher, when asked what was the secret to his serenity, said in his soft, shy voice, “I don’t mind what happens.” This is so not me—I mind his having even said this. I want to change, but it hurts; waking up is miserable, and transformation is terrifying. Given the choice, who would decide to grow from a clueless, shiny black tadpole to a skittish baby tree frog on a twig? The Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello said that most people don’t want this metamorphosis—they just want their toys fixed or replaced. Well, yeah. H
e made this sound like a bad thing. If, against all odds and indoctrination, you do seek to emerge from tadpole stage to a wilder, more expansive, bouncier kind of life, it is probably not going to go well. Maybe this is good news, that we must crave evolution, must be willing to pay, because it means we may stick it out when life seems too hard, and take shards of progress where they come, wherever unlikely place we find them.

  Paul of Tarsus, for instance. Putting aside the little problem with all the people he had killed, he was annoying, sexist, stuffy, and theoretical. He was not a great storyteller like the Gospel writers. He often got preachy, and his message was frequently about trying to be more stoic, with dogmatic “Shape up” and “Shame on you” talks. He was cranky, judgmental, and self-righteous, worse even than I. Yes, he had moments of genius and light, but then he’d start wagging his fingers again. Yet he knew my heart, he knew the struggle with our dark side: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” And he preached the willingness to be loved and included anyway, as is.

  He knew that people like me would want to have the willingness to have the willingness, but that this is scary and hard. He knew that it comes from the pain of staying the way we are, cut off from ourselves, squandering our lives, envying others, bingeing on whatever, terrified of making mistakes.