Hallelujah Anyway

by Anne Lamott

  We never find out in Paul’s letters what his worst quality was, the thorn in his side—depression, a sexual disorder or addiction? My own favorite personal toxic qualities are jealousy and judgment. The self-judgment is excruciating, but along with judging others, it seems to be lessening slightly as I get older—perhaps this has to do with a failing memory and stamina, or spiritual growth—although I still size people up rather quickly. Is that person coming toward me smart and interesting enough to talk to or date? If not, where’s the escape hatch? I hate this, but in judgment’s defense, it is also an indication that I have a brain. It tells me what works, what doesn’t, what helps, what doesn’t, what is dangerous and what is safe. Judgment is the way we’re wired and raised, and it may have saved my ancestors’ lives: Oops, this looks like the wrong tribe up ahead, they’re in the wrong garb. They may eat me.

  So yes, there are excellent reasons to cling to our judgment and self-righteousness.

  I don’t have much perversion going, what with the partial amnesia and a bad back, nor do I covet much, or binge, but envy and its betrothed, schadenfreude, still arise often enough to do harm, poisonous to my senses of both self and habitat, tenacious as snapping turtles.

  I have been freed of them for stretches of time, and then been ambushed and lassoed again. This last time, after a patch of peaceful detachment, I rekindled a deep resentment and jealousy of another writer, whom I disliked and considered vastly overrated. She had treated me with disrespect in public years ago, yet with panache and humor, as she is quite witty and has enormous charm. I had not seen her since, but you cannot let this ruin a good grudge.

  Not long ago, I saw mention of her upcoming book. I must say, objectively speaking, it sounded terrible, a commercial caricature of her earlier work. I hoped it would receive and believed it deserved bad reviews. God thought so, too, I decided, then managed a laugh. I stroked my shoulder: There, there, honey. As journalist Scoop Nisker said, “You are not your fault.” Nor am I my faults, although this is what I understood as a child. Thinking this way helped, as it gave me both incentive to succeed and some measure of control over the chaos. If I could improve, do better, need less, then my troubled parents would be fine. Never mind that my family’s fixation on our finite natures—our appearance, our standing, our grades and weight—bred judgment, anxiety, and blame, of others and ourselves. Never mind that because of the way finite natures are designed, we could reasonably expect to fall ill, become frail, and die in our future. But at least this made us superior to those nuts who believed in infinite love and mercy.

  I continued to smile at my testy little convictions that day, and promised to tell my best friends—to say it out loud, like Paul. Truth out loud is almost always medicinal, or at least is the call button: tell it, and someone will respond, with presence and maybe a salve. But it feels like it will kill you to tell a bad truth. So first I tried to fix myself.

  I pretended to pull for the writer, to wish her well. When that failed, I tried harder. My elderly priest friend Terry says, “Don’t try harder—resist less.” This is beyond radical: my parents tried really hard, and when that didn’t work out, they tried harder. I tried to try less. I tried so hard to resist less that I got vertigo. I had to call a nurse. So I told my two best friends.

  We mostly laughed off our competitive tendencies—they are artists, too—but they also heard my pain. They said it was perfectly natural, because of my upbringing and the woman’s rejection. One said it made her like me more. The other e-mailed me a bad review the woman got in an important periodical. It lifted my spirits for a while. Then I turned on myself. This is the great sin, the source of most madness and unease, so I took it to church, to the clinic. Hangdog, I confessed in silence, because it said to right there in the program, and because secrets keep us sick, cut off, in hiding, as if we were being stalked. I told the truth to God, that I have terrible thoughts. I couldn’t promise to stop feeling so competitive and mean, but I mentioned that this grieved me.

  Scripture acted as my nurse that day, ironically two of my very least favorite passages. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he talks about the thorn in his side, is his spiritual autobiography, his confessing out loud to how shaming life in the flesh was for him. And in his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul wrote that he hated the things he couldn’t stop doing. His best thinking was to avoid what would give him serenity and joy, and to instead keep doing things that made him feel disgusting and depressed. He had what I have, something awful and broken and stained inside. He was a powerful, learned man, teaching and following the Torah, reaping power’s rewards, yet it all left him desperate. He was a maker of grief and confusion for himself and others, trying to compensate for his emptiness with good works and domination, always trying harder.

  It’s an honest and poignant description of what a fuckup he felt like—the worst Jew ever. He asked God over and over to remove this thorn, but God said no. God said that grace and mercy had to be enough, that nothing awful or fantastic that Paul did would alter the hugeness of divine love. This love would and will have the last say. The last word will not be our bad thoughts and behavior, but mercy, love, and forgiveness. God suggested, Try to cooperate with that. Okay? Keep your stupid thorn; knock yourself out.

  What was the catch? The catch was that Paul had to see the thorn as a gift. He had to want to be put in his place, had to be willing to give God thanks for this glaring new sense of humility, of smallness, the one thing anyone in his right mind tries to avoid. Conceit is intoxicating, addictive, the best feeling on earth some days, but Paul chose instead submission and servitude as the way to freedom from the bondage of self. Blessed are the meek.

  We don’t know if Paul was ever healed of his affliction. I do know that being told I could keep my awfulness made holding on to it much less attractive.

  Not that I was able to let go of it right away.

  I continued to do what Micah taught, to do justice, the grand, cosmic value, and to love mercy—lovingkindness, compassion, feeding the hungry, caring for the ill, attending to the dead. And at the same time, I let my dislike of the writer ride along in my pouch, like a baby kangaroo.

  Our secrets sometimes feel so vile and hopeless that we should all jump off a cliff. Then we might remember that something quirky and ephemeral once restored us or a beloved to sanity when we were in a very bad way. We remember that an unlikely invisible agency made up of love, truth, and camaraderie helped with the alcoholism or debt or heartbreak a few years ago. And we practice cooperating with that force for change, because who knows—it might help again now.

  Micah says to do justice—follow the rules, do what you’re supposed to do—but to love mercy, love the warmth within us, that flow of generosity. Love mercy—accept the acceptance; receive the forgiveness, whenever we can, for as long as we can. Then pass it on. We are bread to be served to the poor and the hungry, and sometimes it is we who need the bread. To give it or receive it, we move out of our shells and personas, scooching toward the real. The real is hard, time-consuming, and badly lit. I much prefer fantasy. And by the same token, change is hard. We like the familiar. We’re self-centered, and we have a lot of fear—equal fear of love and death. Welcome to the monkey house, as Vonnegut wrote. We like breakthroughs, while the changes toward evolution and greater humanity are incremental. We don’t want to grow. It hurts. And yet we do, bravely and scared, bit by bit. We tell it—it hangs in the air with its amazingness—we begin to cooperate with kindness, and we remember the good we’ve seen in our own lives. We soften ever so slightly, with one to two percent willingness, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t enough. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “Anyone who moves forward, even a little, is like Jesus walking on the water.”

  I’ll admit that I did experience mild gladness when this woman’s book got some terrible reviews, and it was good. But the thrill was gone. I felt a mix of feelings, with a baby spoon of
empathy stirred in. I understood that a blend of damage, obsessiveness, envy, and empathy was an occupational requirement for writers. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  My rabbi friend Margaret said once on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that while rabbis usually urge us to atone for our sins and try to be better people, she thought we should try to be worse. This would mean different things to different people, maybe to be more of a slacker, to be less efficient and less helpful, or conversely, to be more of a control freak. But we might even screw up being worse. The Kol Nidre prayer, the declaration with which the Yom Kippur service begins, anticipates that we will keep falling short no matter our best intentions. It says, to paraphrase, “You know all those promises and commitments I make to You and am about to make? Well, forget it. Don’t get Your hopes up. And don’t blame me. It hasn’t gone well and is not going to go well; I think we know that already.” But love and mercy are sovereign, if often in disguise as ordinary people, and as inescapable as sturdy pediatric nurses. Over and over, in spite of our awfulness and having squandered our funds, the ticket-taker at the venue waves us on through. Forgiven and included, when we experience this, that we are in this with one another, flailing and starting over in the awful beauty of being humans together, we are saved.

  EIGHT

  Mostly

  There are many routes to living a merciful life in this mean and dangerous world; assorted ways to find and extend inclusion after lives of cheeky isolation; a number of walkways to awakening and gratitude. And there are two goat paths to the peace of self-forgiveness.

  The first is to get cancer. All the people I’ve known who have received a terminal diagnosis have gotten serious about joy, forgiveness, simple pleasures—new green grass, massage, cherries, the summer’s first peaches—and have been able to find good-enough peace toward people who did unforgivable damage to them and their families. They know they are going to die one of these days, but maybe not today, so they live, savor, rest, wake up kind of amazed.

  The second is to fall in step with a teacher, briefly or forever, a real teacher who makes it clear that even as he or she points to the moon, we have got to stop staring at the person’s fingers. If we want freedom from grudge, we will at times need wise counsel—teachers, with flashlights. Forgiving ratfinks who have betrayed a beloved, let alone forgiving one’s own disappointing self, is grad school. Without these studies, we live so small. Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.

  Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behavior. We will never do this perfectly, but how do we do it better? How do we mostly hold people we’ve encountered with the understanding of a wise, caring mother who has seen it all, knows that we all struggle, knows that on the inside we’re as vulnerable as a colony of rabbits?

  Sometimes when we cannot take it one more day, like the renowned octopus who recently escaped his aquarium and headed toward the sea, a mentor appears, who knows things, and more important, knows that he or she does not know things. We want what that person has, a gentler way of seeing, a less rigid way of thinking, less certainty, more play.

  Thirty years ago, one week after my last drink, on a hot July afternoon, a tall and rather plain woman came up to me in a room of sober people. She extended her grimy hand to me. She was a gardener. I found out she had been a junkie, and had gotten clean ten years earlier at the alternative drug rehab Synanon, famous for having had two of its members put a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an antagonistic lawyer. She was funny but seemed to be in a bad mood. I was, too: I had woken up days earlier, hungover and in deep animal confusion, as I was most mornings: Why couldn’t I stop drinking after six or seven friendly social drinks? Finally the exhaustion of living this way had propelled me to a group of people who had somehow found a way out, a path with one another’s company and bad coffee, people who were laughing about their crazy thoughts and pasts. Most of them were overly cheerful, but Loretta was cranky, and I like this in a girl. She was ten years older than I, shopworn, with long legs, a light brown bob, and glasses.

  I wanted what she had, although it is hard to say what that was, beside sobriety with humor intact. She had a jaunty outlaw energy, but even more magnetic, a depth of kindness visible in her watchful eyes.

  She asked how I was—tense and judgmental—and how many days I had had sober—seven—and I said I was thinking about just having one beer, as it was sweltering.

  She said, “Of course you are.” She got me a cup of coffee with four sugars and we sat in a corner. She listened to the bones of my story: I was thirty-two, with several published books, and the local love of my family and lifelong friends. I was loved out of all sense of proportion, yet I got drunk every day. I was poor and bulimic, but adorable and cherished. There was one problem: my insides. The elevator was going down. It only goes down. As Billy Hayes said, “The bad machine doesn’t know he’s a bad machine.”

  My mind and spirits and behavior were deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

  Then Loretta told me her story: She’d been put in an orphanage after her mother died, although her brothers lived with their father; her cousins gave her a shot of speed at fifteen, which is how she discovered what she wanted to do with her life, i.e., drugs, not knowing of course that this would come to involve turning tricks, alcoholism, and Synanon. She was smart, with no formal education, a voracious reader, and she had what I wanted, a way of taking each day as it came, mostly with humor and even gratitude. What she had could not quite be put into words, but the best way to capture it may be to say that she knew what wasn’t true.

  The other women in the room had taught her how to stay sober, and she’d found that being sober delivered almost everything drinking promised. She could teach me, if I was interested. Writing was involved, and even worse, forgiveness of those I felt had harmed me and my beloved. If I wanted this, I could give her a call.

  I prefer to do things and figure things out alone. I was drawn to the idea of disciplines like tai chi and yoga, where the forms are the teacher. But against all odds, I picked up the leaden phone. “I will come get you at eleven-thirty,” she said. “Take a shower, and try not to drink till then. The shower is optional.”

  I didn’t drink for an hour at a time, and I showed up. Or rather, Loretta picked me up before noon most days. We hung out with these other women, who had betrayed their families and deepest values, and who told me, “Guess what? Me, too. I have those secrets, that self-obsession. It’s okay. Let me get you some cookies.” They convinced me that my disease wanted me dead, but would settle for getting me drunk.

  Loretta told me to pray for the people I couldn’t forgive, even though she didn’t believe in God, to pray for fourteen days that they have everything I want for myself: health, love. By the ninth day, I semi sort of wanted it for them; but mostly I wanted to stop praying for their miserable selves. She said no, when all else fails, follow instructions. So I soldiered on, and it worked, mostly. She taught me I could get better by taking right action. Then she taught me how to teach other women, as she had been taught the forms, and that no one had the answers—it wasn’t just that I was slow, or doing a bad job. I could improve, marginally, inch by inch. Life wasn’t black and white, good or bad. That was an impoverished way to see life, and people.

  We were so much the same, except for our histories. We’d been such good girls, able to tell ourselves that our parents were okay, they loved and would protect us, even as we were scarred by their unhappiness. Then the world got its mitts on us, no matter that we put our best shining faces forward, and we stayed alive however we could. We grew into women with big hearts, scars and dark secrets, mostly gentle and kind, mostly generous, with areas of weakness and craving. When I was a child, I knew a fabulous dog named Mostly, who was mostly beagle, mostly a love bug who every so o
ften bit one of us, although not all that hard. Loretta and I were mostly okay.

  She picked me up every day and we cruised and listened to Graceland, which had just come out. The title song was about a woman so promiscuous that she called herself the human trampoline, but Paul Simon sang that he understood that she was just bouncing into Graceland, and I had a moment of clarity, that this is what we were all doing.

  I had converted to Christianity while drunk, at a tiny church, and about a year later, several months sober, I was baptized. My pastor was a tall, brilliant, progressive preacher named James Noel, who looked a lot like Marvin Gaye, which was only part of the reason I kept coming back. I called him the morning of my baptism to tell him that, regrettably, I’d have to cancel the baptism, as I was currently too damaged and foul for words. I promised to call him when I got a bit better. He said to get my butt over to church, that I wasn’t going to heal sitting alone on my ten-by-twelve-foot houseboat. He said I didn’t have to get it together before I could be included and, in fact, couldn’t get it together without experiencing inclusion. So Loretta picked me up, and I got baptized.

  She helped me stay sober for a couple of years, taught me Life 101—pay bills, return phone calls, dance sober, breathe. I in turn urged her to pursue nursing school. Which she did, and she struggled to barely pass. She taught me humility: I was a hotshot when we met, when I first got sober, but she helped me work my way up to servant.

  We gradually drifted apart, as I fell more in love with sobriety, and she less. She started drinking again. This scared me to death. If it could happen to her, it could happen to me. I shut down once more. Weeks later, my Marvin Gaye preacher moved on. My heart was doubly broken, but in my pain, I became teachable again; beginner’s mind. I listened better: we had a revolving door of ministers at my church for a year, some good, some bad. One dubious preacher in Hush Puppies gave a sermon that seemed to last four hours. I stayed only because I needed the food and comfort of our small choir, who sang from the roots of the earth and their faith, a beauty that vibrated in the air. I stayed, twisting and keening in silence while the minister droned on. And then she threw the lights on for me, about me, and the woman at the well.