Traveling Mercies
I picked up Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith at the Friends of the Library Book Sale a few weeks ago. It sounded familiar, though I’m not sure where I’d heard of the title, or the author, before. It’s a spiritual autobiography of sorts, a series of impressions that, pieced together, give us a glimpse of Lamott’s spiritual journey.
I didn’t pick up an organizing structure, but it’s not chronological. It’s more or less thematic. One review at Amazon describes it as a series of postcards, and that sounds right.
I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about this book. At the level of writing, I thought it was wonderful. It is, first of all, funny. I don’t often find myself reading blurbs aloud for my husband, because I always find it annoying and intrusive when others do that to me. But this book made me annoying and intrusive. How could I resist the one liners, like the one about refusing to forgive being like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die? Or the one about toddlers playing in the sand and looking like breaded veal cutlets? Or the one where she overreacts disciplining her son, and then says, “I did what all good parents do: calmed down enough to go apologize, and beg for his forgiveness while simultaneously expressing a deep concern about his disappointing character.” How could I resist reading her descriptions, which drew explosive little snorts of laughter time and again?
Besides being funny, the writing is also poetic and honest. It made me realize how much of the reading I’ve done focuses on more abstract questions of the faith. Lamott doesn’t try to reason through the problem of evil. She doesn’t offer proofs. But she does write about the issues of ordinary life: being a parent, forgiving, cars breaking down, migraines. She writes about eating, about crow’s feet around her eyes and gravity’s effects on her bottom and thighs (to which she refers as “the aunties”). She writes about family. And she does it, often, irreverently, even crudely. Yet I suppose it’s a measure of the truthfulness that these things didn’t keep me from enjoying this book.
The book’s tone is where the writing and the content begin to get mixed up in my mind. Some kinds of irreverence are useful and even biblical; Jesus offended plenty in the religious establishment because he was seen as irreverent. But there are places where I found myself cringing because Lamott seemed to cross the line. I could discern little if any sense of God’s holiness, of the kind of transcending presence we glimpse in books like Revelation or Isaiah or Jeremiah.
Her theology puts her far to the left of me. I’m in a different camp politically and in any number of lifestyle issues. Her life story and whole approach to life and faith are not like mine, though I have no desire to go point-by-point through her testimony and make pronouncements. I guess what’s striking to me is the number of times throughout this book that she and I end up in the same place on big things. Also, curmudgeon that I can be, I am struck by how much I simply felt an affection for this author. There is a good chance that this is how Heaven will be — defying and enlarging our expectations in the best possible ways.
