Help, Thanks, Wow

Anne Lamott

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444750355
• eBook ISBN: 9781444750362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe, over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help. Thanks. Wow.' Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott's funny and perceptive writing about faith and prayer. And in Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she's learned about prayer into these simple, transformative truths.It is these three prayers - asking for assistance, appreciating the good we witness, and feeling awe at the world - that get us through the day and show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they have meant to her over the years and how they've helped, and explores how others have embraced these ideas.Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is a book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

It is all hopeless. Even for a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse. Everywhere you turn, our lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to pieces. So many friends have broken children. The planet does not seem long for this world. Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.

What I wanted my whole life was relief—from pressure, isolation, people’s suffering (including my own, which was mainly mental), and entire political administrations. That is really all I want now. Besides dealing with standard-issue family crisis, heartbreak, and mishegas, I feel that I can’t stand one single more death in my life. That’s too bad, because as we speak, I have a cherished thirteen-year-old cat who is near death from lymphoma. I know I won’t be able to live without her.

This must sound relatively petty to those of you facing the impending loss of people, careers, or retirement savings. But if you are madly in love with your pets, as any rational person is, you know what a loss it will be for both me and my three-year-old grandson, Jax. My cat Jeanie has helped raise him, and it will be his first death. I told him that she was sick, and that the angels were going to take her from us. I tried to make it sound like rather happy news—after all, vultures aren’t coming for her, or snakes—but he wasn’t having any of it.

“Angels are taking Jeanie away?”

Yes, because she is old and needs to go live in heaven now.

He said, “I’m mad at the angels.” He’s mad at death. I’m mad at death, too. I’ve had it. I am existentially sick to death of death, and I absolutely cannot stand that a couple of friends may lose their children. I cannot stand that my son’s and grandson’s lives will hold so much isolation, strife, death, and common yet humiliating skin conditions. But as Kurt Vonnegut put it, Welcome to the monkey house. This is a hard planet, and we’re a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help.

When I pray, which I do many times a day, I pray for a lot of things. I ask for health and happiness for my friends, and for their children. This is okay to do, to ask God to help them have a sense of peace, and for them to feel the love of God. I pray for our leaders to act in the common good, or at least the common slightly better. I pray that aid and comfort be rushed to people after catastrophes, natural and man-made. It is also okay to ask that my cat have an easy death. Some of my friends’ kids are broken and the kids’ parents are living in that, and other friends’ marriages are broken, and every family I love has serious problems involving someone’s health or finances. But we can be big in prayer, and trust that God won’t mind if we pray about the cat and Jax’s tender heart.

Is God going to say, “Sorry, we don’t have enough for the cat”? I don’t think so.

I ask for help for this planet, and for her poor, and for the suffering people in my little galaxy. I know even as I pray for help that there will be tremendous compassion, mercy, generosity, companionship, and laughter from other people in the world, and from friends, doctors, nurses, hospice people. I also know that life can be devastating, and it’s still okay to be pissed off at God: Mercy, schmercy. I always want the kid to live.

I can picture God saying: “Okay, hon. I’ll be here when you’re done with your list.” Then He goes back to knitting new forests or helping less pissy people until I hit rock bottom. And when I finally do, there may be hope.

There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.

Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.

It is the first great prayer.

I don’t pray for God to do this or that, or for God’s sake to knock it off, or for specific outcomes. Well, okay, maybe a little. When my great hero Arthur Ashe had had AIDS for quite a while, he said: “God’s will alone matters. When I played tennis, I never prayed for victory in a match. I will not pray now to be cured of heart disease or AIDS.” So I pray, Help. Hold my friends in Your light.

There are no words for the broken hearts of people losing people, so I ask God, with me in tow, to respond to them with graciousness and encouragement enough for the day. Everyone we love and for whom we pray with such passion will die, which is the one real fly in the ointment, so we pray for miracles—please help this friend live, please help that friend die gracefully—and we pray for the survivors to somehow come through. Please help Joe survive Evelyn’s dementia. Please help this town bounce back. Please help those parents come through, please help these kids come through. I pray to be able to bear my cat’s loss. Help.

I try not to finagle God. Some days go better than others, especially during election years. I ask that God’s will be done, and I mostly sort of mean it.

In prayer, I see the suffering bathed in light. In God, there is no darkness. I see God’s light permeate them, soak into them, guide their feet. I want to tell God what to do: “Look, Pal, this is a catastrophe. You have got to shape up.” But it wouldn’t work. So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics.

We don’t have to figure out how this all works—“Figure it out” is not a good slogan. It’s enough to know it does.

There was so little air and light in my childhood, so little circulation and transparency and truth. When people and pets died, it was like the Big Eraser came and got them, except for a few mice and birds we buried in the backyard.

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, “You’ve got to get a thicker skin,” like now they might say, jovially, “Let go and let God.” Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then. At the same time, I didn’t want to ask my parents for help, because they had so much on their hands. And besides, I was the helper. I was the go-to girl for everyone in my family. And ours wasn’t a family who would ever, under almost any circumstances, ask others for help.

Plus, we didn’t pray. I was raised to believe that people who prayed were ignorant. It was voodoo, asking an invisible old man to intervene, God as Santa Claus. God was the reason for most of the large-scale suffering in history, like the Crusades and the Inquisition. Therefore to pray was to throw your lot in with Genghis Khan and Torquemada (which was the name of our huge orange cat) and with snake handlers, instead of beautiful John Coltrane, William Blake, Billie Holiday. My parents worshipped at the church of The New York Times, and we bowed down before our antique hi-fi cabinet, which held the Ark of the Covenant—Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk albums.

So, to recap, my parents, who were too hip and intellectual to pray, worshipped mostly mentally ill junkies. Our best family friends drank and one-upped one another trashing common enemies, like Richard Nixon and Christians. I think it is safe to say that not one single family member or close family friend prayed, except for my paternal grandfather, who had been a Christian missionary and who loved his grandkids in a way he hadn’t been able to love his kids. He had never once told my father that he loved him; that simply wasn’t done. Almost all I remember of my grandfather is how bald and gentle he was. Also, that people in public were in awe of him. I remember sitting in his lap, and the smell of his pipe. I was six when he was erased.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, with no proof, that my grandfather prayed for all of us kids. And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

The other day, my older brother, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prelude
• Help
• Thanks
• Wow
• Acknowledgments