Hallelujah Anyway by Anne Lamott

I read this book just before my mother died, shortly after my father died. I felt like it was very good timing. I love Anne Lamott. Her books Traveling Mercies, Plan B, Grace (Eventually), Stitches, Small Victories and Help Thanks Why are some of my favorites.

It's been a while since I've read those books, but it seems like one difference between them and this is that Hallelujah Anyway has less stories or vignettes, and more where Anne is talking about mercy or life, without necessarily telling a story.

This review speaks a little to that. At first, I wasn't so sure I was liking this book as much as her others because of that. I often think I am "all about the story" when I read. But as I read and re-read this book, I appreciated it more and more.

The title comes from a gospel song that Lamott quotes as "'hallelujah anyway.' Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy." That feels true to me. In spite of the death of my dad, followed by the death of my mom 2 months later, and the death of my young cousin in what seems like the beginning of the prime of his life, and the pending death of a friend's son at the age of 11. In spite of all that, hallelujah anyway.

The subtitle of the book is "Rediscovering Mercy." She draws her theme from Micah 6:8 "What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Lamott says, "Oh is that all?" and calls herself and her friends "Arrogance R Us" when she says that walking humbly "isn't going to happen anytime soon." See what I mean? Don't you love it? She also writes, "We think that if our values aren't the correct ones, we would have other ones, which would then be the correct ones." Ha ha. But of course.

And more. "We know mercy is always our salvation...But I wish it was something else. I wish it was being able to figure things out, at which I am very good, or to assign blame, at which I am better, or to convince people of the rightness of my ideas." Yes, wouldn't it be nice if that were true? If God and everyone else valued my figuring-out and blame-assigning and rightness-convincing skills, life would be so much easier!

I love her thoughts on schadenfreude (I love that word, too!).

But some days the only thing that can cheer me up is something bad happening to someone I hate, preferably if it went viral and the photo of the person showed hair loss and perhaps the lifelong underuse of sunscreen. My heart still leaps to see this. I often recall The New Yorker cartoon of one dog saying to the other, "It's not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail." This is the human condition, that in the face of death, cats must lose.

"Mercy means we soften ever so slightly," says Lamott. Maybe that's what I mean when I say my heart feels softer. Sometimes I imagine my heart feeling like a cool, kind of mushy but not drippy and messy thing. Maybe something like softened silly putty? Anyway, I seem to have more sympathy than I used to, less feelings of judgment. I still, as Anne says, feel that I am good at convincing people of my rightness, and often not only that, but others would be much better off if they would just realize my rightness, but somehow even that response is usually softer. Often I am able to feel have a better, more right opinion...and not say it! How about that?!

Lots of Anne's writing makes me laugh. It tickles me. A mis-reading also made me laugh. I read one sentence as "All I have to do in order to begin again is to love mercy, if I am to believe nutty old Mitch." It wasn't Mitch, it was Micah. But for a minute I was picturing good old Mitch, nutty and saintly, kind of like the angel Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life."

Her turns of phrase are so funny, and often so wise.

"The good news is that God has such low standards."

"Jonah is burped onto dry land..."

"But everyone steps on the cosmic banana peel sooner or later."

"We learned that we were all animals, like monkeys and goats, but with Edward Gorey minds..."

"Raising my son brought me the greatest, happiest years of my life. And it was hard, which somehow people had forgotten to mention would be part of the mix. Oops."

She writes about Peter's denial of Christ in Matthew's Gospel, when Jesus called Peter Satan, and said, "But Luke loved Peter and Photoshpped this part out."

About a room full of "alkies" near Skid Row, "The sober people Tom knew in Berkeley all seemed like David Niven in comparison."

Silence has been a fascination for me recently. There's the book and the movie Silence. I haven't seen the movie yet but I did read the book. The silence in that case is the silence of God. I heard a podcast by a writer who collects silence and talks about it as an "endangered species" that made me want to visit Olympic National Park. Lamott write about silence.

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.

I am sure I will re-read this book, as I will Anne Lamott's other books. So much to absorb, to think about, and to laugh with.