by Anne Lamott
The only thing that helps, that has ever made it all sort of doable, is a deep connection with a couple of people. Maybe a friend, a kid, a spouse. Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn’t control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people. Looking back, I would and did pay any price for this love. The stronger person gets the other person water, listens, puts lotion on papery skin, reads aloud, and stays close. The weaker person has the harder job, of receiving. This is largely what we know of mercy—noticing, caring, accepting, helping, not running away. A person has committed to seeing us through, as we have committed to that person. This is the absolutely greatest miracle. By now, we know almost every aspect of ourselves, and thus of each other, the self-obsession, the generosity, the ambition, the gentleness, the greed, the magic, the visceral, the animal, the divine, the mealy-mouthed, and we embrace the person, now and as is, unto forever.
My son and I know each other as deeply as is humanly possible without knowing every single secret about each other’s lives. It is exhilarating and awful, for both of us; truth is always a paradox. As Frederick Buechner put it, “Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole.” And so does my son see me.
Some time ago I disgraced both of us with a snarky public comment about the only transgender person on earth whom I dislike. Regrettably, it was also the world’s most famous transgender person. The backlash stunned me: it was swift, huge, ugly. My attackers were like a mob with pitchforks, shaming adorable, progressive me. One of my son’s best friends transitioned from female to male, a man we both adore, so my son was mortified.
He asked me to apologize publicly. I didn’t want to, because the hundreds of people who attacked me were so vicious and in some cases so stupid. My son said that this was not the point. The point was that I had done something beneath me that had hurt a lot of people, and that I needed to make things right.
We talked on the phone about this and he said: “I love you, but you were wrong. You did an awful thing. Please apologize. I’m not going to let this go. And I won’t let you go, either.” He was in tears. I was sick to my stomach.
Later he sent an e-mail: “You need to do the right thing, Mom. I love you.”
I wrote to the public that I was deeply, unambiguously sorry, even though I secretly still felt misunderstood, as I had actually only quoted someone else’s snarky comment. I did this imperfectly, the best I could, admitting I was wrong. I expressed contrition. It was awful.
My son was grateful, but distant for a time. He said, “I love you, and I’ll talk to you when I can.” Extending mercy had cost him, and extending mercy to myself cost me even more deeply, and it grew us both, my having screwed up on such a big stage. It taught me that mercy is a cloak that will wrap around you and protect you; it can block the terror, the dark and most terrifying aspects of your own true self. It is soft, has lots of folds, and enfolds you. It can help you rest and breathe again for the time being, which is all we ever have.
I healed under the loving space my son offered me. It took me a while to get my confidence back, and his. The air under the cloak is a bit musty now, but there is, paradoxically, fresh air in the space, too. How can this be? It comes from the wellspring, which is not dependent on the environment but is inside you, and within all of us.
THREE
Gold Leaf
Rilke wrote: “I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” We got folded by trying as hard as we could to make everyone happy, to please everyone, and to fill every moment with productivity. Our grown-ups said this would bring approval, and approval would bring satisfaction, and they would like us more. But we also learned to sabotage ourselves so they wouldn’t feel eclipsed. High achievement made the family look good, but also seemed to be another nail in Dad’s coffin. We agreed to get folded at school and in jobs, to get ahead, shine the family star, fill our Swiss-cheese holes. We got folded and fooled into airless states of accomplishment, estrangement from ourselves, squandering our very short lives. Then we folded ourselves so we wouldn’t annoy or embarrass our kids.
Self-importance fueled by performance anxiety, people-pleasing, sloth, and bad self-esteem, wrapped us into small crisp squares like professionally laundered shirts.
I was there this week. I liked it briefly, because folded feels like home, small, familiar, hugged. I like smells of soap and steam and starch. Then it becomes oppressive and disorienting. Even a lot of caffeine and cheery new curtains don’t help.
We got creased in those places such a long time ago that it seems hopeless to begin the great unfolding now. Our integrity got broken. I am not sure we got strong at the broken places, although people love to say this happens. In truth, when I broke my toe, the doctor said, “It will take forever to heal, and never be quite as good as it was.” Life 101. It still hurts sometimes. This was just a toe bone. Big parts of us got broken, parts of our hearts, minds, and beings. Yet we keep getting up, lurching on. We dance with a limp.
When other people look hunched or pummeled, I know what to do and say, to help them recolonize their bodies and lives. I say: Stop the train. Be where your butt is. Maybe shift from foot to foot, as in chanting kirtan, or swaying a baby to sleep, because ritualized shifting keeps you a little shaken up—good shaken, unstuck. I would say: Life can be painful, but I am right here, and you have a good heart. This heart is who you are, not your bad mind.
I would tell a person, “You have the right to remain silent. Would you like a nice cup of tea? Some M&M’s? Let’s sprawl, unfold these creaky wings.”
But this unfolding could mean we miss deadlines, by days or decades, ending our careers and harming our standing. Our parents bit the bullet, stayed in bad marriages, kept jobs they hated. That is the American way.
Some of us have spent our whole lives protecting kids and pets from our parents, even parents who did not yell or get out the belt. We had younger siblings to save, and whole litters of kittens and cousins with their own neglectful or malnourished parents. We were the light of the world, by which other kids could be led out of Egypt. We walked on eggshells, we tiptoed and tightrope-walked. Of course our feet ached, like Chinese bound feet in plaid Keds. The effect of being hobbled, and failing to save our siblings, the cats, ourselves, was anxiety, endless striving to do better, and be more admired by the world.
The path away from judgment of self and neighbor requires major mercy, both giving and, horribly, receiving. Going without either of them leads to fundamentalism of all stripes, and fundamentalism is the bane of poor Mother Earth. Going without engenders blame, which offers its own solace but traps us like foxes. We trick out box traps with throw rugs and vases, until the pain grows too big. Then the only way out of jail is forgiveness.
There should be an app, with a checklist or map. But no, the way out takes admitting that you’re wrong and sorry. No, no, anything but that. Forgiving people makes you weak. Push them away! Lewis Smedes said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” But I can’t launch forgiveness of my own volition, from my air-traffic-controller mind. We avail ourselves through failure, service, singing, silence, neighbors, sorrow.
To have borne broken hearts and seen such broken lives around the world is what gave us a shot at becoming mercy people. My minister friend Bill Rankin tells me that in Malawi, men in the villages “stand back” unto death and allow women and children to have the few available antiretroviral medications. The motive of the men is the merciful determination that the children should be given a chance to survive, and should not be forced to live without their mothers. We can be those men. We were. Most young children are.
One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.
The ancient Chinese had a practice of embellishing the cracked parts of valued poss
essions with gold leaf, which says: We dishonor it if we pretend that it hadn’t gotten broken. It says: We value this enough to repair it. So it is not denial or a cover-up. It is the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold leaf, which draws the cracks into greater prominence. The gold leaf becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings increase.
That is so un-American. Most of the time we throw it out, cover it up with a doily, or patch the crack so we can still sell the item. This other way is to save our valuables with our own hands, to pass on to our children, nieces, and nephews Auntie’s chipped Inuit carving, Uncle Will’s journals. And if they toss Uncle Will’s journals, rich in memories and minutiae of this family’s story? That’s on them. Not our fault, for once. (Reason enough to get out the gold leaf.) We are invited to be part of creation, like planting shade trees for children whose parents were born last week.
• • •
Misericordia is Latin for “mercy,” from misericors, “merciful,” which is in turn derived from misereri, “to pity,” and cor, “heart.” Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles. It’s not something you do—it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.
This is the point of the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke, where mercy is shown not by those of education or authority, those who are actually paid to teach mercy, but by the single least likely person for miles. The disciples had been grappling with Jesus’ news that He was the Messiah and was going to be killed. They were in despair, as they had been hoping that the promised Messiah would be a little more like General George S. Patton. (In Matthew’s Gospel, when Peter denied this, insisting that Jesus didn’t have to die, Jesus rocked out on him, calling him Satan for his disbelief. But Luke loved Peter and Photoshopped this part out.)
In this passage, Jesus realized that his time had come to be crucified, as had been foretold. He and his crew would travel from Galilee to Jerusalem. It was to be his last journey, the new Exodus. First it was out of Egypt. Now it was out of the flesh, into spirit, into what was eternally real. But there was a tiny problem: The shortcut most travelers took, instead of the long way alongside the River Jordan, was through Samaritan territory, which was dangerous for good Jews, with their laws about ritual cleanliness. And everyone in his right mind hated the Samaritans. They were outcasts, sworn enemies.
When the group entered Samaritan territory, Jesus sent two disciples to a village to book some rooms, as Samaritans would sometimes rent rooms to Jews. The men at the local inn said no. The disciples went back to Jesus and asked if they should call down fire from heaven. I love this. Jesus reminded them that despite the age-old hostility between Jews and Samaritans, they were all brothers now. It was supposed to be a journey of peace, for people who’d hated each other forever.
He asked the disciples, “What is the greatest commandment?” That we love God with all our heart, and love our neighbors as ourselves, said one man, learned in the Torah, trying to justify his hard heart. That’s nice, said Jesus, but who is our neighbor? The man was looking for a loophole. He was hoping that neighbors meant other Jews, whom he was glad to be kind to, as they were family. “Who is my neighbor?” He didn’t want to have to love the Samaritans.
Jesus answered with this parable: A man, a Jew, got badly beaten up on the way to Jericho, in the Jordan Valley. He shouldn’t have been traveling alone. There were gangs, roving bands like ISIS, rebels with a political agenda. The badly injured man was left in a ditch by the side of the road.
The first person to pass by was a highly respected Jew, probably a priest, someone able to hold worship in temples. The priest saw the poor man, and made the decision to walk as fast and as far away as possible. He had an excuse: he could have said he thought the guy was dead; touching the body would have rendered him ritually unclean, unable to do worship for a week.
The second person to pass by was a Levite, on staff at the temple, like an altar server. A significant religious person, who by law was supposed to come to the aid of marginalized people, he also crossed the street.
A third man came by. The disciples were all expecting him to be a nice Galilean, like them. They were humble, ha, not like the snobs from Jerusalem in their Jimmy Choos. They were good Jews, men of the people. But an improbable hero came by—a Samaritan. The disciples would have expected him to rummage through the man’s pockets, take his wallet and keys.
Rather, Luke reports, “he was moved by pity.” He took care of the injured man, and hoisted him up onto his donkey, which meant he himself would have to walk. He took the man to an innkeeper, who welcomed them both.
A diocesan priest I know says that God is the welcome and the welcomers. The welcome comes through people—Samaritans, drag queens, zealots moved by pity.
Who is our neighbor? The person who helps us when we are suffering. And implicit in this story is Jesus’ saying, You go do this, too. Be a neighbor. The reviled Samaritan for us might be a person at the opposite end of the political spectrum. In Texas, it would be a drag queen tottering up to a Tea Partier in a ditch; in California, a John Bircher helping out on the streets of Oakland.
Those of us who have gotten sober all began as the man in the ditch, shown mercy and welcome by sometimes strange people, with bolo ties or neck tattoos. They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, at our most ruined, to speak gently to ourselves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever.
All I could do for a while was not drink, period. Wake up, not drink for a while, overeat, nap, not drink for a little longer. Then I began to unfold the best I could, so set in my neurotic ways, an origami pinwheel opening each of its flaps to become its original self.
I have seen and heard so many mercy stories since:
In 2015, nine people were slaughtered at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and their relatives spoke forgiveness. In the 1990s in South Africa, during the hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a woman confronted the man who had burned her husband and son in front of her. She was asked what his punishment should be. She said she wanted him in prison forever, not put to death, and she wanted to adopt him, so she could give him all the love she could no longer give her husband and son. She let herself out of jail. The same is true of teenage Tibetan nuns tortured in prison who prayed for their Chinese guards, held them with mercy because they could see that the guards had created lives of suffering for themselves. This is not pity as if “they” are separate and different, but as if they are “us,” and share our human lot. The Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, reached out to the widow of the man who killed five of their schoolgirls in 2006, so she could be included in the circle of mourning and comfort.
One last story, about the aforementioned diocesan priest: In 1976, my friend Tom got sober with the very hip in the People’s Republic of Berkeley. Everything was okay in early sobriety, except that he felt utterly insane all the time, filled with hostility, fear, and self-contempt. Then he was transferred to Los Angeles, where he did not know a soul. Another Jesuit told him to call a diocesan priest named Terry.
Terry had been sober for five years, so Tom thought he was God. They made plans to go to a men’s stag gathering one night, which was being held in the back of the Episcopal cathedral, in the heart of downtown L.A. It was Terry’s favorite place to be on earth, full of low-bottom drunks and junkies—people from nearby halfway houses, bikers, jazz musicians. “There I am, on my first date with this new friend Terry, who turns out to be clumsy and ill at ease, an introvert with no social skills.”
Terry asked Tom how he was, and after a moment, he replied, “I’m just scared.” Terry no
dded and said gently, “That’s right.”
Terry took him to the church, near Skid Row, where all these rough-looking alkies were hanging out in the yard. The sober people Tom knew in Berkeley all seemed like David Niven in comparison.
Terry directed Tom to a long flight of stairs. Tom started walking up, jaws clenched, muttering to himself tensely like the guy in front of him, a man his own age who was stumbling, and maybe not quite yet on his first day of sobriety.
“The only things getting me up the stairs are Terry and a dozen other men behind us, pushing us forward every so often, and my conviction that this is as bad as it’s ever going to be—that if I can get through this, I can get through anything.” Then, all of a sudden, the man in front of Tom soiled himself. Shit ran down onto his shoes, but he just kept walking. He didn’t seem to notice.
Tom clapped a hand over his mouth and nose, and his eyes bugged out. He couldn’t get out of line, because of the crush behind him. And so, holding his breath, he stepped into a windowless meeting room.
It gets better: The greeter in the doorway, a biker with a shaved head and a Volga-boatman mustache, got one whiff of the man with shit on his shoes and threw up.
“You’ve seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming? That’s me. But Terry enters the room right behind me. There’s pandemonium, no one knows what to do. The man who soiled himself stumbles and plops down in a chair. A fan blows the terrible smells of shit and vomit around the room.”