by Anne Lamott
So there’s nice old Jesus one afternoon, sitting near Jacob’s well, pooped, when a Samaritan woman approached to draw water, a dirty, disgusting Samaritan. Why was the woman there at such an odd time? All the “good” women came early, when it was still cool, women who wouldn’t go near her because she was a prostitute.
Jesus asked her for a drink of water, from her vile Samaritan utensil. You just didn’t do this. Jesus and the Jews went to elaborate lengths to observe purity, and His eating with hookers and tax collectors was one of the things the Pharisees later charged Him with. It’s mercy beyond imagining that He would even approach her, and then create a container for the two of them, and then remain in conversation with her. It’s the longest conversation Jesus has with any one person in the Gospels.
The woman said, “Let me get this straight—you want me to get you water? Unclean Samaritan me? What’s up with that, with a Jew wanting water from a Samaritan?”
She insisted that the rift between Jews and Samaritans could not be healed. He said the time would come when they would all worship together. He said she would learn to worship God instead, in spirit and in truth, the opposite of the material world, not degraded bodies and segregated temples, but what is real, heartful, integral, merciful, eternal. It would no longer be, “I’ll worship God here, you stay over there.”
He meant you didn’t compartmentalize life or yourself into two bins, into good/bad, clean/dirty, us/them. Jesus said Samaritans would be treated with honesty and fairness.
This blew her mind. Jesus told her, “Now go call your husband.” He knew she didn’t have one. He wanted her to move out of the lie, into authenticity, but first she had to admit to how she was living her life. People in recovery would call it taking a thorough and fearless moral inventory and then sharing that with another person. Jesus offered himself as a loving listener, a no-judging ear. He invited her to come clean. His invitation was a call to a new life, not to be a receptacle for men, but rather, a carrier of the good news. There was a huge love loose in the world, of which she was part and parcel; this is the kingdom of God. It was an invitation to be changed, to have a complete psychic change from ultimate outsider, to welcomed, beloved.
She said, Oh, no, thanks.
I love this. She kept lying. Jesus did not stomp away. He stayed with her. Such mercy and patience. He countered by saying that she wouldn’t be getting water at noon unless something was seen as being wrong with her. That must have hurt. So, Jesus said, let’s talk about that. That is where you’ll start from—from what is real, instead of from the lie. He had to badger her into accepting a call to a sweeter life.
The woman finally confessed to what her life was like, and He said, Well done, girlfriend—welcome. He told her about a spring within her, a well that wouldn’t run dry, a holy breath that connected her to the whole, to the illimitable, to love.
She was transformed. Then she did what the sober women who fished me out of the bad waters did: she told others. She left the well in the confidence that she would be welcome, having just tasted this welcome, the great shalom, or that if she wasn’t, it absolutely didn’t matter. She didn’t need the approval of the rough men; she had the gold ticket in her pocket. She told her family, neighbors, former clients, about this strange man she’d met at Jacob’s well. Why would they believe the town hooker? Because they could see with their own eyes an astonishing transformation, and they wanted what she had.
She’s all of us who have felt marginalized by society, who have come from chaotic or stifled families, walking around on eggshells even as small children thinking we were shit. We failed to redeem our parents’ lives, failed to fulfill their expectations. We got the bad message in our families, we got it from magazines and TV, we got it at school, from children, and from homework that revealed we either weren’t up to it or were teachers’ pets, kissing ass. You couldn’t win for losing. It was like the carnival, where you have to be tall enough for the ride, and you aren’t yet; and then you’re too tall—you missed it!
All it takes is one safe person to listen, to hear, to noodge us to start over and not give up. My safe true person was Loretta. I was no longer so scared that my shame and inadequacies would be trumpeted, because she let me see hers, and we laughed. The truth was no more our inadequacies than our personalities, our personas, our histories. As C. S. Lewis supposedly said, we don’t have souls, we are souls: we have bodies.
I didn’t see Loretta for years, while she was drinking. Then one day my mom, who was sick with Alzheimer’s and diabetes, asked me to come down to the assisted living place and meet her fantastic new nurse. It was Loretta. When I arrived, she was cutting my mom’s short, sparse hair, and my mother was beaming, and as regal as the queen. Loretta and I rejoiced. We both looked like soft-sculpture versions of our younger selves. She still wore her hair in a bob. She was no longer drinking, although she admitted to a fondness for prescription drugs. She was still cranky. My mother fell in love with her, and she with my mom. My mom literally got to feel married for the last two years of her life, God is my witness. It was a miracle that my lonely mother got this. Loretta gave her shots, haircuts, neck rubs. They talked endlessly about me, and their cats.
Loretta and I were never out of each other’s lives again for long, up to her last day, when she died last year at the same assisted living place, loved by the nurses, her brothers, nieces, and her two closest sober women from the old days, including me.
Jesus said to the woman at the well, Be like me: be true to who you really are; be in truth, share, and above all, try to forgive. This is such bad news for those of us who would like to even the score at some point. On bad days we can still feel, All my enemies are drowning and it’s the best day of my life. Jesus says, That’s fine, honey, nice try; I still love you, but maybe you would consider restarting the forgiveness stuff? Maybe you might practice inclusion? I still remember the droning voice of the preacher in Hush Puppies who taught me this, and that I stayed, uncomfortable and understanding next to nothing, until I heard the words I needed. But the choir fed me until then. Their voices were like a life raft in choppy waters, and the lightweight boat held me, and the harmonies of words I couldn’t make sense of gave voice to a beauty inside me, which I could not yet access, and could not possibly have made by myself.
NINE
The Open Drawer
Mercy started to leach out of me when I was five years old, at the channel between the Bolinas Lagoon and Stinson Beach. I began to shove mercy and trust into a drawer, as instructed by my parents, one late afternoon in 1959, at the skinny portal between the lagoon and the ocean, when I was attacked.
I was with my tall, handsome father, fishing at the seawall that ran above the treacherous rocks and muscular waters of the channel. My brother Stevie was one month old, at home with our mother. I was running around, playing on the rocks and the weedy dirt where the wall ended. Seals cruised up and down, eyeing us humans curiously. There were a few fishermen beside my dad. They usually pulled up tangles of seaweed. I was not allowed out of my father’s sight—once a dog got sucked out to sea there. So much can happen and change on a dime in that rough and constricted space.
I was all innocence and playful curiosity that day, a budding scientist, nose in the weeds, studying bugs. I might have put away my merciful disposition a few weeks later anyway, when kindergarten began, with the bullying on the blacktop that started as soon as the older boys gleefully noticed how frizzy my hair was. On this particular day, my dad had fallen into conversation with another fisherman, who was older, balding, wearing glasses. They stood side by side, each with a pole in one hand, a beer in the other. My father had binoculars around his neck to admire the white pelicans above us, the birds on the beach to our right, plovers and sandpipers, egrets on the Stinson shore across the water. As my father and the other man were talking, I came close to check in. The man looked over his shoulder, saw me, and asked Dad, “Is that you
r daughter?” My father smiled and nodded. The man said, “Where’d she get that hair?” Then he used the most evil word on earth, in a declaration about who must have been hiding in the woodpile. And my dad, the love of my life, my civil-rights-marching dad, laughed.
I don’t know how I knew that this was an attack; I did not know this other man was disgusting, did not know about the pornography of institutionalized racism, or that any man, even an idiot, sometimes counted more to my father than his daughter. I knew only that they were laughing at me, that I had done something wrong, something illicit, or more likely, that I was something wrong.
They went back to fishing. My dad did not wink at me, or roll his eyes, to show that the guy was an ignorant jerk, that his words meant nothing. Rather, on the way home, noticing my cringing state, he suggested I get thicker skin. This would turn out to be the battle cry of my childhood, I should have thicker skin, i.e., just be someone else entirely.
That was all I remember about that day, but I was no longer the same girl who had clambered into the backseat of our Dodge that morning. What went in the drawer that day, besides innocence? The child’s assumption that the people who were with one’s parents were safe. And curiosity. Not long after, I began getting migraines, and a wicked sense of humor.
We came into this life so generous, alive, unarmored, and curious. Curious, in the best, silliest, most fixated, life-giving way.
Fifty-seven years after that day, and ten miles away from that beach, a very depressed teenage friend had to take a leave of absence two months before the end of her freshman year in college. She was beautiful, with thick, silky hair and long legs. Squashed by school, her family, the culture of beauty and success, and her own bad brain, she had taken to cutting. She could hardly stand to be awake. Her parents wisely offered her refuge without demands or their hot breath on her neck.
She slept a lot and read graphic novels. Then one day, out in the garage, looking for a box of her early poetry, she found an empty aquarium.
And so much came back to her: wonder, focus, caring. She filled the aquarium with water and tadpoles from a local pond. The water looked so awful and unappetizing, but it was the water the tadpoles knew, and they thrived. They’re fascinating, in a spermy sort of way, with bulges below their heads that are going to be legs. Down the road, the legs will appear and the tails will disappear—not zooooop, but slowly and clumsily, from under the bulge of skin. They’re black, plump, and shiny, the size of papaya seeds.
Then the young woman did the most terrifying thing of all: she made a mistake. She added too much boiled spinach. The water began to look like something out of Lord of the Rings, or pea soup. The tadpoles developed white stuff on their bodies. She worried they could die. She had fouled the pond water through her own zeal. But God is merciful and the girl was smart and resourceful, so she scooped out much of the spinach and diluted the water with more pond water. A few tadpoles died all at once, but somehow she did not take the deaths as hard proof that she was defective. She made a trumpet mouthpiece of her fist, played “Taps,” moved on.
You got to see the girl’s heart and attentiveness, just as when she’d been a child, dreaming of a future as a scientist—studying this thrilling stuff, a microcosm of creation, where you can actually see what happens in creation with your very own eyes. Other people, not paying attention, could see the tadpole and the frog, but she wanted to see in between, like the silence between musical notes, where the mystery is.
When the tadpoles grew legs, she started feeding them mealworms. When they turned into frogs the size of her pinkie fingernail, she returned them to the pond, on the grassier side, where there was cover and shade from the sun and predators: mercy as shade.
She went back to the pond for another generation of tadpoles. She was able to feel joyous responsibility again for the first time in a while. She talked incessantly about the tadpoles, with excitement and worry. We could see the bright kid again, the eccentric, brilliant, curious scientist eight years old. Here with these tadpoles in murky water was a clear channel. Here was a tiny future that she could possibly work with again.
• • •
Mercy creates a future for the downtrodden, hopeless, and hungry. The Book of Ruth tells the story of a young Moabite woman’s love for her Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, after the death of Naomi’s sons, one of whom was Ruth’s husband. Ruth’s love and loyalty induced her to leave her homeland: “Where you go, I will go, your God will be my God, and your people my people.” She accompanied Naomi back to the land of Israel, across the Jordan River. Ruth was a survivor—she adjusted, in chaos, to new surroundings, and found a job as a farm worker, willing to be a gleaner in the fields, gathering up leftover grain and grapes, so she and Naomi could eat. Ruth was very real—she’d been slapped around by life. She was practical, and faithful: We’ll eat, there’s a roof over our heads, we’ll be friendly to each other. Such blessing.
Her devotion, loyalty, and hard work came to the attention of a Jewish landowner named Boaz, who had instructed his laborers to leave behind extra grain in the field. Gleaning creates a larger consciousness, that we are all in this together, symbiotically. It’s an infinitely more merciful theory than trickle-down, where we’ll collect everything and keep the best on top, and maybe some will spill over for the bootstrap people to fight over. No: the wheat, the grapes, are already there. Just don’t take them all. Always leave some behind.
Goodness and hope can come out of that—in the smallest gestures: sharing some of your food, picking up litter, helping search for the lost, welcoming home the found. Then you have open doors that had been shut, with moments of holy kindness and generosity, in which we see the outreach of God or goodness. We see loving destiny: Boaz marries Ruth. They become King David’s great-grandparents. Ruth is one of four women listed by name in Matthew’s messianic genealogy, from Abraham to Mary.
I’ve tried to teach my Sunday-school kids this as the ultimate mercy story, but they won’t have it. They can’t relate to Ruth, who is too pure. But they always like the story of Joseph in Genesis, Joseph of the coat of many colors, because there are evil brothers and a merciful hero to whom they can relate, and best of all, blood.
Joseph’s brothers, jealous of their father’s love for him and disturbed by his creepy prophetic dreams, sold him into Egyptian slavery as a child. They killed a goat and poured its blood onto his beautiful coat, and showed it to their father, Jacob, as proof that his most beloved son had been killed by wild beasts. (This is why the kids love the story.) Joseph ended up in Pharaoh’s court, and because of his prophetic dreams slowly rose to be the powerful food czar in the court. He saved Egypt and the surrounding countries from famine. His brothers, starving in nearby Canaan, came to Egypt seeking food, and when it was their turn to petition Joseph, they didn’t recognize him. He recognized them and was very harsh at first, until they spoke of his father and youngest brother, the baby, Benjamin. Then his heart softened. He showed them mercy on steroids: first he forgave them, and then he gave them a future. They had made him homeless, but he gave them a home, near him, in Pharaoh’s favor. They went back to Canaan for Jacob and Benjamin, and the family was made whole again.
Mercy began as forgiveness, and then became: Here’s the food you need, and why don’t you put your roots down here? Mercy is: Let’s be brothers again. Let’s sit at table. Joseph was in tears of grief and love at the end of the story, with the men who destroyed his life and his father’s. He showed the brothers who they were—as beloved and cared for as the youngest—and the story shows how we were, too, before we put away childish things. Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment. You open the drawer that was shut and you take out the precious treasures that you hid there so long ago and, with them, the person who marvels at tadpoles, who pulls for people to come clean and then have a second chance, who aches and intervenes for those being bullied, forgives the evil brothers
and unforgivable you.
We are all gigantically flawed, such screwups. Everyone is broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. We are the brothers, and we are Joseph. Or at least we were as children. Maybe we temporarily wanted people who hurt us to be punished, but then we couldn’t bear for them to suffer or be humiliated, because we saw ourselves in them. My older brother used to hit me pretty hard and get sent to his room without dinner. But I’d sneak him oranges later.
Fifty-seven years after the fishing experience, the memory burbled up one day, like a blob of oil in a lava lamp. And I forgave the men. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.
My therapist had begun practicing a new technique where one follows the movements of light back and forth across a two-foot bar. It is similar to hypnosis, although one is not put under into a trance. She asked me for my earliest most traumatic memory, and I told her about my father and the fisherman. She asked how it left me feeling. I said I had felt ugly to men and thus under constant threat of attack.
The doctor asked me if there was an advisor in my adult life, and I told her about a trusted woman named Robyn. The doctor said to ask Robyn to enter this memory. Robyn scooped me up, nuzzled me, made a cooing sound that was almost Japanese. The doctor asked if I could send in a defender, and I sent in my friend Doug. He strode over to the fisherman and shoved him against the seawall. Then he looked at my dad with contempt and said, “You’re a disgrace, Ken.” He came over to huddle with Robyn and me.