Just finished reading Anne Lamott’s “Hallelujah Anyway – Rediscovering Mercy.” Like stumbling into an oasis. From the back cover:


“I’m not sure I even recognize the ever-presence of mercy anymore, the divine and the human: the messy, crippled, transforming, heartbreaking, lovely, devastating presence of mercy. But I have come to believe that I am starving to death for it, and my world is, too.”

There was this stunning paragraph a few chapters in:

“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.”

One of the last chapters in the book begins and ends like this:

“What is the medicine for one’s own awfulness? There is evidence of its existence, in a salty energy that periodically causes a holy thirst, to be healed, or to help heal, to extend ourselves, to receive. … Anyone who has gotten sober has been given the medicine, not, unfortunately, by single dose in a tiny paper cup, but bit by bit, over time, with a lot of writing involved.”
…
“Over and over, in spite of our awfulness and having squandered our funds, the ticket-taker at the venue waves us on through. Forgiven and included, when we experience this, that we are in this with one another, flailing and starting over in the awful beauty of being humans together, we are saved.”

Thank you, Anne Lamott. I needed this.

 
Cheers,
BuFoon Steve Gillard