Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

First published: New York: Pantheon Books, 1999

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Autobiography; essays; meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s): Attachment and detachment; children; conversion; friendship; self-knowledge

Overview

In Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott describes her faith journey as “a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another.” Her chapter titles frequently show evidence of her Christianity, with titles that either describe religious principles, such as “forgiveness,” or the importance of family, such as “Mom” and “Dad.” However, as she shows, she began life in a home where emotions were repressed and religion was heavily disparaged. She has strong secular roots as well, and she freely admits to being a liberal who supported George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. Because her own journey was so capricious, she recognizes and respects plurality, transforming even her most intense religious experiences into moments with which all her readers can identify through the use of humor and vivid description. Many of these essays originally appeared in slightly different form online in Salon magazine.

Lamott begins with her childhood: She experiences an emotional distance from her parents in childhood, loving the feeling of belonging at a Catholic mass with a friend’s family. Later, moving to a castle whose emptiness echoes her family’s emotional repression, she becomes close to another friend’s mother, this one a Christian Scientist. This mother believes that God is a mother as well as a father, and that she, Anne Lamott, is beautiful, down to the wild and kinky hair that elicits her father’s friends’ racist jokes about her supposed mulatto heritage. Playing tennis with this woman’s daughter, Shelly, and sleeping over at her house, Lamott hides from the rest of her life. As her teen years progress, she becomes increasingly involved in drugs and alcohol, even getting drunk with her father one night while her mother is studying for a law exam. One college class draws her closer to God, and a group of Jewish friends celebrate her mock bat-mitzvah, but she drops out of college.

Lamott feels drawn to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church at the height of her addiction because the singing touches the places in her soul that those religious moments of childhood had reached. She cannot, however, bear to stay for the sermons, not wanting to be preached at about Jesus. After a weeklong alcohol and drug binge following an abortion, she starts hemorrhaging badly, and fear sobers her. Lying in bed after the bleeding stops, she realizes Jesus is there, invisible in the room with her. After that, though she does not stop drinking immediately, she senses Jesus as “a little cat” following her. After accepting Jesus, she begins gaining control of her addictions. She gets sober and a year later is baptized. She then fights her way through bulimia.

A second pregnancy brings her to a new turning point. After deciding not to have an abortion, she finds she can rely on her friends at St. Andrew’s to help her with her baby son, Sam. Similarly, after her best friend, Pammy, dies, Lamott realizes she must live joyfully in spite of death. Her faith carries her through the struggles of motherhood and the loss of her friend. It also gives her insights into everything from friends coping with a terminally ill child to another child’s overcoming a little of her fear of dogs to learning how to forgive.

Before her conversion, Lamott’s religion was “sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.” Even after choosing the Christian path, Lamott’s spirituality is unorthodox. Her moment of conversion was almost anticlimactic, but typically Lamott. She surrenders to her repressed religious yearnings with a curse followed by a resigned, “All right [Jesus]. You can come in.” After her formal baptism, she refuses to ignore the wisdom she finds in other religions, taking advice from Buddhists as willingly as from Christians. More than that, though she clearly takes her religion seriously, her sense of humor creates an open atmosphere where more than literal biblical interpretations have meaning.

Because her work lacks the moralizing critics might expect from a Christian author, Lamott’s message reaches a broad audience, even as it embodies the faith she expresses. Her writing draws on some of Christianity’s core themes, particularly that God loves everyone and grieving is a lifelong process, endurable only with God’s love. She also believes she can hear God in the deep quiet part of her soul, and several of the essays plumb the depths of that silence. Considered as a whole, Traveling Mercies represents a new kind of Christian literature, one that is open to faith of all kinds while still committed to strong religious values.

Christian Themes

Lamott’s most powerful messages include the strength of God’s love for all people, forgiveness, and miracles. She describes her own flaws unflinchingly; she feels God loved her even when she was an addict living on a houseboat and recovering badly from her abortion. She describes a priest friend’s coming to Christ as feeling like an unwanted article at a pawnshop who is, unexpectedly, given a reprieve because Jesus agrees to take his place on the shelf. She comes to faith herself only after experimenting with several religions, which leaves her with a powerful respect for wisdom from a variety of sources.

Particularly in her emergence from addiction and bulimia, she relies on outside guidance. A priest helps her begin dealing with her alcoholism and drug addictions, and a therapist assists her in finding ways to cope with bulimia. When she becomes pregnant a second time (with Sam), a minister tells her to listen to the quiet parts of her soul when deciding whether or not to have an abortion. This guidance carries her through other crises, and she even makes a “help” box, where she puts the problems she is turning over to God and letting go of herself.

Without preaching to her audience, Lamott suggests that she could never have emerged from her addictions, from her bulimia, or from her lost childhood without God’s love, even if she did not know it at the time and even if she could not know who his agents would be. She repeatedly relies on God’s love and forgiveness to find herself, and she repeatedly describes events—even small things, such as Sam’s enjoyment of an inner-tube trip on his birthday—as miraculous, recognizing God’s presence in the smallest parts of her life.

In coming to terms with her father’s and her friend Pammy’s deaths, Lamott conveys the significance of God as a comfort in times of strife. After Pammy’s death, she goes on vacation with Sam to Ixtapa, Mexico, where she realizes that it is a fallacy to believe grief passes quickly, but we must live with joy anyway. She realizes that grieving is necessary, that we carry pieces of our lost loved ones with us for our entire lives, and that God helps when the grieving hurts too much. Still brokenhearted twenty years after her father’s death, she nevertheless realizes that the mud to which we will all return is wonderful for itself, and she can live, enjoy life, and write because of love, because of God, and she is grateful.

Sources for Further Study

Jones, Malcolm, Patricia King, Sherry Keene-Osborn, and Mike Hendricks. “Touched by the Angels.” Newsweek 133 (May 3, 1999): 71-72. Focuses on Jan Karon, Iyanla Vanzant, and Anne Lamott as three best-selling mainstream religious authors.

Lamott, Anne. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead, 2005. Continues Lamott’s spiritual journey. Essays cover topics ranging from faith in the face of turning fifty to her mother’s death to Sam’s teenage years.

Merwin, W. S. The Rain in the Trees. New York: Knopf, 1988. Merwin’s poetry resonates with Lamott; here the poems discuss love and the loss of Eden through progress. Lamott introduces Traveling Mercies with an excerpt from Merwin’s “Thanks.”

Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine U. Henderson. “Anne Lamott.” In Inter/view: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. While pregnant with Sam, Lamott discusses her Northern California roots and how all of her books are about being lost and found.

Tennant, Agnieszka. “’Jesusy’ Anne Lamott.” Christianity Today, January 21, 2003. A sympathetic perspective on an iconoclastic and challenging writer whose radical Christianity is, perhaps surprisingly, rooted in tradition.

Tippett, Krista, host. “The Meaning of Faith.” Speaking of Faith. St. Paul, Minn.: American Public Media, originally aired in October, 2004. Streaming audio available at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org. An interview with Lamott and individuals from three other religions discussing the meaning of faith in their lives.