Anne LaMott's Traveling Mercies

I bought Radioheads’s OK Computer in 1999, three years after it was released. I traded my white trainers for hip Steve Maddens in 2004. In so many words, my habit: to arrive fashionably late to fashionable trends. At least three years late.

So, in good form, I’m just now reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, nearly a decade after her copyright. Her message: God’s pursuit of humans is in the muck of living. Anne’s story shows that there’s nothing laudable in us to prompt God’s interest. And that’s not to say she’s despicable. Her writing is so beautiful, you could only imagine she is the same. The way you’d imagine Tom Hanks if you met him, consistent. Or Don Miller.

I’m chewing on the ideas of her coming to faith, wrestling with the messiness of it, finding myself more willing to admit my own addictions and favorite sins because she’s so unconcerned with my thoughts of her life. Maybe I should be less concerned too. She knows who she is—or is okay with not knowing—and I’m just a spectator invited to engage in, as the subtitle says, her thoughts on faith. Through the first hundred pages, her emotive power has been the most moving part of my experience. There are lines where I felt so strong a desire to weep, my chest would tighten and my lungs draw close to each other. I felt short of breath and inwardly convulsing, like what I suspect would happen if you applied a heart defibrillator to someone in no need of it. I wouldn’t be upset if everyone on the planet read the scene where the black woman held the AIDS victim like a crow, sang, and wept, this after a year of lifelong stereotypes about gay people. But don’t skip to it. Let her take you there. So beautiful.