第 1 章
Faith Begins with One Step Forward
Anne Lamott's "Traveling Mercies" has become a spiritual touchstone for millions since its 1999 publication. This raw memoir of faith, addiction, and motherhood has been embraced by believers and skeptics alike for its unflinching honesty and unexpected humor. Oprah Winfrey called it "a spiritual journey that will make you laugh and cry," while The New York Times praised Lamott's ability to find "transcendence in the most unlikely places." The book's cultural impact extends beyond religious circles-it's frequently cited by recovery communities and writing workshops for its authentic voice. With over two million copies sold and translation into 28 languages, Lamott's spiritual journey continues to resonate with readers seeking meaning amid life's messiness.
第 2 章
Finding Faith Through Lily Pads of Safety
Anne Lamott's spiritual journey wasn't a dramatic leap but rather "a series of staggers from one safe place to another." Like lily pads holding her up while she grew, these seemingly random stopping points created a path toward faith. Her childhood in Tiburon included an incongruous palm tree that somehow mirrored her own out-of-place feelings. While her intellectual parents championed civil rights and atheism, young Anne secretly prayed at night, convinced someone was listening.
Her first lily pad was her Catholic friend's home, where she envied their large, chaotic family with their glamorous mother in stylish dresses-so different from her own short, practical atheist mother. Another sanctuary was found in her friend Shelly's home on Belvedere Lagoon, where Shelly's Christian Scientist mother Lee gathered neighborhood children like a "Marmie" figure. Lee introduced Anne to radical ideas: that God was both Father and Mother, and that Anne was beautiful despite her wild hair and awkward body. When nighttime fears overwhelmed her, Lee would lie beside her whispering the Twenty-third Psalm, helping her find "green pastures inside" while frightened thoughts "stampeded like lambs."
By sixteen, Anne lived two contrasting lives: one as a competitive tennis player traveling California with her doubles partner Bee, the other as a hippie high school student in San Francisco with her friend Pammy. When their English teacher returned as a born-again Christian, Anne and Pammy rebelled by studying great atheists like Bertrand Russell. The saved students' gentle, patronizing tenderness made Anne "capable of murder." That night, her father-who intensely disliked Christians-offered her wine with dinner. They got drunk together for the first time, and when she asked about quitting competitive tennis, he told her to follow her heart.
At college, Anne took religion classes to address something "tugging at her sleeve." She envied her Jewish friends who seemed smarter, funnier, and hipper-"the tribe of Lenny Bruce, Grace Paley, and Gloria Steinem." Everything changed when she encountered Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling." Reading about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac while still trusting God's goodness, she made her own "lurch of faith." When she told her Jewish friends she believed in God, they decided she must be bat mitzvahed. They taught her phonetic Hebrew, gave her the name Simcha (joy), and held a mock ceremony complete with Manischewitz wine.
These seemingly random stopping points-Catholic homes, Christian Science teachings, Jewish traditions-formed the unlikely path that eventually led her to faith. Each lily pad, however flimsy, held her up just long enough for her to reach the next one.
第 3 章
Facing Death and Finding Light
In August 1977, twenty-three-year-old Anne walked Duxberry Reef with her father and eighteen-year-old brother Steve, examining tide pools while trying to anchor themselves to earth because their world was ending. Though seemingly healthy at fifty-four-trim, in love, with all his children nearby-her father had been experiencing strange symptoms: his head "didn't quite work" and when typing, different thoughts emerged than intended. That day, they would learn he had a brain tumor-metastasized melanoma-something no one had survived.
The diagnosis devastated Anne, who secretly believed in God but kept it from her father, who worshipped only nature's beauty. He would have one good year after treatment, see her brother graduate, read a draft of her novel, but eventually the cancer would spread, his mind would deteriorate, and they would become his caretakers, playing his favorite music as he slipped into a coma.
After her father died, Anne moved to Tiburon at twenty-eight, broken-hearted and self-destructing. She'd split from the married love of her life and moved in with her friend Pat "for a couple of weeks" that stretched into eighteen months. Her days followed a grim routine: waking late, hungover, writing briefly, then secretly replacing the Scotch she'd consumed from Pat's bottle. She'd dispose of empty bottles along the bike path, terrified someone would discover her drinking problem.
Her life became utterly schizophrenic-outwardly functional but inwardly cracking. Making only $7,000 that year, she couldn't afford therapy and cycled between bulimia, drinking, and disastrous affairs with unavailable men. In photos from that time, she looked "skinny and furtive" beside her healthy friend Pammy, "like someone trying to disappear."
Eventually, the cracks webbed completely through her. Believing she would die soon, she called Bill Rankin, the new priest at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. When she told him she didn't think God could love her, he simply said, "God has to love you. That's God's job." He became the first Christian she could stand being around, and slowly, she began coming back to life.
The darkness continued when she became pregnant in 1984 while living in a tiny houseboat unit in Sausalito. She was so drunk each night that morning urine was too diluted for pregnancy tests to read positive. After her abortion, she stayed home drinking heavily. One night, bleeding badly, she became aware of Jesus sitting in the corner of her room. She told him, "I would rather die." But he persisted, following her "like a little cat wanting to be let in." Finally, after another Sunday at church, she surrendered: "Fuck it: I quit... All right. You can come in."
A year after getting sober, she was baptized, and later had her son Sam. Through death, addiction, and despair, she found that light persists even in the darkest places.
第 4 章
Finding Connection in Turbulent Times
Life's turbulence often creates unexpected connections. On a delayed flight returning from St. Louis, Anne-a terrified flier-tried to cope by helping fellow passengers, distributing magazines and chocolates, getting water for an elderly man, and entertaining babies. Seated between a Latvian woman with limited English and a man reading an apocalyptic Christian novel, she endured severe turbulence while reflecting on a miracle she'd witnessed at church: Ranola, a standoffish choir member, embracing Ken, a man dying of AIDS, as they sang together through tears.
When the turbulence subsided and a passenger had a heart attack, the three strangers in row thirty-eight shared unexpected laughter, creating their own small miracle of connection. These moments of human connection amid chaos became a recurring theme in Anne's spiritual journey.
Grief brought its own turbulence when her friend Pammy died of breast cancer. Three months after Pammy's death, Anne took her two-and-a-half-year-old son Sam to Ixtapa. Grief had changed them both-Sam became clingy and Oedipal, while Anne felt emotionally fenced off. She described grief as a "lazy Susan" that spun between underwater heaviness, rage, keening, and numbness.
Though initially regretting the return to a place filled with memories, she began experiencing moments of unexpected joy amidst the pain. As Jung said after his wife died, "It cost me a great deal to regain my footing. Now I am free to become who I truly am." She started to accept the finality of Pammy's death, though her emotions swung wildly between serenity and brokenness.
One afternoon, a one-legged man at the resort inspired her as he climbed the trapeze ladder with "disjointed grace" and swung through the air triumphantly. On their last day, she finally went snorkeling with her friend Tom, floating in the dreamy silence where she cried for Pammy but felt lighter remembering others' bravery and happiness.
Even parenting decisions created turbulence. Two days before Sam's seventh birthday at a writing conference in Idaho, they watched paragliders floating down from a mountain. When one landed nearby, Sam mentioned his upcoming birthday, and the pilot offered to take him paragliding in a tandem harness as a birthday gift. Anne was immediately torn between good parenting and overprotection.
That evening at dinner, she sought advice from two older people-a Zen adventure writer and his wife. The wife firmly opposed the idea: "He is too small. He has a lifetime of adventures ahead of him." Her husband countered: "You have to give your children their freedom, even if you do so with tremendous anxiety."
As they debated, Anne remembered their pastor Veronica's words about following God's direction by stepping into circles of illumination that appear just beyond our feet. When she got quiet and listened to her deepest feelings about Sam's paragliding, she felt euphoria at the thought of canceling. Sam celebrated his birthday inner-tubing down a gentle creek at the mountain's foot instead-an adventure she could handle.
Through these experiences, Anne discovered that connection with others helps navigate life's turbulence, whether on planes, in grief, or in parenting decisions.
第 5 章
The Sacred Community of Church
Sam is the only child he knows forced to attend church regularly, and he never wants to go despite his mother packing snacks, toys, and art supplies. When asked why she makes him, Anne jokes that she outweighs him by seventy-five pounds, but the truth is deeper: she wants to give him what she found-"a path and a little light to see by."
The people she knows with purpose, heart, and joy have deep spirituality and community. When she was desperate, St. Andrew's congregation "tied a knot" in her rope and helped her hold on. Unlike family gatherings that leave her feeling "skittishly self-obsessed," church feels like spiritual chemotherapy.
Seven months before Sam's birth, the congregation celebrated her pregnancy and provided for them. Elderly women on fixed incomes secretly slipped her money-especially Mary Williams, a beautiful woman in her mid-eighties who brings Baggies of dimes and calls Sam "our baby." She sits in the back, praising God in "a nonstop burble," and Sam hugs her every Sunday while she smells behind his ears "where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes."
Anne has learned that adults don't have shiny tools of wisdom, but rusty bent ones-"friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty"-that somehow prove sufficient. Once when Sam's friend Josh canceled a sleepover and devastated Sam, she prayed silently for help. When she mentally lifted Josh "off the hook of my judgment," he suddenly changed his mind. The next morning, Josh even asked to join them at church, where Mary Williams brought another bag of dimes-not because they needed them financially anymore, but because "we need another bag of dimes."
This sacred community extends beyond church walls. When friends learned their two-year-old daughter Olivia had cystic fibrosis, Anne and others built a metaphorical barn around the family. They raised money, showed up to clean and listen, took care of children, walked their dog, provided both privacy and companionship. They took Olivia's father out for dinner where he alternated between sobbing and hysterical laughter. They let her parents hate what was happening when they needed to, and offered "the gift of no comfort" when there was none to be had.
Churches around the country pray for Olivia weekly. As autumn approached with its viral dangers, Anne promised that when the cold winds came, they would come too-they'd been building this barn all along, and there would always be shelter. This is the essence of church for Anne-not just a building or rituals, but a community that shows up when needed most.
第 6 章
Embracing Imperfection and Grace
Anne has learned more about grace recently, confirming Auden was right: "If there when Grace dances, I should dance." Two weeks ago, she shared a stage with Grace Paley, her lifelong hero. She desperately wanted to dance beautifully but didn't-she was "more Peter Boyle in 'Young Frankenstein' than elegant performer." They bombed during their unscripted conversation, with Anne dominating, going on too long, being called "shrill and narcissistic" by one audience member.
Grace thought it was fine ("It was what it was"), but Anne was devastated. Her fear of failure is lifelong and deep-if you are what you do, and you do poorly, you're wiped out. Alone in her hotel room, she whispered: "Help."
She remembered a priest friend saying grace means accepting being ineffective and foolish. She remembered Grace's stories about self-forgiveness and caring for one another. She discovered the gift of failure-it breaks through tension about looking good, offering vulnerability's strange freedom.
For their second performance, she simply cooperated with the original plan of prepared talks. The evening went well. Grace was honest, sweet and tough, making everyone feel like fighting the good fight. Anne had wanted to be Cyd Charisse onstage, but what she wanted was acclaim, and what she got was Grace-lovely and plain in her faded dress and dark socks, smiling at her all night.
This embrace of imperfection extends to parenting. When Sam's blood tests showed concerning results, Anne spiraled into anxiety. In the bathroom at the blood lab, watching Sam contentedly do water experiments with urine specimen cups, she decided to simply show up and be as sane as possible. Looking in the mirror, she prayed for faith in God's will and protection, for her sense of humor to survive. The answer came: Go forth and shop.
They bought Sam a toy that transformed from race car to armed replicant. But her mind kept racing with images of him sick and weak. Back in another bathroom stall, she prayed "beggy prayers" while Sam played happily. She felt homesick for their old life before Sam's blood got "funky," for the comforting routines she believed held her together.
She remembered the prophet Elijah in his cave, waiting for God. First came wind, earthquake, and fire-but God wasn't in these. Instead, God came as a still small voice. Like Elijah, she needed to eat (smoothies with bananas, "the only known cure for existential dread") and find comfort in ordinary rituals-washing windows, giving the dog a flea bath, drawing with Sam.
Two days later, the doctor called with great news: she'd canceled their appointment with the oncologist. Sam just had an uninteresting allergy. Anne's Jesuit friend responded, "Baby? Sometimes deliverance is as cool as the air in a redwood grove."
Through these experiences, Anne learned that grace often comes through embracing imperfection rather than striving for an impossible ideal.
第 7 章
The Body's Wisdom and Wounds
After developing feelings for a man recently out of a relationship with a much younger woman, Anne found herself scrutinizing her middle-aged appearance with despair. Despite being both feminist and religious, she secretly believed she was her packaging-her skin, hair, and those triangular fat deposits at the tops of her thighs. A small voice inside urged her to pray.
Soon after, friends invited her to see "Latcho Drom," a film about gypsies. While eating a KitKat that made her underwear feel "instantly tight," she watched as the film revealed gypsy women of all ages. The middle-aged mothers looked exhausted like her-tired from walking the tightrope of raising children while caring for elders. Their faces showed the wear of constant exposure and responsibility.
But the old women-they danced with an incredible spirit that had kept them lit through howling winds. Unlike our culture where elderly dancers seem quaint or horrifying, these crones commanded respect. Having stopped chasing anything down, they radiated a freed life force. The younger gypsies clearly saw them as beautiful, like movie stars.
Meanwhile, a beautiful twelve-year-old girl watched the men in a tavern, and began to dance with mastery and purity. Leaving the theater, Anne realized she held both the girl of her past and the future crone inside her. What she truly wanted was what those crones had-time for deep breaths, watching closely, and enjoying what she'd feared: the sag, the invisibility, the understanding that life isn't about doing.
Her body's wisdom extended to her relationship with food. At thirty-three, she finally learned to feed herself. Until then, she cycled endlessly between eating, starving, bingeing, purging, getting fat, getting thin-being "good" and "bad." She discovered bulimia after her father's brain cancer diagnosis, feeling she'd found life's secret: emotional numbness without weight gain. Though she appeared fine outwardly-thin, cheerful, successful-inside she was obsessed, depressed, and physically damaged with heart palpitations.
After getting sober in 1986, she improved in almost every way except this: she couldn't escape the voice commanding her to binge and purge. Finally desperate, she called Rita Groszmann, who taught her to recognize actual hunger and feed herself appropriately. She began eating what she truly wanted-even frosting and Cheetos-without purging afterward. Learning to eat became about learning to live, about deciding to live.
Similarly, she learned to honor her body at the beach with her "beloved elderly aunties" (her thighs and butt). When four teenage girls in bikinis appeared with judging glances, she initially felt devastated until she realized their secret: they didn't think they were okay either. Her heart softened with compassion, though she still envied their small butts. Back in her room, she apologized to her "aunties" and pampered herself with lotion and makeup-not to disguise herself but to honor the girl still inside.
Through these experiences, Anne learned that the body carries both wisdom and wounds, and healing comes through acceptance rather than rejection.
第 8 章
Family: The Training Ground for Forgiveness
A photo of Anne and her mother holding hands on Stinson Beach captures a moment of genuine love amid complicated feelings. At seventy-three, her mother is short, round, and acts older than she is, needing help to walk on sand. Anne is often annoyed-she's not the tall, elegant, fiercely confident mother she would have chosen at the "Neiman-Marcus Mommy Salon." She's irritated by her mother's neediness, her lipstick-smeared teeth, her worship of Anne's brother. Yet she's learning to savor moments when her heart breaks with love for her.
Looking through old family photos, she sees their shared mouths but different eyes. In one childhood photo, she's wearing her mother's fancy gloves, her face "bathed in wonder." Their family pictures reveal "faces that are sweet and sad and bleak and glazed"-no ski vacations or Hawaiian beaches, just squinting on porches and posing beside old cars like their sturdy Dodge that represented her father's pride.
Watching Sam take her mother's hand, Anne realized "families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness"-like "learning to drive on an old car with a tricky transmission: if you can master shifting gears on that, you can learn to drive anything."
In Houston with a failing romance, Anne experienced an epiphany in the Rothko Chapel that finally allowed her to grieve her father's death twenty years earlier. As her boyfriend grew restless and left her alone in the chapel, something inside her "like a silent and muscular jungle cat" pounced-the realization that the man she was desperately calling back could never return because he was dead.
For two decades she'd been trying to make other men wear "my father's dog suit," an old, flea-ridden garment that could never fit them. She remembered racing home to her father's quiet study after school, hearing his pencil scratching as he edited his writing. "It's so different having a living father who loves you... After your father dies, defeat becomes pretty defeating."
In the chapel's silence, she finally "handed over my hope and belief that I did not have to have a dead father" and released the conviction that she could manipulate other men into filling that space. Though devastated, she felt "a rivulet of hope" that she might finally have a genuine shot at love.
Anne's relationship with her hair also reflected family dynamics. After a lifetime of people asking if she'd stuck her finger in a light socket, she finally got dreadlocks at St. Andrew. The African-American women there worried for her-dreadlocks make you look like Medusa, make people wonder if you're rebellious. These women wanted her to "pass" safely through the world.
Two things changed her: Pammy's deathbed wisdom ("Annie? You really don't have that kind of time") when she fretted about a dress, and seeing The Shawshank Redemption's baptismal rain scene. She realized she'd spent too long obsessing over hair rather than things that matter.
Her neighbor Marlene, an African-American Buddhist professor with beautiful dreadlocks, offered to help her. They sectioned her hair, twisted it with beeswax, working to gospel and reggae music. Anne cried during this sacred, tender grooming ritual. When finished, she looked "beautiful-royal, shy, groomed. Beautiful. Strange. Mulatto." Four years later, her dreads have grown past her shoulders. Each is unique "like snowflakes"-"like having very safe multiple personalities."
Through these family relationships-both biological and chosen-Anne learned that forgiveness and acceptance are the heart of love.
第 9 章
Finding Mercy in Muddy Places
At the beach near San Quentin prison, Sam and Anne witnessed something horrific-a man violently hitting his golden retriever with a thick stick. When Sam began crying, begging his mother to "do something," Anne froze, uncertain whether the man was evil or just violent. She finally called out a weak "Stop." Another mother joined her, shouting forcefully that she would call the police. Anne echoed her threat, but the man just laughed with disturbing intensity before walking away with his dog.
The other mother and children went to alert a prison guard, while Anne remained behind, ashamed of her timid response. When Sam returned, he demanded to know why she'd let the man escape. She admitted her fear that the man might hurt them.
Walking down the beach afterward, Sam asked if the dog would always have to live with that man. Anne assured him it wouldn't, though she wasn't certain why she believed this. She felt exposed in her cowardice, remembering a friend who once threw himself under a rearing horse to save a child-something she'd imagined she could do too.
A memory from church came to her-about God choosing to love everyone, even the cruel and broken. This comforted her slightly, but what truly saved her was Sam's perfectly timed childish act: slapping her palm full of collected white agates, scattering them across the beach as he ran off laughing. His small meanness made her think, "Boy, is he going to be hard to place"-bringing her back to herself with unexpected humor.
August brought more suffering when Anne's romance ended badly and her darling Mary Williams died at eighty-six. She'd always thought Mary would live forever, bringing Baggies of dimes, sitting near the church doorway crying, "Yes, Lord, thank you, thank you." A week later, a beloved relative was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. After crying daily for a week, smaller troubles piled on: running out of money, Sam developing a sty, bouncing a check, and her car backfiring so loudly pedestrians mistook the sound for gunshots.
Her friend Neshama suggested a hike to a marsh that looked like "Mesopotamia accidentally deposited amid suburban buildings." As they walked, Anne remembered Mary Williams' baptism testimony about stepping into the Mississippi River seventy years earlier to be baptized within a circle of poles marking safe footing.
The ground beneath them grew increasingly boggy. Anne's expensive walking sandals disappeared into mud. They laughed, realizing it was just mud-it washes off. Mary Williams got baptized in it. When they reached a small muddy slope, Anne attempted to climb it first to help Neshama up. The root she grasped pulled free, and she slid down on her butt. On her second attempt, she made it up, reached back for Neshama's hand, and promptly pulled them both down into the mud.
Looking at her friend's blue linen dress and ballet slippers covered in silt, Anne began laughing uncontrollably. It felt strange to be so old, so muddy, with no angry parents around and no face left to save. Air seemed to bubble into places inside her that had been airless.
As they sat silently afterward, Anne closed her eyes and saw all the people she loved-sick children, friends who had died, frail elders, her former lover. She thought, "No wonder you're this sad." The marsh's profound silence felt like the flip side of church singing, where just the previous Sunday, people had sung "Go Down, Moses" a cappella with their eyes closed, crying and singing loudly in communion.
When they finally got up to leave, Anne was still sad but better. This is the most profound spiritual truth she knows: even when we're sure love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us as our friends, and there it swells and comforts. Your spirits don't rise until you get way down into the mud, the bottom-because that's where it all rises from.
On Sam's eighth birthday, they built what started as a castle but morphed into a woolly-mammoth-shaped birthday altar decorated with shells, feathers, and beach glass. When they needed to leave, Sam protested about abandoning their creation to the tide. Though initially upset, he later presented Anne with an oval of soft pink beach glass that she keeps in her pocket as she writes.
The glass helps her write in some mysterious way. And so she whispers again: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
