Lamott's Traveling Mercies

Anne Lamott takes you through her life twice. The 55 page "overture" is a brief autobiography that sets the context for the stories and reflections that follow. The stories and reflections range from an encounter with a man and his dog on the beach to spending time with her friend dying of cancer. Perhaps because her life experiences and context is very different from what I have known, the shared and common faith is quite powerful. My favorite chapters are on Forgiveness and Grace (128-144) but here's some the good quotes:

p8. "He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in, and trust, unless his mood shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah"
p55 "She pointed it [the church] out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, 'You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.'"
p65 "Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way."
p95 "It's frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them [ashes] into the air and they flutter and disperse. They don't. They cling, they haunt. They get in your hair, in your eyes, in your clothes."
p106 "She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of hte emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.
p231 "It's about baptism, for God's sake. It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving in to all those things we can't control; it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched."