Hallelujah Anyway

By Anne Lamott

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because mercy isn't a virtue you cultivate — it's the self you were born with, and someone helped you put it away.

Most of us treat mercy as an achievement — something the spiritually advanced extend outward, gracefully, toward the difficult people in their lives. Anne Lamott assumed this too. Then she sat down to write an entire book about mercy and discovered she couldn't stop hoping a rival writer would get terrible reviews. She tried to want the opposite. She tried harder. Her priest advised her to "resist less," so she tried so hard to resist less that the effort itself became the problem. This is either a spectacular failure to practice what you preach, or (and this is Lamott's argument) the most honest thing a book about mercy could confess. What she's trying to help you find isn't a virtue you build through effort. It's something you were born with, shoved into a drawer by a world that found it unproductive, and impossible to retrieve by trying harder.

You Can't Teach What You're Still Failing to Practice

Anne Lamott is writing a book about mercy when she notices news of an upcoming novel by a writer she cannot stand. The woman is witty, successful, charming — and had once embarrassed Lamott publicly with the casual ease of someone who barely noticed doing it. The new book sounds, Lamott decides with complete objectivity, terrible. She hopes the reviews will be devastating.

Then comes the self-improvement effort. She tries genuinely wishing the woman well. That fails. She tries harder (what you do when something isn't working). Her elderly priest friend Terry offers a different prescription: don't try harder, resist less. Lamott tries so hard to resist less that she gets vertigo and has to call a nurse. Eventually she tells her two best friends. One of them emails her a particularly scathing review the rival received in a major publication, and her spirits lift — briefly, before she turns the judgment on herself.

This is the book she's writing.

A New Yorker cartoon she cites gets it exactly. One dog says to another: "It's not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail." Lamott names this the human condition (flatly, without irony), which is funnier and more honest than any elaboration.

Mercy, in Lamott's definition, is radical kindness: undeserved, extending even to the unforgivable. She grounds the book in Micah's three-part formula: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. The problem with "do justice" is that everyone already believes their own values constitute it, which makes it useless as spiritual direction. "Walk humbly" is no more achievable; Lamott can't name anyone she knows well who has actually managed it. What remains is mercy. Lamott came into the world with a wide-open heart. Parents, teachers, and an achievement-focused culture methodically stuffed it in a drawer because it made her look vulnerable and reduced her productivity. She still has it. She also still wants her rival's book to fail.

The argument doesn't come from someone who has mastered mercy. It comes from someone who needs it as badly as anyone she might extend it to, starting with herself. That's not a disqualification. That's the proof the argument is honest.

Mercy Never Shows Up Where You'd Think to Look for It

In 1976, a newly sober man named Tom gets transferred from Berkeley to Los Angeles, where he knows no one. Another priest points him toward a diocesan man named Terry, five years sober, who invites Tom to a recovery meeting held in the back of an Episcopal cathedral near Skid Row. The crowd — bikers, jazz musicians, halfway-house regulars — is nothing like the hip, overeducated Berkeley crowd Tom had imagined getting well alongside.

On the stairs going up to the meeting room, a man ahead of Tom stumbles. He soils himself. It runs down onto his shoes. He doesn't appear to notice. He keeps walking. Tom claps a hand over his face but can't go anywhere, with a dozen men pressing him forward from behind. He makes it into the windowless room. The biker acting as greeter gets one whiff and vomits. A fan comes on. Tom's interior state, he says, is the Edvard Munch figure screaming on the bridge.

Then Terry crosses to the man and crouches beside him. He says, quietly, that the man has some trouble, and they're going to help. Three men from the recovery house next door take him to the shower, wash his clothes, give him their own things to wear while he waits, bring him coffee and dinner. Nobody pretended nothing had happened, but nobody made it the man's defining feature either. He was treated as a member of the community, because in what mattered, he was.

Lamott names this the whole point. Mercy isn't something you do from a position of advantage toward someone beneath you. It's a recognition — this is one of us — arriving at the least convenient moment, without planning. Tom had imagined recovering with people who were housebroken and efficient. Grace set up what Lamott calls a makeshift tent instead, in a room that smelled of vomit, and it worked.

Misericordia is the thread running through the middle of the book. The Latin joins misereri (to pity) with cor, heart: a heart for someone's trouble. It's something you access through use, like a muscle, and it never appears where you first look. Not with the priest in the Good Samaritan parable, who crosses the street to avoid a dying man. Always in the undignified location, among people you'd never have picked to carry it.

Some Wounds Don't Get Redeemed — They Only Get Accompanied

Before the memorial, before the mismatched chairs assembled in Ann's long concrete yard, Lamott and Ann drive to the funeral home. People had advised against it: the casket was sealed, Jay was awaiting cremation, what was there to do? They went anyway.

In the room, neither of them knows which end holds Jay's head and which holds his feet. So Ann rests her hand on the cloth at one end; Lamott rests hers at the other. They stay like that. Then they look at each other, switch places, and smile.

That smile is what the chapter is actually about. Not resolution. Not comfort through the extraction of meaning. Just two women who didn't leave, doing something arbitrary together in the presence of something terrible.

Ann is ninety-two. Her younger son Jay shot himself at a beach near her house, where he'd been living for almost a year. Everyone had seen it coming for a long time — and it was still the end of the world. In the days after, people pressed her to sleep, to eat more protein, promising she'd feel him again someday. She said she felt him now. Ann wasn't performing peace. She was describing her actual experience without dressing it in the language of recovery. That's its own kind of mercy: refusing to organize grief into a shape that makes the living more comfortable.

A week later, at the memorial in her garden, Ann stood trembling and read Jay's suicide note aloud. He'd said he had to do this, he was sorry, please forgive him, don't be sad. That he loved her. Then she described the final ten months they'd spent together. Jay had come home saying he wanted to help care for her in her old age and had found what peace he could in her backyard. She called that time a "gestational period." Not a tragedy she'd survived. Not a gift in disguise. A gestation: something without a clean noun.

Lamott's point isn't that mercy makes this bearable. It's that mercy is what shows up when bearable has left the building. It's Ann rubbing cloth at the wrong end of a casket, then switching places and smiling anyway. It doesn't mean anything. It just means someone stayed.

To understand why showing up was the whole of it, and why everything else had already run out, you have to go back to where things started closing.

The Mercy You Need Was Put Away Before You Knew to Hold On to It

Lamott can tell you exactly when the calibration started for her.

The channel between Bolinas Lagoon and the open ocean is a narrow, dangerous passage, the kind of place where a dog once got pulled under and never came back. In the autumn of 1959, a five-year-old Lamott is there with her father, fishing and studying bugs in the weeds, when an older, bespectacled man glances at her frizzy hair and uses the worst word in the English language to describe what must have been lurking in her family tree. Her father, who marched for civil rights, laughs. On the drive home, he notices her cringing and offers advice: get thicker skin. She was not the same girl who had climbed into the backseat that morning.

The drawer closes. Not all at once: childhood is slower than that. But the afternoon marks the start of a long calibration: learning to shove mercy, trust, and bare curiosity out of sight, because someone didn't like them on display. The assumption that people who stood beside your parents were safe goes in. The pleasure of noticing things (bugs in the weeds, seals watching the fishermen) goes in too. Migraines arrive. A sharp sense of humor follows.

Fifty-seven years later, a therapist guides Lamott through EMDR — a technique in which the patient follows moving light across a bar, loosening the hold of old memory. She returns to the channel. She imagines defenders into the scene: a trusted friend who gathers her up with a soft sound, a man she names Doug, summoned into the session, who shoves the fisherman against the seawall and tells her father he's a disgrace. Then something unexpected: once she has the protection she never received as a child, she realizes the person she has been waiting fifty-seven years to forgive is not the fisherman. Not her father. It's herself — for swallowing the ugliness, treating it as reliable information, stockpiling it as evidence that something in her was fundamentally wrong. She frees herself from the fisherman the way you'd ease a butterfly off your sleeve, without force, without ceremony.

The drawer was never a grave. It was a hiding place. You put mercy there because the world told you it made you soft, vulnerable, easy to ignore. Recovering it isn't a discipline you impose from the outside. You excavate it. And the hardest part isn't forgiving the people who hurt you. It's forgiving yourself for having believed them.

The Spiritual Self-Improvement Project Is Precisely What's Blocking You

The harder you work at becoming a better person, the more firmly you're gripping what needs to change.

Paul of Tarsus, cranky and self-righteous enough that Lamott counts him among the worst versions of herself, spent years asking God to remove what he called the thorn in his side. He never names it in the letters; possibly depression, possibly a sexual disorder, the precise failure too humiliating to spell out. The answer came back: no. Grace would have to be enough. Nothing Paul did or failed to do would change the scope of divine love; the last word would be mercy, not his track record. The catch: he had to see the thorn as a gift, not a defect awaiting correction. What she couldn't have predicted: being told she could keep her awfulness made holding on to it much less attractive.

Moral striving keeps the flaw in view because it treats failure as a problem to solve. Permission removes the urgency. And with it, the grip.

Rabbi Margaret told her Yom Kippur congregation not to try to be better people but to try to be worse — more of a slacker, more of a control freak, whatever the reverse of their usual improvement program. The Kol Nidre prayer that opens the service doesn't even wait for failure: it preemptively cancels every promise you're about to make to God. Lamott's paraphrase: don't get your hopes up, it hasn't gone well, we all already know how this ends. You don't have to fix yourself before you belong.

Lamott's jealousy toward the rival writer doesn't disappear by the chapter's end. It rides along in her pouch like a young animal that hasn't been weaned. But its hold loosens. The loosening came not from discipline or better spiritual practices but from being told she could keep what she was trying to lose. Transformation tends to be an accident. You stop forcing it, and it moves in.

The Break Isn't What You Hide — It's Where Mercy Enters

The American reflex is to patch the crack and sell the item, or cover it with a doily. We do the same to ourselves. We fold ourselves into small crisp squares — through people-pleasing, performance anxiety, walking on eggshells until our feet ache — and call the compression survival. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that wherever he was folded, he was a lie. Lamott agrees: the folded state is briefly familiar, even comforting, like laundry starch and steam. Then it becomes suffocating.

The trouble with the patch is that it requires pretending. And mercy, she argues, cannot live in a pretend self. A gold-repaired bowl doesn't pretend. It presents the break honestly, as part of what it is, and becomes more interesting than the unbroken original. The gold isn't concealment. It's an acknowledgment that the thing was worth repairing, which is different from saying it was never broken.

That's the move Lamott has been making throughout: mercy doesn't gather where we're whole. It adheres at the break: in the windowless meeting rooms, at the fishing channel where fathers fail their daughters, in the therapy sessions where you discover you've been hoarding someone else's ugliness as evidence against yourself. You stop waiting to be restored to baseline. You trace the crack with gold instead. What you get isn't your pre-broken self. It's an honest one, and it turns out that's the only version capable of receiving — or offering — anything real.

The Pulley That Never Forgot What It Could Do

You were made with this. The mercy Lamott keeps failing to perform on her rival, keeps stumbling across in windowless rooms and at the wrong end of caskets — she didn't build it. She excavated it. It had been pressed into the drawer during the fishing trip, during the achievement years, during every occasion the world taught her that openness was a liability.

So the project isn't construction. It's retrieval. And the strange news — which Paul learned the hard way and the Kol Nidre has been announcing for centuries — is that retrieval happens not when you press harder but when you stop pressing entirely. You don't become a merciful person. You let the one who was always there finally stand back up.