Reviews for Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

The average rating for Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-15 00:00:00 Adam Vetter I bought this book the day before I had a late-night conversation with life-time friends about religion, and heritage, rational thought vs "faith," and personal responsibility. I learned a lot from that conversation. Indeed, I think I keep learning from it. Perhaps reading this book prolonged those lessions. At the very least, it kept alive in my own mind the debate. Can a rational, free-thinking, independent person have religious faith? Is there any good in organized religion? Do we have an obligation to preserve a heritage that our ancestors suffered to retain? Does this obligation extend to a duty to be a member of a group with which you have many ideological and/or political differences? I still don't know any answers. But I do like that Anne Lamott shows that there is a benefit in this heritage. I like to think that she also shows that it is possible to believe in the underlying principles without conceding to the myopic politics of many contemporary institutions. But I shall save this conclusion for presentation at the next installment of our original discussion.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-16 00:00:00 CANDY GLENN I do not at all understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. Traveling Mercies is a collection of autobiographical essays by Anne Lamott in which she explores her life without God, her road to faith, and her continuing struggle to live a life worthy of the beliefs she holds. It is not the story of her life, there are uncovered gaps that we know are there, but it is the story of her soul, and that, I would argue, is more important. With a little touch of Erma Bombeck, and an ability to look at the ugly and petty, along with the sublime of her life, she achieves a lot in terms of inspiring without resorting to even a moment of preaching. I love her descriptions of the people she has met along her journey: her best friend, Pammy, the elderly black church member, Mary Williams, who gives her bags of dimes to help her through her broke (and sometimes broken) days; her father, whose death devastated her life, and her son, Sam, who colors it. Some of her words seem written just for me. I lost my father and mother two months apart in 1994 and all these years later I feel the homesickness for them in ways I cannot convey to anyone: Twenty years ago. For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return. I believe she has tapped the code to grief, a kind of spector that comes and goes in your life, but never entirely dies away: All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it." and, Sometimes grief looks like narcolepsy. But, lest you think this is a book about death or grief, I will share the following except, which will prove that this is just a book about insight, humanity, and grace. I can't imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy. 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.