“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago TribuneThe New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. “Mercy is radical kindness,” Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It’s the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the … permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult.
In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by “facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves.” It’s up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—“within us and outside us, all around us”—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it’s crucial, as “kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all.”
Full of Lamott’s trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise—a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.
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Ann Lamott is simply a brilliant author who sneaks up on you and sucks you in! Great book on being grateful…
Like all of Anne lamotts books it was amazing.
By all accounts, I should love Anne Lamott. She’s a liberal Christian single mom in recovery, full of snark and judgement, but aware of her own flaws. She should be right up my wheelhouse, so maybe this wasn’t the right book with which to start.
I’m not discounting many of Lamott’s points about grace and mercy, about forgiveness for yourself and others, but I found it hard to slog through some of her almost stream-of-consciousness sentence structure. And maybe that’s just because one of the subjects of the book is a recent, startling faux pas she committed in regard to the transgender community. I definitely was able to garner some nuggets and will likely pick her up again, but I’m not falling over myself to do it.