"Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy" by Anne Lamott

One afternoon a few years ago, two friends and I sat on my porch and mourned the gradual loss, over the years, of our nicer selves. “Where has she gone?” we each wondered. Reluctantly, we came to the conclusion that our “niceness”—our mercy—had simply worn down—an inevitable by-product of aging.

We are not the only ones lamenting our winnowing of mercy. Anne Lamott does, too. Enough to write a book about it.

There is hope, yet. We are not so far gone, my friends and I, that we have become the dogs in the famous New Yorker cartoon Lamott recalls in Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy: “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.”

What if we are just out of practice? And, age aside, what if we, as a society, are all a little rusty on the mercy front? “Mercy, grace, forgiveness and compassion are synonyms” writes Lamott.  “And when we practise mercy, it is restored to us."

And what if mercy is not a constant of character, some have it, some don’t, but retrievable when the situation requires?

Lamott describes moments in her own life when, instead of being “prickly and judgmental” she can stop “pull, back, take a breath. The next thing I know, I let others go first, or see that now is not the time to demand an explanation or apology…. And I get me back.”