Traveling mercies

I'm visiting my sister and her fiancee in NY at the moment. I had a long day of traveling - leaving from YVR at 8am and arriving in Neward at 9pm. I went from YVR to Dallas, then Dallas to Newark. I had never been to Texas before and I was semi--exicted about having a 2 hour lay-over in the airport - even if it was just seeing the airport! I noticed the difference in the deomgraphics of the people who were onboard -they were very white and some very blonde. When I got to Dallas, everything appeared shiny, big, and showy, including its people. I felt like such an exotic species, a minority, a stranger in a strange land.

Coincidentally, I started reading a new book that my roommate recommended to me - Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. It is an autobiographic work about a woman and her journey of faith - how she came to being a Christian. My roommate had said that the author reminded her of myself - crazy and funny. Upon reading the book I can see what Ah-Ju means - except I hope that my craziness does not extend as far as hers, yet I suppose her experiences and mine could be comparable. I do see pieces of myself in her. I am thoroughly enjoying her writing, which is so genuine and gripping. She reveals to her readers her most vulnerable and pathetic experiences in life, some of which somehow lead to moments when she experienced the most of Jesus' presence and his Grace. I've gone through just a bit less than half the book and I think that it won't be long before I'm done. There are a few lines that I read which really struck me today and I would just like to share them with you here...

"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: you essential rhythm is your heartbeat; you 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."

"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."

It doesn't get any better than this. The realness of our lives, the depths of our emotions (of our souls!) just as God allows us to experience them, perfectly and painfully conjured up in human terms. Thank God for Anne Lamott and her utterly messed (I wanna even say f*cked up) up, but gloriously and splendidly grace-adorned experiences.