Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Anne Lamott is a unique-styled writer who focuses more on expression than precision and in doing so, you can feel her heart poured out on the page and still hear its pounding. In the reading, there is laughter both from joy and from her refreshing frankness and freshness, as well as beautiful recognition of life and ourselves in her experiences, insights and metaphors. Her writing expresses the passion and pain in life, with the ever-present belief in the great balm of Love and connection to the mysterious, loving creator in all of us. She weaves funny, blatant or pained speech (that you can feel are all truthful from her experience) with absolutely piercing-poetic writing, and the combination touches your heart and is a tonic for the soul.She focuses and expands on three prayers we reach out to God with of Help, Thanks and Wow. The final chapter is on Amen. This book helped me see the importance of little prayers, big prayers, frustrated prayers, angry prayers, thankful prayers, awe-inspired heart-bursts, wordless prayers expressed in tears, wonderment in your gut from glories seen with your eyes or in your heart. All prayers. Prayers are the expression and connection to our Creator and each one is an action of faith that we are at least heard. Others carry an awareness that we see and are seen, know and are known, loved and loving, connected, in relationship with God. There is beauty and power in all of our prayers.This book would be one to give or suggest to atheist or agnostic friends or to keep handy in times of crisis for ourselves because it’s entirely without the pretense of knowing all of the answers. It looks squarely at the mess and confusion of life and of ourselves, the unanswered why’s that will always be there, and instead of trying to explain away in any combination of pat answers that leave one in the end reaching but unsatisfied, she reminds that there is always, always still exquisite beauty, awe, revelations and regenerations in life, in Love. I’ve often thought that one of the problems with religion is actually the attempt to have all the answers, each and every one, which of course fails miserably and is full of contradictions, instead of being content in the Mystery. This book, her writing revels in the Mystery and in the Glory of Love. The prayers that we send to our Creator are a beautiful connection to Love, to Life-Source, to the One, where all answers reside. We have and receive answers and miracles that we need, being part and connected to the One, though the answers may often appear differently than we expect. And even in confusion and feeling like some answers are incomplete, in prayer there is connection to what is whole and complete—God, and a reminder that somehow, we and life are whole and complete too. In the sometimes heartbreaking tragedies and complexity of life and relationships, in the violence and pain in the world, in our own stumbles and foibles, in the often repeated mistakes and awkwardness, there is grace, growth, magnificence-there is God-for us, in us. And the Love-connection in prayer is always there. Amen.Sometimes after I read a book and there’s been a little more time to digest, the lessons I need come right to the surface and make themselves clear and known. So, I’d like to share and expand a bit more on the review. Anne Lamott says in the book, “God can handle honesty.” I’d add God can not only handle honesty, but absolutely loves it! In honesty, we are connected to Love and in Love, we can receive truth. Because sometimes what we think or feel isn’t the truth at all, but the truth is that we are thinking or feeling that thought or emotion. Share it with Love and Love will show us the way, love us in the sharing, wherever we’re at. Prayer with God is a place where we have the privilege of “getting real-really real”.After reading this book, I noticed that sometimes I was preparing to pray or delaying connection with Love because I felt unworthy in my energy…As if God was a friend I wanted to call, but because of a funky mood or too heavy of stuff going on, I delayed the call, not wanting to bring them down. Now I see that God is the open line in our lives, back and forth communication, for every circumstance, every mood. We can’t be too mad, too distracted, discouraged, frustrated, disbelieving, too out of touch to pray. God wants to hear from us especially then! This is the time to jump back into Love, back into dialogue, back into the Loving energy and then stay swimming in its precious freedom and connection.Love is the only place that there is true freedom–all of the Love is in Love, in us, in the whole. And all truth and answers and goodness and infinite combinations of Love reside within Love, so there’s no place to prepare for Love. Love is where it’s all at. Just dive right back in. If you’ve been out of the loving energy for two days, you don’t need two days to get back in! Slipping out of Love and all the positivity and truths and beautiful things within it can be a slow unconscious process. But–the holy instant there’s a recognition that you are out of it-jump right back in! Don’t let the negative, untrue energy you are mixed up in tell you there’s anything from preventing you from returning wholly, fully and instantly back into your true self and connection to God in Love. The ego can try to make us feel guilty for being out of Love and use it to say, “Well, you’ve been bad, you can’t jump into Love just now. You did it again, so Love won’t take you back so fast and besides you don’t deserve it because you failed the spirituality test again. You don’t love God enough. You’re not good. God is pissed at you–you don’t deserve all the joy in Love because you didn’t value it or you would’ve stayed in it.” Or the ego might even say, “You need to stay in this energy a bit more in order to do what you need to do.” All these lies just prevent people from jumping back in right away to the Love that refreshes and loves us and always lends a hand. We don’t need to do anything but start talking to Love! We don’t need to patch up our energy before praying because the only healing, lifting and transforming energy is within the whole of Love! We don’t have to be perfect or believe perfectly or try to know all the answers before connecting because Love is where all the Love and the answers we need reside! Love is everything. We won’t know all the answers in this lifetime to all the questions, but we can know what we need to know, we can experience the whole that we are a part of and one with and thus experience and know ourselves to be whole and loved and free. Love is where all of the healing and remedies are for each of us. It’s our freedom.Prayer is a constant dialogue as we swim within Love. We don’t even need to use the word prayer as the word itself represents connection, and within that connection, so many unnameable and beautiful things. God can handle and wants our true expressions, and in Love, we find truth. We are whole, we are ourselves, we are free.

I never thought about the three prayers and how I cycle through them. She captured the worry where I still don’t turn it over to God.

This sweet little book I could not put down. It is excellent. I’d like to order several more. I actually bought it used and that didn’t matter. It’s an easy read helpful on prayer makes you laugh and makes you wish you knew the author personally.

The three essential prayers: Help, Thanks, Wow have become essential journaling prompts for me daily as well. I began the habit of journaling years ago but recently added these three prompts in my daily pages and I do believe this is great therapy for my mental and emotional health. It’s also drawing me closer in relationship to God as I pray not only requests but praises too. I love this book for so many reasons, but mostly for the spark it has added back into my journaling practice.

When you read thin books, you always assume that they are sharp and succinct, that they were once big books that have been cut to the bone, trimmed to the essence, and winnowed to their winning ways before submission for publication. You certainly entertain no thoughts of repetitiveness -- not in a thin book. That's forgivable with Dickens, Thackeray, and Fielding. They write huge tomes that earn the room for error. But the 100-page book? No.That's my main beef with Anne Lamott's long essay on prayer. I read a NY Times essay of hers that I enjoyed mightily. It told of how her family was anything-but religious, how they worshiped at the altar of great writers and lived a Bohemian lifestyle. Lamott cut against the family grain. She got religion -- of a sort. But, in writing about it in this book, she travels six ways to Sunday yet keeps arriving at the same four-way intersection. That is, as I read it, I found the same repetition one gets in rote recitals of real-life prayers, and I thought to myself, "This would never see the publishing light of day if not for the name of its author."I should have been the perfect audience for this book, which is why I bought it. I am irreligious, yet spiritual; agnostic, yet defensive about God; skeptical, yet trusting in the great unknown. Lamott is similar. She has no patience for Christians who claim to know "the way" because, of course, they don't. Hers is a most laid-back and understanding God. He (sometimes Lamott goes with "She") doesn't mind if you say, God, I'm P-O'd with you this time, as if these are the risks deities take when they get in the business of creating humans. Frankenstein's monsters, and all that.But the three sections -- prayers for HELP, prayers of THANKS, and prayers of WOW -- were a bit circular and the writing a bit meandering. I wanted a more poetic precision from this. The smaller the genre and the smaller the manuscript length, the greater the demands. Plus Lamott has earned a reputation as a writers' writer. Did she not write BIRD BY BIRD, chapter and verse, the Gospel of Wannabe Writers everywhere?OK. Yes, there are some neat moments, like this paragraph on the WOW of autumn:"And autumn ain't so shabby for Wow, either. The colors are broccoli and flame and fox fur. The tang is apples, death, and wood smoke. The rot smells faintly of grapes, of fermentation, of one element being changed alchemically into another, and the air is moist and you sleep under two down comforters in a cold room. The trails are not dusty anymore, and you get to wear your favorite sweaters."But overall, I got a "Meh" kind of feeling, like the book needed HELP, like I owed it little THANKS, and like I'd been gypped out of $17.95 (WOW!) for 102 measly pages.Welcome to the hazards of reading new books, Pilgrim. If you love Anne Lamott's stuff unconditionally, "proceed." If not, "with caution...."Amen.

Anne Lamott tells it as it is. There's no fancy paper or pretty bow to tie everything up with, she lays her thoughts and testimony out on the table. Refreshing, challenging and thought provoking.She's also funny and had me smiling and laughing out loud which is great, but did cringe at her total honesty at times as well. Go girl!I shared one or two things from this book with a friend of mine which got her laughing. She is now going to buy it. I'm in my 60s and I really enjoyed the reading.

There's little to say. It's so obvious that you didn't see it. That very fact is what makes this book good. Once you've read it, you know you already knew it, but even that makes it great. Eternal truths are very simple after all, just because they're true and eternal. Amen.

Anne Lamott’s perception of life is extraordinary. She views life in a calm, loving way. The way that she writes gives you the opportunity to share in this perception. You are with her and she with you.

This is such a breath of fresh air!Anne Lamott writes so engagingly about how we can care so much that our attempts to help, and even to pray, become toxic.Releasing ourselves to God is our only way through.Wonderful, enlightening and engaging.

I bought this book after reading about it at memoriesfromcloverlane.com. It dit nog let me down! Anne Lamott has found a wonderful voice writing about this subject. Her writing appears to be effortless, and reaches out to a very, very broad spectrum of readers. I admire her for that. Sarah from Clover Lane is a devout Catholic, and her recommendation actually turned out just fine for me, as a member of a pretty liberal Dutch church. (I won't bore you with a detailed review of the Dutch christian landscape...).