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Very thoughtful reflection on prayer. Such a good summary of what prayer is all about. Help, thanks and wow. Amen! ( )

Summary: The author’s account of what it is for her to pray and three types of prayer that, for her, describe what it means to pray.

Anne Lamott hit bottom in her own life, struggling with alcoholism and drug abuse, and out of this came to faith as a Christian. And she began writing about it in her unpretentious, “this is who I am and my best shot at explaining what I’ve come to understand and what God still hasn’t made sense out of.” In this book, she does that with prayer and, along the way, narrating her own experiences in prayer. All of it is free of spiritual jargon, evident in her title summarizing what she thinks are three essential prayers in three words. Help. Thanks. Wow.

Help. Help is the prayer when you hit rock bottom and know that all your efforts to run life or fix someone else’s just aren’t working. It is the prayer when we are mired in broken relationships, debt, or a scary medical diagnosis. It is praying that God will help others facing the same kinds of stuff, or just trying to make it through life. It is the prayer of her grandfather, a missionary. She writes, “if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.” (I know this. I had a grandmother who prayed like that for me.). She writes that the beginning place for this kind of prayer is “admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.” She shares her own “help” prayers and talks about the miracle of when we reach the place where our hearts shift and we surrender, which leads to…

Thanks. For Lamott, this is short form for “thankyouthankyouthankyou.” It can be everything from ten minutes free of obsessive thoughts to a good day of work to a season of good health. Sometimes it is a glimpse of “the beautiful skies, above all the crap we’re wallowing in, and we whisper, ‘Thank you.’ ” Thanks, Lamott proposes flows into our behavior–serving or at least not “being such a jerk.” Serving others is where joy comes, an awareness that God is having a good time watching us do this. Sin in this regard is the hard, ungrateful heart. We can’t change it–we can only give it to God to change. And those moments when grace leads to gratitude reveal the changes God is working. Thanks.

Wow. It’s the gasping response to something of incredible wonder or terror. Sometimes it is the response to climbing between clean sheets that feel so good on us. There are so many wonders for her from dinosaurs to the cosmos to boys to Monopoly and Sylvia Plath. She believes “spring is the main reason for Wow.” It is the extravagance of a God who “keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. And it is blackberries eaten slowly.

Amen. This chapter sums up her thoughts on prayer and discusses the place of “Amen” in her prayers. She concludes:

“Let it happen! Yes! I could not agree more.Huzzah. It is a good response to making contact with God through prayer, and to praying with people who share the journey, and to most things that are good, which much of life can be. So it is, when we do the best we can, and we leave the results in God’s good hands. Amen.”

There is so much good in this account of prayer, a life of prayer woven into all of life, into all the moments of help, thanks, and wow, in which we become aware of both our desperate need of God and God’s utterly extravagant care. All of this comes in Anne’s self-deprecating demeanor (she suggests that “Help me not to be such an ass!” might be a fourth great prayer). She likes a version of the Serenity Prayer that prays, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the weaponry to make the difference.” As with so much of Lamott, you laugh at one moment and catch your breath at a bracing insight the next. If you want to learn to pray but have been put off with books that just seem more spiritual than you ever hope you can be, Lamott may be the place to start. “Help, Thanks, and Wow. Amen” seems a pretty good place to begin. ( )

—I am a Litteratur. I cannot a kinky hair American book respect. Wrong book for me, wrong book.

—I mean, it’s ok. It didn’t revolutionize my prayer life. If every book I read revolutionized my prayer life and I had to brag on it like it was the Word made ink, I dunno. That might not be a good thing.

So anyway, it’s a contemporary liturgical Protestant private verbal prayer kind of book, which is just my ineffective way of saying that it’s a prayer book by someone who’s part of the church’s meditation wing, the Lib Prots, praying at home or whatever using words. Some of that is just how you assume prayer is sometimes; it’s a book on prayer. It’s not a book of set prayers like the Book of Common Prayer, which is obviously fine, and it’s not an evangelical manual that theoretically gives you formulas about how to make interesting unique never-to-be-repeated prayers all the time, which books I’ve never found to be effective, although I suppose I’m not an evangelical. Really Anne here talks about what it’s like to pray, about having an attitude towards prayer and life and what it’s like, more than technique in the narrow sense.

She does still have things to say. Help/Thanks are the kinda classic verbal prayer types she covers, just like they have them in the Bible, although the thing about Psalms people sometimes forget is that the songs/psalms are meant to put you in a state of mind; theologians sometimes quote them to define theological terms and sometimes carry that same lawyer head with them into prayer, it seems like. Anne’s style is more semi-memoirical (I dislike the terms autobiography and autobiographical), although it’s not a memoir.

Wow is like semi non-verbal prayer, although in a spontaneous, non-formal way, like when art or music or poetry or an unexpected life event just startles you into gratitude and peace, and you’re actually with God for a minute, instead of just grumpily telling her what to do, you know.

I think if you like Anne’s style, and prayer, it’s fine, you know.

—But you cannot tell me it a Litteratur book is.

—They say the New Testament is written in bad Greek. I guess God’s a slacker.

—*emphatic* He is! He is!

It was curiosity that attracted me to this unusual theme. I had discovered Anne Lamott by accident through a TED talk on YouTube and the message she brought there appealed to me. But this book has disappointed me a bit, because it stays rather shallow.

Not that she has no interesting things to say. Prayer and religion in general are very underrated phenomena in our society, certainly in the European context. Lamott seems to have a rather pragmatic attitude about it: praying is focusing on something that transcends you and that really helps, because it puts you with both feet in the humble place that man is entitled to. But again and again she emphasizes our smallness as a human being, our inadequacy, the mess life seems made of. In the long run that denigrating approach disappointed me, because it conceals a far greater and more interesting part of positive spirituality. Of course, in the parts 'Thanks' and 'Wow' that positive spirituality is touched upon, but only in a very superficial way.

There's also something very American (sorry, over there) to her approach: she persistently talks about her own experiences (the word "I" is written a thousand times in this little booklet) which makes this a very ego-centred approach, very near to the classic religious stories on personal conversions ("I saw the light"), to which I am really allergic. In short, this little book is not uninteresting, but it barely exceeds the level of a TED talk. ( )

A great little book that contains a lot of solid, meaningful encouragement about God and faith in a few pages. Perceptive, encouraging, amusing yet so on-target. Reading this is like having a good conversation with a close friend. ( )