Hallelujah Anyway: To the Listeners

I've been reading Anne Lamott's Hallelujah Anyway. Listening to it, actually. I've been enjoying it so much that I picked up a copy from the library so I could go back and reread passages. This morning I listened to chapter six on my way to work. Much was said on the mercy found in listening. I wanted to write some of it here.

Mr. Einstein said everything is moving and we're all connected, and maybe never more so than when we listen [...] Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable. We end up looking into other people's eyes, and see the desperation, or let them see ours. This connection slips past the armor like water past stones. Being slow and softened, even for a few minutes or seconds, gives sneaky grace the chance to enter. There won't be something waiting that you can put on a bumper sticker, and it will not just be one cute thing, although I would very much prefer this.
[...]
There is such a depth to listening, and an exchange, like an echo from inside a canyon, when friends have listened to me at my most hopeless. They heard. Someone heard, heard what was happening, what was true and painful, when the center would not hold. They sat, listened, and breathed with me like doulas.
Breath is a koan: both a resting place and enlivening. To take a deep breath is a thirsty person sipping water, both ease and nourishment. The person said, 'I hear you, it completely sucks. I'm here for you, and will be, no matter what.' You sat together breathing. Maybe the friend trotted out the excruciating absurdity of the situation, laid it on the table so we could observe it together, with amazement and eventual amusement. The friend let us go again to every place we have ever wallowed, and helped make it funny. The friend just got it. We felt like a failure, but we were helped to see that we were doing everything we could, as well as we could. Maybe we won't step in that same hole again now. (Maybe we will.) No one, not even God, has a magic wand so what awaits is probably still going to be hard sledding, but at least we're out of the ditch and on the hill in the slush. There had been no hope of this, when we were stuck in me me me, hurt, hurt, hurt. Now, as Rumi said, 'someone opens our wings . . . someone fills the cup.' My pastor puts it: 'God makes a way out of no way.' We will somehow be cared for by that someone - a dear neurotic friend, minister, mullah - or something or a shift that helped release a bit of what tortured you an hour ago, or what you tortured yourself with, a space you've populated with demons, now opening from that trance out to what is really there: a cup of tea, kind eyes, paper whites, orange sand" (112-114).

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