While there are some good ideas in Help, Thanks, Wow - they are not terribly radical or new. Second, the book really did not strike me as being profound or even notable. And I am not even sure if it was worth being made into a hard cover. Now that I have, I must say that I am disappointed.įirst, the book is way too expensive for the length that it is.
I've been looking forward to reading this book for some weeks. I am a tremendous admirer of Anne Lamott and her many books. Clarity and wisdom, humility and hope-all from one little book. That said, though elegant and wise, this book is still a trifle: "Help" is better than "Thanks," "Thanks" is better than "Wow," and the brief concluding essay is inferior to the other three. the prose with which she describes her life is so elegant-so sleek in its zen concentration, so studded with remarkable phrases-that we fear she has moved far beyond us, and feel humbled when faced with her clarity and wisdom. Lamott is so frank about sharing her brokenness, all the fragments of her crazy hippie life, that we hope we too-if we had half her courage-could reap the rewards of prayer at least as bountifully as she.
I have read two previous books on spirituality by Lamott, both longer and better than this one, but they all have the same qualities.
"It's sort of like blinking your eyes open.This slim book consists of three essays on spirituality, each exploring a different type of prayer: petition ("Help!"), thanksgiving ("Thanks!") and ("Wow!), which I feel can best be described as prayer in praise of the sublime. "Prayer is not about saying, 'Oh, I think I'm going to pray now.' Or, 'Oh, I see I've made a notation here to pray at 2:15.' It's about getting outside of your own self and hooking into something greater than that very, very limited part of our experience here - the ticker tape of thoughts and solutions, and trying to figure out who to blame. This is great.' Wow is the prayer of wonder."
You say it when you see the fjords for the first time at dawn, or you say it when you first see the new baby, and you say, 'Wow. When I don't know what else to do I go outside, and I see the sky and the trees and a bird flies by, and my mouth drops open again with wonder at the just sheer beauty of creation. The prayer where we're finally speechless - which in my case is saying something.
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