Anne Lamott is one of my rabbis. I know Ms. Lamott is not Jewish, but over the years she has crafted a homespun theology that is kind and wise and downright sensible.
In her latest book, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, Lamott tells readers we live "Stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching."
Hope, meaning and repair are in the details of life. When I was younger, I used to fixate on the big picture and get overwhelmed. Here is what I tell my children when they start to get anxious: Take life in 10 minute increments. It will give you the time to notice the fine, intricate parts that create a life.
Lamott's book is also a response to the first anniversary of the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. To that end, Lamott does not hesitate to tell her readers that life is grim, the world is a mess and, quoting the writer Barry Lopez, "[all] that is holding us together is stories and compassion."
A number of years ago, I was at a school meeting in which the principal asked what we, as parents, hoped that our children would get out of Jewish day school. We went around the room and most parents said that they hoped their children would be happy and satisfied with their lives. I love the sentiment, but I don't want my children to be happy and satisfied all the time. How will they help to repair the world if the never get fed up with the poverty, hunger, racism and all of the other maladies plaguing our world? I want my children to be compassionate, and then I want them to be even more compassionate. But, coupled with that, I want them to be optimistic. In my mind, an optimist doesn't close her eyes and wave away the bad and the ugly in an "everything is going to be all right" way. That feels empty to me. An optimist takes Lamott's stitches and makes something of them. "You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next," she writes. "Without stitches, you just have rags." That's the kind of belief in the power of good that I'm taking about.
And God bless Anne Lamott for bringing up the overly sensitive child. I want to say this as clearly as possible: There is no such thing as being overly sensitive. I know what I'm talking about. People call me overly sensitive all the time. The overly sensitive child is the fifth child in the Passover Seder. Nobody says it better than Lamott when she writes:
Almost everybody worth his or her salt was a mess and has been an overly sensitive child. Almost everyone had at one time or another been exposed to the world as flawed and human. And that it was good, for the development of character and empathy, for growth of the spirit.
When my daughter was little, she told me that she couldn't stand it when people were angry with her. My guess is she felt misunderstood when a friend or a parent berated her. As the overly sensitive child grows up, she never quite gets over the events that made her sad in childhood.
And then there is the quandary of what you say to people when they ask you how you are. You don't want to open a dam of feeling and possible sadness, so you say you're fine even though your child may not be faring well in school or your elderly parent is having trouble remembering your name. Things are so perfunctory in our society. But like the great teacher and spiritual counselor that she is, Lamott's good news on the subject is that "If you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside of you, and maybe outside of you too, forever."
When I said the Kaddish for my father eleven years ago, I was determined to keep him alive in my heart by not missing a day of prayer. Sometimes I brought my kids to minyan in their pajamas. There was my young son shuffling around the chapel in his Scooby-Doo slippers. My daughter sometimes participated in the service with her friend whose mother was also mourning her father at the same time I was. We called them the "Ashrei" girls because they opened the evening service with the ubiquitous Psalm of David.They were overly sensitive children in training.
Like this startling world of ours, children don't always grow up the way you expect them to. Love and beauty have infinite forms. Once again, I summon Anne Lamott to explain that "We are shadow and light... We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance."