Author: Annie Dillard
Publication details: Perennial Library, New York, 1988
“The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute.”
Teilhard de Chardin
In 1975, Annie Dillard moved to an island in Puget Sound in Washington. She lived there for two years in a room “plain as a skull,” with “a gold cat named Small,” and “a spider, too … which whom [she kept] a sort of company.” The result of this stay was Holy the Firm (1977), a kind of journal that contemplated the presence of God in life, the counterpoints of beauty and brutality in nature and the order of things, the eternal in the midst of the temporal, and what it means to live a human life. Frederick Buechner lavished praise on this non-fiction narrative, calling it a “book of great richness, beauty and power.” Indeed, it is a tense and evocative three-part contemplation on the unsafe natures of being and of God.
The three parts to this narrative piece are titled “Newborn and Salted”, “God’s Tooth”, and “Holy the Firm”, and each builds on recurring ideas and themes of joy and suffering. Behind these ideas, though, lies a bigger one, for Dillard, as with so many contemplative writers like her, is truly bothered by the mystery of the God who, with one hand, blesses with joy and happiness the human sojourn across the concrete landscape of the now, and with the other, blights with terrible suffering the same human crossing along that very same terrain. How does a human person live in the face of the paradoxical God, who loves one moment without apology, while capriciously inflicting pain and sorrow the next? Connecting, or reconnecting, with the unseen dimension of life via a contemplation of creation recovers our sense or understanding of the untamable and unspeakable Transcendent.
So Part One begins with “Newborn and Salted”, calling attention from the opening lines to the grandness and extravagant beauty of the regenerating and creating power of life every day: “Every day is a god, each day is a god …. Today’s god rises, his long eyes flecked in clouds. He flings his arms, spreading colors; he arches, cupping sky in his belly …” This god vaults and jumps, freedom and power registering in his limbs which create the world anew and afresh, day after day after day. The god rising from the foams of nature, Puget Sound itself, stands for the energy and pulsing life that is found in the natural world that Dillard celebrates here: throbbing signals of the invisible hand of the Divine. Yet within this reach of waking creation at sunrise comes the inevitable realization, that death follows suit after life is newborn. This is part of the many “hard things” that Dillard says she came out to Puget Sound to learn: “I came here to study hard things—rock mountain and salt sea—and to temper my spirit against their edges”. Contemplating creation becomes for her a rash prayer to God, “Teach me thy ways, O Lord,” and one she does not recommend, she confesses, for the painful seriousness with which God answers her and her deliberations.
Together with the new burst of energy and life that strikes against the night every bright morning comes also the violent energy and brutal cessation of life—both the creating and the dying are part of the vaulting and lifting work of the powerful-limbed, rampant god that Dillard calls Puget Sound. The mighty indifference with which life emerges and is cruelly and quickly snuffed out is part of Puget Sound, part of the whole cycle of ushering beautiful mornings in, and the violent brutality of moths sticking fatefully to candle wax and burning for hours in candle flame: “One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held …. I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second”. Dillard’s acceptance of such a thing, even her compliance and complicity, sounds far removed indeed from “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Nevertheless, a covenant of life was made between God and creation—nature stands as an indelible witness that God prefers life. Salting the covenant sealed the work of creation and the eternal promise of the rainbow: I will not destroy … Thus Dillard observes that the Armenians and ancient Jews salted their newborn babies: “They washed a baby in water, salted him, and wrapped him in cloths. When God promised to Aaron and the Levites all the offerings Israel made to God … he said of this promise, ‘It is the covenant of salt forever.’ In the Roman church baptism, the priest places salt in the infant’s mouth”, reminder to the Almighty that recorded Scripture ever begins with, In the beginning, God created …
Part Two requires the faithfulness and faith of the salted covenant. For in “God’s Tooth” Dillard and her island neighbours discover the terrifying indifference of God. His tooth bites and tears into the muslin fabric we call life. With a dismissive hand, he crashes an airplane, like a man swipes at an annoying fly and kills it: “… the plane’s engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the firs. It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed into the thin woods…” With as careless a finger, he flicks a gob of ignited fuel which hit a little girl’s face: “the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face”. No one else was hurt in any way. On that day, the new god of day had no power to save: “No, that day’s god has no power. No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time’s tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy”.
Is there meaning and sense in such offhand cruelty? Was God truly being indifferent? Or perhaps, in trying to touch the transcendent, we need to throw off the limits of pity and fear, and look up towards the sharp and angled lines of God’s uncompromising wooing. Julie Norwich, little faceless anchorite of God like her medieval namesake, must needs prepare for a life of nun-hood behind the veil of burnt and scarred flesh. It is no easy thing to be a bride of Christ. To come near to him is to draw near, like the moth, to the candle flame, and to consent to be burnt in order to lend a greater brightness to the world around. God is the holy fire, and to love him is to realize that the intensity of our love (like the angelic seraphs’) “will [ignite us] again and dissolve [us] again, perpetually, into flames”. How closely do we dare to come to this God? The hard things of life throw the reality of God in our faces: “God is a brute and traitor”. Dillard knows his touch burns like airplane fuel. The concreteness of nature and creation can only flame in ecstatic love and burn in speechless terror at the invisible power that lures us fatally. No wonder we prefer God at a distance: a powerful Presence in the remote hinterlands and horizons, the unseen One we shudder at and call, “[Ultima] Thule … Time’s Bad News …. Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God’s Tooth”.
Thus the world is at the creator God’s mercy: “What can any artist set on fire but his world?” (Part Three: “Holy the Firm”) Indeed to look at God in such a way is to feel the steadiness of firm ground under our feet every time disasters like Julie Norwich’s burnt face strike. In terror and disaster, Dillard remembers the salted covenant, the promise of life (to life). So Part Three, “Holy the Firm” has the earth still salted, still noisome, lighted, and glad, with the Absolute still filling it with his liveliness. But it is at the intersection of the artist’s fiery hand and the muddy, thick earthiness of unformed matter, that our innate formlessness senses change and transformation. We are afraid of the shaping hand that crudely cuts through stone, and meticulously chips away at small securities and pleasures, to salt us with fire fit for worship. Julie Norwich was “a salted fillet” preserved from all evil, “baptized at birth into time and now into eternity into the bladelike arms of God” to live life at a cloistered intensity. Who wants such a blessing?
We would rather have a God we can understand; someone who makes us feel our limited and small perceptions of life are right; someone who can fit into our palm. But that is not the God who is. Being transcendent, he is troubling, but worthy of worship: “I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand”. Interestingly, it is to simple humans that the illimited God reveals himself. If the thread of understanding breaks in us, if in the “tangled comfort of pleasures” we grow exhausted by the need to understand, nevertheless it is still true: there really are only humans living out the smallness and meanness of our days with whom God communicates. So Part Three, “Holy the Firm” contemplates a baptism, a communion, the world and its relation to the transcendent, the divine in Christ. “Holy the Firm”, Dillard says, is a substance posited by esoteric Christianity to be the most basic, pure matter. What if, she asks, this matter at its dullest were in touch “at base” with the Absolute, infused and inflamed with God for all its baseness? “Holy the Firm”, this stable, basic, dullest matter suggests then that God is vitally in touch with “time and space” (that would be creation). Rather than the mysterious and detached hand that reaches down from somewhere up there to bless or blight something down here, God is rather deeply intimate with the world of matter, yet so distinguishable, that to speak of life, of nature, of the god, Puget Sound, and not recognize the God, the “flame unconsuming”, the holy fire “immanating” from this world of matter, is to miss the point of the Incarnation altogether. For what is the Incarnation but Christ’s irrevocable baptism of death and resurrection into the enfleshed and glorified body he promises to us too at the end of time? Irrevocable humanness–dullest matter– in the sublime Divine. That gives our unbelief pause.
“The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute”. This is holy firmness that beats all other solid rocks.
