Holy the Firm

by Annie Dillard.

a book review

Holy the Firm is a short book of nonfiction– perhaps more like a long essay, or a series of three essays.  The chapter titles are “Newborn and Salted,” “God’s Tooth,” and “Holy the Firm.”  It is highly poetic, dense and rich, the language startling– in Dillard’s own word, “violent.”  Dillard seems able to tackle exceedingly difficult problems with a full concession to their complexity, and yet retain a frequently conversational style.  She sweeps the gamut between joyful exultation and frank realism.

In Holy the Firm, Dillard tackles the problem of the suffering of innocents.  Is God involved in any real way with the reality that we experience?  She grants God’s existence, grants even His goodness, but questions whether He has retained any meaningful connection with time and space. The first section of the book is fiercely beautiful and unabashedly poetic– it is the section where she establishes her great human connection to time and space, to this earth and to nature, where she establishes that we walk each day in the midst of holiness.

And then: God’s Tooth.  A child is randomly, senselessly, and brutally burned in a freak accident.  Dillard equates God to an iceberg, and us stuck in the cracks.  She writes marvelously of love and how connected we are to one another by our love, and how vulnerable.  She asks impossible questions.  Is pain the only thing real in the midst of a world that is all illusion?  What is expected of us?  “Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever, and with us.”

She asks these astounding questions, and yet is able to dwell in the mystery that is faith without answers to these questions.  She does answer them, I suppose– but she answers them not with certainty, but with a courageous embrace of the mystery.

There is no way I can do justice to the book itself– which is short enough that you might as well just read it.  It is stunning– over and over I found myself marveling, “holy smokes,” at the question she dared ask, or the language she found, or the joy she evoked.  This book imparts to me a glorious freedom to enter each day with anticipation and delight; it convinces me that every experience is real and has real meaning. It inspires me to seek the holy everywhere, and ride it.

Robinson and Dillard

Lately I have been reading Annie Dillard– For the Time Being and Holy the Firm, and Marilynne Robinson– Gilead. Some quotes from both:

MR: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

AD: “I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready at hand. There is an anomalous specificity in all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs.”

MR: “grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways”

AD: “Everything, everything is whole, and a parcel of everything else.”

MR: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”

AD: “We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lies captive on the face of the obvious– the people, events, and things of the day– to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”

MR: “what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.”

AD: “But how do we know– how could we know– that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve?”

MR: “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or a parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”

AD: “And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.”

AD: “There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.”

Art for Art’s Sake?

I was listening to India.Arie’s tribute to Stevie Wonder today, and thinking about how much his music means to me.  Then I remembered a video of her singing it in front of him, and for some reason I wondered if he really heard it as a tribute to himself, or if he was just into the music.  I suspect that when Stevie Wonder writes a song, he is not trying to inspire or connect– I bet he is just trying to write a good song.  His music has at times unparalleled ability to inspire and connect, but I think that is the effect of good art.

So I was thinking that in any kind of work we do, our responsibility is merely to do our best at that work.  Stevie Wonder tried to write really great music, and as a by-product he happened to tell a lot of truth and inspire a lot of joy.  This all means that, if I pursue my intended path, it will be my duty to write really good articles of literary criticism.  It’s hard for me to imagine how literary criticism fulfills a very high purpose, but the worst thing I could do would be to try to distort my writing to fulfill another design.  It will be most successful, even in unexpected ways, if it is allowed to be literary criticism, and not some agenda masquerading as literary criticism.  I’m sure that my desire for love and truth will work itself out in all of my writing, if I am serious about pursuing it.   But I needn’t be didactic, for instance.

I am not here trying to reiterate the “good art is inherently Christian; bad art is not Christian” argument.  I think what I am saying is something more like this: perhaps we are to pursue the art itself, and not the things that art gives birth to.  In other words, I think that music is powerful because it fosters connections between people.  It stirs up emotion, and in that way perhaps transcends some barriers.  But the goal needs to be to make good music– if the goal becomes transcending barriers or stirring up emotion, then it is no longer the art that one is pursuing.   Maybe I am making an “art for art’s sake” argument.

This all reminds me of a thought I had a long time ago.  It is my suspicion that those things which are most difficult for us to reveal, because they are the deepest, the most well-hid, the closest to our vulnerable centers– are also the things that will be most generously received, because they are perhaps the most universal.  In some sense, then, we are safest when we are at our most vulnerable.  (”pain is our mother; she makes us recognize each other”?)  The analogy, I guess, would be that art does the most when it is pursued for itself alone.

I’m not entirely sure how far I take this, but these are my current thoughts on the matter.  It’s remarkably liberating, to think that I need focus only on the purpose of the work in front of me, and not muddy the waters with trying to achieve other, perhaps “nobler” purposes at the same time.  The nobler purposes will be served as it happens, if I serve first the immediate work.

Responsibility and Language

I would really love to have a conversation about how we use language, as individuals. What options do we have, and what kind of decisions do we have to make, in regard to how we present ourself verbally or in writing?

I feel a huge sense of responsibility toward the way I use language. I’m not sure how much of this is a “natural tendency” and how much is a result of my training. A character in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces claims: “to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” I don’t know if we are ever very adept at saying the very thing we really mean, but there are myriad ways to shape and finesse our sentences and select our words to gesture toward a particular connotation. That is, for me, the art and joy of words.

And yet. That sentiment is immediately called “a glib saying,” and Lewis makes his larger point that we don’t really even know what we are saying. If this is true– if we don’t even know ourselves well enough to understand what it is we mean– then is the entire exercise of trying to say exactly what we mean a wasted effort? It seems to me, though, that we will only get to that truth by the attempt.

Another objection can be raised, however. Do we stifle expression by being too careful of our words? Do we censor ourselves? Do we waste too much energy worrying about how something might be taken? What exactly constitutes careless and/or irresponsible?

The answer to these questions is probably “it depends.” It depends on the subject matter, it depends on the audience, it depends on the author’s abilities. Does the sense of responsibility I feel merely correspond to my talent/ability? If so, what can I reasonably expect from other people?

I have an extraordinarily difficult time saying “to each her own.” Language has been put to malicious use, and we should not stand for it. Where, though, is the line between malicious and careless? And who defines it? I cannot stand against the destructive use of language by those in power, and yet turn off that conscientiousness when it comes to the irresponsible use of language by others. Can I? Yet where is the distinction between conscientious and nit-picky or overly critical?

All of these questions to which I have no definitive answers. But I would love for others to weigh in.

Broken Society

The State of Michigan spends more on jail than on higher education.  I think the ratio is something like $1.16 to jails for every $1.00 to higher education.

Something so clearly is not working here.

Marriage

In a discussion on a friend’s blog, I found myself claiming a position that surprised me:

Marriage is more about the making of a commitment than the keeping of that commitment.

What say you?

Merton’s Prometheus

Far from killing the man who seeks the divine fire, the Living God will Himself pass through death in order that man may have what is destined for him.

If Christ has died and risen from the dead, and poured out upon us the fire of His Holy Spirit, why do we imagine that our desire for life is a Promethean desire, doomed to punishment?

Why do we act as if our longing to “see good days” were something God did not desire, when He Himself told us to seek them?

Why do we reproach ourselves for desiring victory?  Why do we pride ourselves on our defeats, and glory in despair?

Because we think our life is important to us alone, and do not know that our life is more important to the Living God than it is to our own selves.

Because we think our happiness is for ourselves alone, and do not realize it is also His happiness.

Because we think our sorrows are for ourselves alone, and do not believe that they are much more than that: they are His sorrows.

There is nothing we can steal from Him at all, because before we can think of stealing it, it has already been given.

Thomas Merton, from “Prometheus: A Meditation”

Start early

From the local Journal:

“The ____ ____ Academy has announced the creation of two new scholarships . . . one to a current student and one to a new student.  Awards will be granted to students who demonstrate a strong desire to excel, in addition to academic promise.”

In addition to an application and testing for the scholarship,  “transcripts and teacher recommendations will also be considered.”

The scholarship is for students entering the first grade.

Merton on Mercy

Inexorable consistency.  Is reality the same as consistency?

The “reality” of the world he creates is made of consistency, but the reality of the real world is not consistent.

The world of consistency is the world of justice, but justice is not the final word.

There is, above the consistent and the logical world of justice, an inconsistent illogical world where nothing “hangs together,” where justice no longer damns each man to his own darkness.  This inconsistent world is the realm of mercy.

The world can only be “consistent” without God.

His freedom will always threaten it with inconsistency– with unexpected gifts.

A god who is fitted into our world scheme in order to make it serious and consistent is not God.

. . .

Mercy is not to be purchased by a set way of acting, by a formal determination to be consistent.

Law is consistent.  Grace is “inconsistent.”

The Cross is the sign of contradiction– destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies, of blood sacrifice, and of obsession.

But the magicians keep turning the Cross to their own purposes.  Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the Cross contradict mercy!  This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity!  To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved– while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

Thomas Merton, from “To Each His Darkness: Notes on a Novel of Julien Green” (in Raids on the Unspeakable)

Mercy

The ones who need mercy the most are those who deserve it the least.

(said by an inmate in the documentary, “Shakespeare Behind Bars”)