Monday, August 09, 2010

"Everywhere I Look I See Fire"

Annie Dillard is now a card-carrying Catholic; but for many year, she was (as she described it) "spiritually promiscuous." Annie dabbled in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and a smattering of other ideologies.

In an effort to sort through her thoughts, she wrote them down. Then, at age twenty-nine, Annie won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. (I'm now chanting, "iwillnotbeenvious, iwillnotbeenvious...")

Nearly twenty years following, Annie Dillard converted to Catholicism and seems to have stuck there ever since. But this short reflection from her first book, written in her days of searching, struck me with its beauty. I love her reflections on nature, and how they obviously led her to the existence of a creator. This passage left me in awe--not only of her ability as a writer, but in awe of God's ability to create magnificent beauty in such a way that we can't help but try and take it all in.

If you, too, are left speechless by beauty, grab a cup of tea and enjoy this piece:

After watching a frog killed slowly by a gut-sucking beetle (you read that right), Annie wrote:

"Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power of light, the canary that sings.... Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.....

The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell...containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.

We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?

....The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

Years later, and we still can't ignore the "conundrum." The whole world is still sparking and flaming for an answer to the question: who gave us this beauty and grace?