How Annie Dillard revived my faith last Friday
Or, Jesus did, through Annie's witness
Gentle reader,
I’ve been feeling it:
Feeling the stinging cuts that come, when Christians are horrible to other Christians, overwhelmed by the mud of the sin of the church.
I don’t have some big new horror to report.
No enormous thing sank its teeth into my soul and started to drag it down.
Instead the things were piling on:
a student’s eager faith stomped on by a patriarchal gatekeeper,
another student asked to leave an organization for failing to shibboleth properly,
a friend’s precious, faithful gifts politely refused, by polite people, as though those gifts were trash,
incompetence and lies and deceit,
the bearing of false witness which is the doing of great harm,
and Jesus being mocked by nationalism, by prosperity preaching, by authoritarian patriarchs who would rule the kingdom of this world, co-opting the name of the Prince of Peace.
The things were piling on, and I felt my soul sinking.
Then, like John Wesley reading Luther’s preface to Romans, I picked up Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm.
I found Dillard writing about the horror, the wrong, the lash of sin and sting of death.
“So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn’t I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking?
I found her writing what we so often suspect of God, when we feel those lashes.
“Of faith I have nothing, only of truth: that this one God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged.”
Henry Golden Dearth, Flecks of Foam, c. 1911/1912, public domain, via the National Gallery of Art
And then Dillard went and slapped me in my jaded face with the singular gospel. Though, “of faith I have nothing,”
Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation—a contraction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love. That God’s works are as good as we make them. That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen. Faith would be that God moved and moves once and for all and “down,” so to speak, like a diver, like a man who eternally gathers himself for a dive and eternally is diving, and eternally splitting the spread of the water, and eternally drowned.
Annie Dillard came out of my blind spot and smacked this theology teacher, managing to speak the Word afresh once more, managing to startle me into seeing Jesus, once again.
My soul might be sinking, but God is the one who dives “down,” chasing the drowning.
The false witnesses cannot undo the God who dives.
The church that cuts looks away from the God who, “as a man would lash himself to a tree for love.”
The power mongers guarding the doors with their shibboleths cannot keep out the one who was “wondered at by cattle and oxen” and who, having defeated the powers and principalities, now walks through doors.
He walks right on through their doors.
How I needed Dillard’s witness to the beauty of the Jesus who shows us the truth of the Father in the goodness of the Spirit.
Don’t worry over whether her metaphysics is incomplete or even wrong.
Because this is poetry, not analytic philosophy. Because she bore witness. To Jesus.
She faithed the good for me.
She came at me so hard and fast I didn’t have time to duck, and she hit me in the body with the bodied God. If God is power, my soul can sink.
Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power’s sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang.
But Jesus knows there is no power that is not, finally, love. If God’s hand is here, “it is a good hand.” There is no God who is not the one who,
“emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness” (Philippians 2:7).
Thank you, Annie, for your witness.
Thank you, Jesus, for revealing who you are.
Thank you for reviving this weary soul;
“a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice” (Isaiah 42:3).
Get a copy of Dillard’s Holy the Firm.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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I think so much of the arguing today in theological/Christian circles is over this question - is God primarily a God of power, majesty, might? So holy that we die to look upon Him? Or is God a God of love, who empties Himself for our sake, who continually condescends to His creatures, so that we may be transformed through His love into who He has made us to be? I personally believe that God’s love IS His power, that all of creation was created through and by and for His love, who is Jesus.
Well done, Beth! I'm going to be "digesting" that very book soon on xianbrainstretch. Look for it!