“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord and who will stand in this holy place?” Psalm 24:3Those interested in mystical spirituality might like this poetic essay on the mystery of suffering. Annie Dillard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” writes from a Christian perspective; however, this challenging book is not pop-inspiration. Dillard, a convert to Catholicism, uses highly poetic language to pose a question that writers have asked (but never satisfactorily answered) since the Book of Job. If there is a loving and powerful God, why is there so much suffering? Dillard spends three days in relative isolation at Puget Sound. “I came [to the Cascades] to study hard things—rock mountain and salt sea—and to temper my spirit on their edges. ‘Teach me thy ways, O Lord’ is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend.” Dillard sees a firestorm of spiritual metaphors in the natural world. She observes a moth flying into a candle flame. It becomes consumed by the fire, acts as a wick, and then provides energy and illumination by which Dillard reads about the poet Rimbaud--whose intensity caused him to flame-out while proclaiming beauty. The wingéd-imagery continues as Dillard watches a cat rip the wings off of a beautiful bird, and Dillard associates it with a passage from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah wherein seraphs (angels born in fire under the throne of God) move toward the throne of God, chanting: “Holy, Holy, Holy.” (Later generations of rabbis taught that the seraphs had such an intense love for God that they ignite into flames.) A Voice from the throne asks, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Dillard suggests some candidates: moths; birds; artists; innocent little girls; us?Tragedy collides into Dillard’s reverie of the natural world. “Into this world falls a plane.” The small plane (its wings sheared like the bird and the moth) crashes in the woods nearby and explodes, melting the skin off the face of its passenger, a seven-year-old girl, with whom Dillard had picked apples a day earlier. Little Julie Norwich (Julian of Norwich?) faces a lifetime of horrific pain and disfigurement. “Her face is slaughtered now.... Can you scream without lips?”Where was God? “No, that day’s god had 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 god of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy.” She wonders if God was “self-limited” by God’s own design. Does God have any connection to us? "Does God touch anything or is time on the loose?” Is God a holy fire burning, self-contained?" Whom shall God send? Who will stand in God’s holy place? Dillard answers, “There is no one but us.” Dillard adds that we learn this by studying the lives of artists and visionaries. She ventures: "The universe is neither contingent in nor participant in the holy." To her opening sentence “every day is god,” she now responds—“if days are gods, then gods are dead, and artists pyrotechnic fools.” Dillard, along with Job, asks a series of questions: “Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? Do we need 'little flame-faced children' to remind us what God can-and will-do? Dillard counters, “Do we need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what God cannot do?” The title, “Holy the Firm,” refers to a medieval concept of a layer of “substance” deep within the earth, beneath the rock, that serves as both bridge and barrier between the physical and the spiritual worlds. “Holy Firmness is in touch with Time and Space and the Absolute at base.” Dillard speculates that the firmness of “absolute zero” is a circle that connects two theories: emanance (God is apart from the world in vertical chain of “burning”); and immanation (God is within the world in horizontal line). Dillard writes: There is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is lit, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and life without sacrifice is an abomination. What can any artist set on fire but his world? His face is flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for people to see; his life goes up in the works. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and throned. How can an all-powerful and all-loving God allow suffering? I think Dillard’s suggestion is that God has self-imposed limits on God’s power. Dillard’s mysticism pushes against the boundaries of my pragmatic attitude. I just know that we all suffer. Some suffer and become light; others suffer and go dark. Perhaps, instead of just asking why is there so much sorrow, we could also ask how there is so much good, and ask how do some people manage to transform their suffering into art or selflessness? I have tried to relay Dillard’s musings, as I understand them, with fidelity-- though I confess that do not really understand them. I would not try to comfort the father and mother of that burned little girl by telling them that there is “a holy firmness” that undergirds all things or that their daughter is a prophetic burnt offering. But though Dillard’s mysticism hits the brick wall of my skepticism, she nonetheless speaks to the poet within me.This is one of those books that will displease many readers. Atheists may scorn her faith, and the religious with a literal approach to faith, may think her beliefs heretical. I think Dillard’s audience, for this book, consists of undecided seekers and open-minded believers who look-- not to doctrine-- but to metaphor for clues as to the primeval mysteries of the world.March 18, 2013
In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard certainly can not be accused for excess verbiage. Her little book, consisting of less than eighty pages, is a thoughtful and sometimes intense investigation into the soul. One can almost imagine her staring deeply at a flowing river or a particular kind of tree and genuinely seeing Divinity in and around it, authentically feeling it and being transportated to the nether reaches of the unexplained. Yet, it is a good place or moment where nothing can touch you or hurt you. It is the zone where you have that elongated, never ending epihany. However, in Holy the Firm, she has that exact moment or moments, citing a couple of specific occasions and or happenings: a moth engulfed in a candle flame, a child severely burned in an airplane mishap and lastly, a baptism on a chilly day on a beach. Her stabbing gaze and visual processing is an inherent endowment for us all but very seldom used, sad to say. Each example that she bethinks, on the surface, looks violent and harsh and horrible. But behind that mask of the unpleasant, there is profound cheer at the transformation of the perception, of soul development, and yes, of course, of the logical, humanistic and psychological plain of thought processing, filtering and transforming. The essay, in no uncertain terms, conveys a kind of WOW factor that says, I don't really know how this whole thing operates, but isn't it amazing nonetheless? The deity of God has to be here, right in front of our very eyes, every moment, every instance, every half second. Holiness is under a rock, in people, in nature, in moments (good and bad), one giant gelatinous glob with so many tags and definitions attached to it. But only the Holy makes it cohesive and function. This work is not so little in its implications and gratitude. There is a majesty here, an august celebration. And we're all in it together, a gem of a book!
What do You think about Holy The Firm (1998)?
Has he no power? Can the other gods carry time and its love upside down like a doll in their blundering arms? As though we the people were playing house---when we are serious and do love---and not the gods? 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.
—David Ranney
Oh, Ms. Dillard. I heart you. From the first time I opened Pilgrim At Tinker Creek in a nature writing class as Grays Harbor College in 1994, you have consistently demonstrated the ability to take my breath away and give it back over and over again. They way you take your observations of nature and experiences of the world and use them to explore the biggest questions amazes me. You are not for the bored or faint-hearted. I took this little book with me to Flapjack Lakes and read it until I fell asleep and then finished it sitting on a mossy rock overlooking a lake while I drank my morning coffee out of a blue titanium camping mug. The moth! The girl! You explore the question of why there is such suffering in the world if there is a God and add that the existence of suffering is the reason for art. Well, that's what I think anyway. You sometimes go over head in the most gorgeous way.
—Liz
My daughter states this is her favorite book, next to the Bible. She rereads it every year. I decided to find out what she likes. Having read Annie Dillard's other book and not in the mood for it at the time, I was surprised to find myself enjoying this book immensely. I feel it is a book that needs to be read aloud. Annie lives in a one room home on Puget Sound with a view of mountain ranges, the sea and forest. She lives with one ambitious cat, a spider and her thoughts. In this book we learn to appreciate the Pacific Northwest and the moods of the rain and sea. She writes prose like poetry. The book is almost like a diary, a rambling account of days. I like that for a writer, one so open and revealing. There are no expectations of deep thoughts but to reread this book, as my daughter does, I can see that I too would gain new insights into human nature, the wilds of land and sea and the solitude we all share as individuals when we too sit in one room alone with only our pets for company. I look forward to reading this again next year.
—Darlene
