A Face Aflame

Any reader who comes across the prose of Annie Dillard in Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly or in her books finds an eloquent blend of facts, theological ideas, and visual images. The power of her prose is undeniable. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, now selling widely in paperback, won the Pulitzer prize. Holy the Firm, her new book, more directly addresses theological ideas.

Annie Dillard deserves analysis. In her own words, she departs from such British rationalists as C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton; yet she firmly rejects agnosticism and worships in Christian churches. The following interview was conducted by Campus Life editor Philip Yancey at Dillard’s office on Puget Sound. Dillard speaks for herself. Assistant editor Cheryl Forbes and writer Patricia Ward evaluate Dillard’s books in Refiner’s Fire (page 28).

Question: Annie, when I mention you to my friends, I get one of two reactions: either a sign of appreciation from a fervent admirer or a puzzled “Who?” It seems most evangelicals are in the second category.

Answer: Well, I admit I am consciously addressing the unbeliever in my books, though I have great empathy for evangelicals. I was raised Presbyterian, in Pittsburgh, and during my development I had only one short fling of rebellion against God.

For four consecutive summers I had gone to a fundamentalist church camp in the country. We sang Baptist songs and had a great time—it gave me a taste for abstract thought. But I grew sick of people “going to church just to show off their clothes,” so I quit the church. Instead of quietly dropping away, I wanted to make a big statement, so I marched into the assistant minister’s office. I gave him my spiel about how much hypocrisy there was in the church. This kind man replied, “You’re right, honey, there is.”

Before leaving, I said, “By the way, I have to write a senior paper for the school—do you have any C. S. Lewis books?” He gave me an armful and I started a long paper on C. S. Lewis. By the time I finished I was right back in the arms of Christianity. My rebellion lasted a month.

Q: You have gained stature in the publishing world so quickly. It’s amusing to be with publishers who think they have the whole literary scene predicted and portrayed on graphs and charts. Then out of nowhere comes a young woman with her first book, which gets the Pulitzer Prize. Were you shocked?

A: Sure, but what excited me more was the acceptance of the first chapter from Pilgrim for Harper’s magazine. That day I was happy. I was out playing softball when the phone call came. I ran in, ate an apple very quickly, and called everyone I knew. Twenty-four hours later I got happy all over again. The Pulitzer came much later—over a year later.

Q: You did, however, become a public person suddenly. How did that affect you?

A: It was confusing at first. Offers came in from everywhere: offers to write texts for photography books, to write for Hollywood, write ballets and words for songs. And I received hundreds of invitations to speak and teach.

That whole business is a dreadful temptation for an artist. I thought about it, and finally made my choice by turning down an appearance on the Today show. Now I give only one reading a year, and virtually no other public appearances. I have chosen to be a writer—and I must stick to that; the craft demands my full energy.

Q: Did you get many personal letters from readers of Pilgrim?

A: Yes. One man, a professor of theology at a Catholic university, wrote that he resigned his job immediately after reading it. Another woman, a devout Catholic, was a book editor for The National Observer. She wrote a very sympathetic, intelligent review for her paper, discussing the religious angle thoroughly. On the same page with the review, the paper ran her obituary; she had died shortly after finishing the review.

Many people who responded with the most warmth were struggling with cancer or some similar burden.

Q: You seem easily moved by people. And yet, you write about them only rarely; you prefer objects and nature. Why? Don’t they fascinate you in the same way?

A: Oh yes—they do. I just don’t think I’m good enough to write about people yet. I’d love to try some day.

“There is one church here, so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I quit the house and wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. On a big Sunday there might be twenty of us there; often I am the only person under sixty, and feel as though I’m on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a Congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world—for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God’s grace to all—in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, ‘Lord we bring you these same petitions every week.’ After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much. ‘Good morning!’ he says after the first hymn and invocation, startling me witless every time, and we all shout back, ‘Good Morning!’ ” (Holy the Firm, pp. 57–58).

Q: I have heard that you have come in contact with rigid fundamentalists. How do they affect you?

A: I have great respect for them. When I lived in Virginia, I did readings for the blind at a nearby Bible College. Fundamentalists have intense faith. Many educated people think them naïve. But fundamentalists know they have chosen the narrow way; they know the social scorn they face.

You must remember, however, my prime audience is the skeptic, the agnostic, not the Christian. Just getting the agnostic to acknowledge the supernatural is a major task.

Q: Your latest book, Holy the Firm, differs greatly in structure from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s a fraction of the length, more narrative in style, more abstract, more directly theological. Many people consider it less penetrable. What did you hope to accomplish?

A: I chose an artistic structure. I decided to write about whatever happened in the next three days. The literary possibilities of that structure intrigued me. On the second day an airplane crashed nearby, and I was back where I had been in Pilgrim—grappling with the problem of pain and dying. I had no intention of dealing with that issue at first, but it became unavoidable.

I kept getting stuck. Those forty-three manuscript pages took me fifteen months to write. In Pilgrim I would get stuck for three days at a time and I would just plow through. But in Holy the Firm the problems were enormous. The question I constantly faced was, “Can it be done?” After the second day’s plane crash … how could I resolve anything on the third day?

I would have to crank myself up to approach the stack of manuscript pages. Then I’d read what I had written on the last pages and even I couldn’t understand it. I don’t live on that kind of level.

Q: People who know you through your writings probably assume you do live on that level, don’t they?

A: Yes, that’s an unfortunate error. As a writer, I am less a creator than an audience to the artistic vision. In Holy the Firm I even inserted a disclaimer. I said, “No one has ever lived well.” I do not live well. I merely point to the vision.

People, holy people, ask me to speak at their monasteries and I write back and say no, keep your vision. In The Wizard of Oz there’s a giant machine that announces “Dorothy!”; behind the curtain a little man is cranking it and pushing buttons. When the dog pulls back the curtain to expose the little man, the machine says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Look at the light show.”

So I ask the monks to keep their vision of power, holiness, and purity. We all have glimpses of the vision, but the truth is that no man has ever lived the vision.

Q: With the exception of Jesus.

A: Of course!

Q: How does your own vision penetrate your life? You don’t write much about ethics.

A: No, I don’t write at all about ethics. I try to do right and rarely do. The kind of art I write is shockingly uncommitted—appallingly isolated from political, social, and economic affairs.

There are lots of us here. Everybody is writing about politics and social concerns; I don’t. I’m not doing any harm.

“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 mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of this 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” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 7–8).

Q: You write as an observer, perched on the edge, but also immersed in the world. You ask us to see it with new, enlightened eyes. But how are your powers of observation affected by what has happened to you in the last few years? Can you maintain an innocent gaze when you know you could make a pile of money on your walk through the woods or on your trip to the Galapagos Islands, or even on your visit to the hospital to visit the plane crash victims?

A: That’s not been a problem. I’d certainly not walk in the woods thinking I’d write a book about it. That would drive you nuts in no time.

Q: In Holy the Firm, you lived those three days knowing you’d write a book about them.

A: True. I started it as a poem. I merely waited to see what was going to happen and I wasn’t looking at my reactions. I simply needed a certain amount of events—whatever might happen—to make a minor point: that days are lived in the mind and in the spirit.

Q: In other words, what we perceive happening in a day is really just the surface layer; something much greater and more profound is occurring behind the curtain.

A: Yes. How does the world look from within? And that brought in the concept of Holy the Firm.

Every day has its own particular brand of holiness to discover and worship appropriately. The only way to deal with that was to discover the relationship between time and eternity. That single question interests me artistically more than any other.

If you examine each day, with the events and objects it contains, as a god, you instantly have to conclude there are pagan gods. And if you believe in a holy God—how does he relate to these pagan gods that fill the world? That is exactly the same question as the relationship between time and eternity. Does the holy God bring forth these pagan gods out of his love?

Here I depart from the British rationalists like C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald. I am grounded strongly in art and weakly in theology. There is a profound difference between the two fields. If I wanted to make a theological statement I would have hired a skywriter. Instead, I knock myself out trying to do art, and it’s not so airtight. It isn’t reducible to a sealed system. It doesn’t translate so well.

Q: Then that’s why in your books you give us both hope and despair, anger and love.

A: I guess. I must stay faithful to art. I get in my little canoe and paddle out to the edge of mystery; it is unfortunately true that words fail, reason fails; and all I can do is to create a world which by its internal coherence makes a degree of sense. I can either do that or hush. And then I learn to make statements about that world, to furrow deeper into the mystery.

Every single thing I follow takes me there, to the edge of a cliff. As soon as I start writing, I’m hanging over the cliff again. You can make a perfectly coherent world at the snap of a finger—but only if you don’t bother being honest about it.

Q: You seem driven to that mystery. You describe the beauty of nature with such eloquence in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—but just as I’m exulting, you strike me with its terror and injustice.

A: As I wrote Pilgrim, I kept before me the image of people who are suffering. They were right there in the room as I wrote the book. I could not write a cheerful nature book or a new version of the argument from design—not with a leukemia patient next to me. I had to write for people who are dying or grieving—and that’s everybody. I can’t write just from any fat position.

When I worked on Holy the Firm and the plane went down, I thought, Oh no, God is making me write about this damn problem of pain again. I felt I was too young, I didn’t know the answer and didn’t want to—but again, I had too.

“In the Koran, Allah asks, ‘The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?’ It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? ‘God is subtle,’ Einstein said, ‘but not malicious.’ Again, Einstein said that ‘nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.’ It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness, a swaddling band for the sea, God ‘set bars and doors’ and said, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?” (Pilgrim, p. 7).

Q: C. S. Lewis said something like this about nature; you don’t go to her to derive your theology. You go to her with your theology and let her fill those words (glory, redemption, love) with meaning.

A: I like that.

Q: Yet I get the idea, in Pilgrim especially, that you did go to nature to derive your theology.

A: In a way, that’s true. I approached the whole chaos of nature as if it were God’s book. From it I derived symbols and themes that gave me some structures for truth.

Q: But only God can tell you about God. Nature merely tells you about nature. What if something you learned from nature contradicted Scripture?

A: If I thought I had to make the choice between God and nature, I would choose God. But I don’t think I have to make that choice.

Q: When you studied nature, you came away with a simultaneous sense of awe and horror?

A: It can’t be reduced to those terms. In Pilgrim I wrote about the vita positiva and the vita negativa. The rich, full expression of God’s love bursts out in all the particulars of nature. Everything burgeons and blossoms—and then comes a devastating flood. There is spring, but also winter. There is intricacy in detail, but also oppressive fecundity as nature runs wild. It all starts collapsing; I see sacrifice and then prayer and everything empties and empties until I’m at the shores of the unknown where I started—except much more informed now.

Q: Chesterton said about nature that it’s wrong to refer to her as mother nature. She’s really sister nature, a separate, parallel creation to man with all his flaws and inconsistencies. She’s half good and half bad.

A: Well, I sure as heck deal with that. I don’t have a summary sentence for my view. It’s all in the books somewhere.

“That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agree to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear; if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.’ This is what we know. The rest is gravy” (Pilgrim, pp. 180–181).

Q: The group you referred to as the British rationalists, notably Lewis, would explain this planet as the condemned planet, an outpost of the universe where evil runs rampant. Perhaps that’s why he makes the statement that you can’t get your theology from nature. You are on the canker sore planet and you may come up with a canker sore theology. Do you view the universe as filled with God’s love and the earth as a marred exception?

A: That’s nuts. We live in the age when we have the photographs of earth from space. Here is one absolutely beautiful sphere floating among the others. There’s more beauty in the variety and richness of life here than on the other planets. As an artist, that picture from space has to affect my view.

Q: I’m sure their reference is to worlds in other dimensions, that the holy world is more real than this world.

A: Perhaps. But this world merited the Incarnation. If everything is a symbol of spiritual reality, then earth’s beauty means something. The classical orthodox definition of beauty is that beauty is the splendor of truth. Beauty and goodness and truth are a triad.

The beauty of this world can’t be brushed away. It is true there is sin and pain and suffering, but to call the earth a blot in the universe is evasive. If you carry that through to its conclusion, then God should never have created the world; it was all some horrible mistake.

Q: Lewis uses the analogy of Christ’s incarnation as a diver plunging into the depths to rescue a pearl without a glimmer of light and pulling it back into the light.

A: Yes—I love that image of God emptying himself.

Q: So we’re really back to your one key question of time and eternity. Just how involved is God in this world?

A: I believe, often, that nature participates in the essence of God himself and if he removed his loving attention from it for a fraction of a second life would cease.

Q: You referred in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to the Law of Indeterminancy in physics. If randomness is the rule, what part does God play? Isn’t it true that his law strengthens the concept of God the sustainer? If he weren’t here, it could literally fall apart at any moment. There must be wisdom behind it.

A: And yet you have to be very careful how you state that, because it borders on superstition. I believe that ultimately the people praying in the monasteries are keeping the whole thing going—metaphorically, at least—but there’s a huge danger within any religion that it will lapse into superstition.

Q: Do you believe in miracles of the supernatural, nature-interrupting sense?

A: Of course, I have no problem with them at all. I’m a long way from agnosticism. I can’t imagine now how I could have had a problem with them at one time.

To me the real question is, How in the world can we remember God? I like that part of the Bible that ticks off kings as good and bad. Suddenly there comes this one, King Josiah, who orders the temple to be cleaned up and inadvertently discovers the law.

This happens after generations of rulers and following God through the Exodus. Somehow they had forgotten the whole thing, every piece of it. Recognizing that, the king tears his clothes and cries.

A whole nation simply forgot God. We think, how can we forget—we who have seen God? Is it right of God to insist that we wear strings around our fingers to remember him?

This notion of recollection is a pressing spiritual problem—not only how can we remember God, but why does he let us forget? I’m always forgetting God—always, always. That famous prayer, “I will in the course of this day forget thee; for forget thou not me” is sometimes thought of as a warm Christian joke. I don’t think it is so warm. I think that is a lot to ask.

“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff’ (Pilgrim, p. 33).

Q: There is another side of God. One of the strange sights in Scripture is Jesus weeping over unreceptive Jerusalem. “Oh that I could gather you under my wings,” he says. A very strange statement for an omnipotent God. He has limited his actions on earth; he refuses to coerce.

A: I often wonder why God didn’t make things clearer, why he spoke in a still, small voice. And I get angry at God when I see so many good people who appear to lack an organ by which they can perceive God. I blame God for that; but that’s just the way he chooses to go about doing things. I often think of God as a fireball—friendly—who just rolls by. If you’re lucky you get a slight glimpse of him.

Q: But if you actively look for the fireball he can be found. Nature can be one vehicle, as Pilgrim shows.

A: The sixteenth-century British mystic named Juliana of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, which I’ve only had the courage to read once. Its main idea, God’s love, is the most threatening of all, because it demands such faith. Q: You have described yourself as hanging onto the edge of a cliff, grappling. Yet I just read a review of Holy the Firm in New Times that paints you as the predetermined Christian with pat answers. To the reviewer, you were not hanging on the cliff: you were still very much on solid ground and he was over the cliff, unbelieving.

A: That’s the trouble. Agnostics don’t know what in the world is going on. They think religion is safety when in fact they have the safety. To an agnostic you have to say over and over again that the fear of death doesn’t lead you to love of God. Love of God leads you to fear of death.

Agnostics often think that people run to God because they are afraid of dying. On the contrary, the biblical religion is not a safe thing. People in the Bible understood the transitory nature—the risk—of life better than most people. They weren’t using religion as an escape hatch. Faith forces you to a constant awareness of final things. Agnostics don’t remember all the time that they’re going to die. But Christians do remember. All our actions in this life must be affected by God’s point of view.

“What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burnt out, any muck ready to hand?

“His face is flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. 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 thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home” Holy the Firm, p. 72).

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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