An Annie Dillard Reader (28 page)

1993

1976

I
T IS A FAULT OF
infinity to be too small to find. It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time. Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors. We live over a bulk of things. We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps to reveal more colored things. Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe. There is no crack. Unbreakable seas lie flush on their beds. Under the Greenland icecap lies not so much as a bubble. Mountains and hills, lakes, deserts, forests, and plains fully occupy their continents. Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams? In holes at the roots of forest cedars I find spiders and chips. I have rolled plenty of stones away, to no avail. Under the lily pads on the lake are flatworms and lake water. Materials wrap us seamlessly; time propels us ceaselessly. Muffled and bound we pitch forward from one filled hour to the next, from one filled landscape or house to the next. No rift between one note of the chorus and the next opens on infinity. No spear of eternity interposes itself between work and lunch.

And this is what we love: this human-scented skull, the sheen on the skin of a face, this exhilarating game, this crowded feast, these shifting mountains, the dense water and its piercing lights. It is our lives we love, our times, our generation, our pursuits. And are we called to forsake these vivid and palpable goods for an idea of which we experience not one trace? Am I to believe eternity outranks my child's finger?

The idea of infinity is that it is bigger, infinitely bigger, than our universe, which floats, held, upon it, as a leaf might float on a shoreless sea. The idea of eternity is that it bears time in its side like a hole. You believe it. Surely it is an idea suited for minds deranged by solitude, people who run gibbering from
caves, who rave on mountaintops, who forgot to sleep and starved.

 

Let us rest the material view and consider, just consider, that the weft of materials admits of a very few, faint, unlikely gaps. People are, after all, still disappearing, still roping robes on themselves, still braving the work of prayer, insisting they hear something, even fighting and still dying for it. The impulse to a spiritual view persists, and the evidence of that view's power among historical forces and among contemporary ideas persists, and the claim of reasoning men and women that they know God from experience persists.

“A young atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” C. S. Lewis observed with amusement. Any book on any subject—a book by a writer the young atheist least suspects of apostasy—may abruptly and unabashedly reveal its author's theist conviction. It may quote the Bible—that fetish of Grandma's—as if it possessed real authority. The young atheist reels—is he crazy, or is everyone else?

This Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a bestseller, is a chink—often the only chink—through which winds howl. It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple world strays and vanishes. We crack open its pages at our peril. Many educated, urbane, and flourishing experts in every aspect of business, culture, and science have felt pulled by this anachronistic, semibarbaric mass of antique laws and fabulous tales from far away; they entered its queer, strait gates and were lost. Eyes open, heads high, in full possession of their critical minds, they obeyed the high, inaudible whistle, and let the gates close behind them.

Respectable parents who love their children leave this absolutely respectable book lying about, as a possible safeguard against, say, drugs; alas, it is the book that kidnaps the children, and hooks them.

This and similar fragments of biblical language played in my mind like a record on which the needle has stuck, moved at the root of my tongue, and sounded deep in my ears without surcease. Who IS my neighbor?

Every July for four years, my sister and I trotted off to Presbyterian church camp. It was cheap, wholesome, and nearby. There we were happy, loose with other children under pines. If our parents had known how pious and low-church this camp was, they would have yanked us. We memorized Bible chapters, sang rollicking hymns around the clock, held nightly devotions with extemporaneous prayers, and filed out of the woods to chapel twice on Sunday dressed in white shorts. The faith-filled theology there was only half a step out of a tent; you could still smell the sawdust.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Arise, take up thy bed, and walk.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. The heavens declare the glory of
God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.

Every summer we memorized these things at camp. Every Sunday, at home in Pittsburgh, we heard these things in Sunday school. Every Thursday we studied these things, and memorized them, too (strictly as literature, they said), at our private school. I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you could not find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks and minerals, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. I wrote poems in deliberate imitation of its sounds, those repeated feminine endings followed by thumps, or those long hard beats followed by softness. Selah.

 

The Bible's was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

I saw Jesus in watercolor, framed, on the walls. We Sunday-school children sat in a circle and said dimly with Samuel, “Here am I.” Jesus was thin as a veil of tinted water; he was awash. Bearded men lay indolent about him in pastel robes, and shepherd boys, and hooded women with clear, round faces. The River Jordan, the Sea of Galilee—it was all watercolor; I could see the paper through it. The southern sun, the Asian sun, bleached the color from thick village walls, from people's limbs and eyes. These pastel illustrations were as exotic, and as peculiar to children's sentimental educations, as watercolor depictions of lions and giraffes.

We studied the Gospel of Luke. In that world, people had time on their hands. Simon Peter, James, and John dropped their nets and quit their two boats full of fresh fish: “And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him.” They had time to gather at the side of the lake and
hear harsh words. They had time to stand for the Sermon on the Mount and the sermon on the plain. A multitude followed Jesus and the twelve into a desert place belonging to the city of Bethsaida. The day wore away while Jesus spoke to them of the Kingdom of God; then he had his disciples feed them—“about five thousand men”—on five loaves of bread and two fishes, which Jesus blessed and broke, looking up to heaven.

 

Luke's is the most reasoned, calm, plausible, and orderly Gospel. It does not claim divinity for Christ, but a glorious messiahship; Jesus is the holy teacher who shows the way; he leads Israel and all the world back to a prayerful acknowledgment of the fatherhood of the one God. The coming of Jesus, attended by signs from heaven, does not interrupt the sacred history of Israel; it fulfills it. But Luke's Gospel is calm and plausible only compared to the swirling bewilderments of Mark and the intergalactic leapings of John. All of the Gospels are unprecedented, unequaled, singular texts. Coming at Luke from our world, we stagger and balk. Luke is a piece torn from wildness. It is a blur of power, violent in its theological and narrative heat, abrupt and inexplicable. It shatters and jolts. Its grand-scale, vivid, and shifting tableaux call all in doubt.

In a hurried passage, Jesus walks by Levi the tax collector and says, “Follow me.” That is all there is to that. He calms the storm on the lake from his skiff. He heals the centurion's servant at a distance from his house; he raises a widow's young son from his funeral bier. He drives demons into the Gadarene swine and over the cliff. He performs all with his marble calm, by his fiery power which seems to derive from his very otherness, his emptiness as a channel to God. He moves among men who, being fishermen, could not have been panicky, but who nevertheless seem so in contrast to him: “Master, master, we perish!” Jesus is tranquil in his dealings with maniacs, rich young men, synagogue leaders, Roman soldiers, weeping women, Pilate, Herod, and Satan himself in the desert. Resurrected (apparently as a matter of course), he is distant, enlarged, and calm, even subdued; he explicates Scripture,
walks from town to town, and puts up with the marveling disciples. These things are in Luke, which of all the Gospels most stresses and vivifies Christ's common humanity.

Long before any rumor of resurrection, the narrative is wild. Jesus dines with a Pharisee. A woman—a sinner—from the town walks in; she has heard that Jesus is in that house for dinner. In she walks with no comment at all, just as later a man with dropsy appears before Jesus at another house where he is eating. The woman stands behind him in tears; the men apparently ignore her. Her tears, which must have been copious, wet Jesus's feet. She bends over and wipes the wetness away with her hair. She kisses his feet and anoints them with perfume from an alabaster flask.

After some time and conversation with the Pharisee, Jesus says, “Seest thou this woman?…Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet…. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” To the woman he says, “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” (This is in Luke alone.)

The light is raking; the action is relentless. Once in a crushing crowd, Jesus is trying to make his way to Jairus's twelve-year-old daughter, who is dying. In the crowd, a woman with an unstoppable issue of blood touches the border of his robe. Jesus says, “Who touched me?” Peter and the other disciples point out, with exasperated sarcasm, that “the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?” Jesus persists, “Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.” The woman confesses, and declares she was healed immediately; Jesus blesses her; a message comes from Jairus's house that the daughter has already died—“Trouble not the Master.”

“Fear not,” says Jesus; he enters the child's chamber with her parents and Peter, James, and John; says, “Maid, arise.” She arises straightway, and he commands her parents to give her meat. Then he calls the twelve together, gives them authority over devils and power to heal, and sends them out to teach and heal. When they come back he preaches to multitudes whom he feeds. He prays, teaches the disciples, heals, preaches to
throngs, and holds forth in synagogues. And so on without surcease, event crowded on event. Even as he progresses to his own crucifixion, his saving work continues: in the garden where soldiers seize him, he heals with a touch the high priest's servant's ear, which a disciple impetuously lopped off; hanging on his cross, he blesses the penitent thief, promising him a place in paradise “this very day.”

 

Historians of every school agree—with varying enthusiasm—that this certain Jewish man lived, wandered in Galilee and Judaea, and preached a radically spiritual doctrine of prayer, poverty, forgiveness, and mercy for all under the fathership of God; he attracted a following and was crucified by soldiers of the occupying Roman army. There is no reason to hate him, unless the idea of a God who knows, hears, and acts—which idea he proclaimed—is itself offensive.

In Luke, Jesus makes no claims to be the only Son of God. Luke is a monotheist: Jesus is the Son of Man, and the Messiah, but Jesus is not God's only-begotten Son, of one substance with the Father, who came down from heaven. Luke never suggests that Christ was begotten before all worlds, that he was very God of very God, that eternity interrupted time with his coming, or that faith in his divinity is the sole path to salvation. The substance of his teaching is his way; he taught God, not Christ. The people in Luke are a rogues' gallery of tax collectors, innkeepers, fallen women, shrewd bourgeois owners, thieves, Pharisees, and assorted unclean Gentiles. He saves them willy-nilly; they need not, and do not, utter creeds first.

Salvation in Luke, for the followers of Christ, consists in a life of prayer, repentance, and mercy; it is a life in the world with God. Faith in Christ's divinity has nothing to do with it. The cross as God's own sacrifice has nothing to do with it; the cross is Jesus' own sacrifice, freely and reluctantly chosen, and of supreme moment on that head. That Jesus was resurrected in flesh and blood means in Luke, I think, that he was indeed the Messiah whom God had promised to lead the people—now all people—by his teaching and example, back to prayerful and spiritual obedience to God their father and creator.