Questioning Faith

Where it’s Okay to Ask

Annie Dillard's Story

Taken from Walking Away from Faith by Ruth A. Tucker

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

While recovering at home from outpatient surgery some time ago, I listened to the taped reading of Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book had been sitting unread on my bookshelf. I had started it years earlier, but I tend to do things in a hurry, and if there is one book that cannot be read in a hurry, it is this one. So, lying in bed, unable to sit up and read, I listened unhurriedly to Annie's words.

In many ways I identify with her. We were born a few months apart. She has her Tinker Creek; I had my Yellow River. Hers is a stream running through a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains; mine is a river running through the forests and meadows of the two-hundred acre farm on which I grew up in northern Wisconsin. I loved that river in every season, and I spent countless hours getting to know its movements and melodies and rhythms, its forms and hues and temperament. I was a child then. I live far away from the river now. But Annie brings me back into a world I then perceived only dimly, one that has now passed me by. And as I go back to that world, I see more clearly through her eyes not only nature but human nature—and more than that, hints of God, hints that reach our senses all along the banks of Tinker Creek. Here are some of the words I listened to as I was recuperating:

The sky is deep and distant, laced with sycamore limbs like a hatching of crossed swords. . . . My back rests on a steep bank under the sycamore; before me shines the creek . . . and above it rises the other bank, also steep, and planted in trees. I have never understood why so many mystics of all creeds experience the presence of God on mountaintops. Aren't they afraid of being blown away? . . . It often feels best to lay low, inconspicuous, instead of waving your spirit around from high places like a lightening rod. . . . Invisibility is the all-time great "cover." . . . And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. . . . That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. . . . The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. . . . When we lose our innocence—when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot—we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open.²⁰

An American Childhood

Annie grew up in Pittsburgh—an environment very different from the rural setting in which I grew up. But our spiritual formation was similar. She tells of going to Bible camp every summer with her sister: "If our parents had known how pious and low church this camp was, they would have yanked us," she writes. The children all sang "rollicking hymns," prayed, and learned Scripture verses to the point that she had lodged in her brain "miles of Bible in memory." "I had got religion at summer camp," she recalls, but time took its toll. "As the years wore on, the intervals between Julys at camp stretched," and in between were all the attractions of the world. "When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. . . . I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I was sinking into that pit."²¹

From that point, her life began to unravel: "I quit the church. I wrote the minister a fierce letter." This was at the very time she was struggling with the question that would continue to haunt her: "If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering?" But most of her struggles were less philosophical.

Funny how badly I'd turned out. . . . I woke up and found myself in juvenile court. I was hanging from crutches; for a few weeks after the drag race, neither knee worked. . . . I'd been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. . . . Both my parents wept. . . . Why didn't I settle down, straighten out, shape up? I wondered, too. . . . Late one night, my parents and I sat at the kitchen table; there was a truce. We were all helpless, and tired of fighting. . . . "What are we going to do with you?" Mother raised the question. Her voice trembled and rose with emotion. . . . She sighed and said again, looking up and out of the night-black window, "Dear God, what are we going to do with you?" My heart went out to them. We all seemed to have exhausted our options. They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn't come up with anything. The U.S. Marines didn't take sixteen-year-old girls.²²

Philosopher at Tinker Creek

Annie has since grown up, and she has some of the clearest insights on belief and unbelief that I have ever encountered. And some of her insights are no insights at all—they are simply statements of fact. I concluded chapter ten with her reflections on pain and suffering—an issue that has troubled her since youth. Her verdict: "We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel's worth of sense into our days."²³

It is Annie's humor that I enjoy the most. It is all too easy for Christians—and the church that is made up of Christians—to take themselves and their acts of piety too seriously. How silly we must often look in the eyes of God—and I mean all of us, not just those who are exercising the gift of "holy laughter" or the pastor who is sitting on the church roof to raise money for a new "ministry" van. We all look silly. We need to examine ourselves and our feeble attempts to connect with God. And that which is truly feeble, Annie points out, may actually connect with the heart of God more effectively than that which is so smooth and professional. One of her stories illustrates this well:

We had a wretched singer once, a guest from a Canadian congregation, a hulking blond girl with chopped hair and big shoulders, who wore tinted spectacles and a long lacy dress, and sang, grinning, to faltering accompaniment, an entirely secular song about mountains. Nothing could have been more apparent than that God loved this girl; nothing could more surely convince me of God's unending mercy than the continued existence on earth of the church. The higher Christian churches—where, if anywhere, I belong—come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.²⁴

Annie captures the continuity of history and our place in history before God as well as any writer I know. I am a historian more than by profession: I cannot think apart from history. Without history there would be no future, no faith, no God. Annie's writing and thinking is permeated by a sense of history—sacred history that comes in very shabby clothes:

A blur of romance clings to our notions of "publicans," "sinners," "the poor," "the people in the marketplace," "our neighbors," as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. . . . There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet, some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.²⁵

"Yet, some have imagined well," she writes, "with honesty and art" especially "artists and visionaries."

Notes

²⁰ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 89-90.

²¹ Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), pp. 132-33, 222, 224.

²² Ibid., pp. 233-36.

²³ Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 61.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 58-59.

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 56-57.