I still can't let go of spirituality. . .

When I think that I am perfectly settled in my agnostic way of being, something comes along to remind me that the mystical and supernatural still reverberate bizarrely within me. When I read this essay that a friend of mine had written, it was saying what I didn't know that I needed to say:

Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm confronted and freed me. I had come to a place in my mind where I did not know if I could call myself a Christian any longer. The language in the air of my evangelical college with which I heard people speak of God had become empty in my ears. I thought that Christianity meant mercy and justice and service, but around me I witnessed vanity and materialism and a general apathy for world issues. The disconnection was more than I could reconcile on my own. When I repeatedly heard language about morality and then watched people shrug away the marginalized, I assumed that in order to have passion for the latter, I had to relinquish the former.

Then, Dillard gave me reality, and illuminated the threads that join all of life’s experiences, both the comfortable and the harsh. She juxtaposed the times that life fits like a puzzle with the times that the brokenness of the world makes you want to scream at God. In doing so, she proposed the meeting of the imminent with the transcendent, in all its beauty and terror. Her book left me awestruck, but more so, urgent to follow the passions that I knew I possessed and felt were true regardless of my confession of faith.

Dillard painted the motif of a nun who is a flame for God. Whether the nun was a moth stuck in the wax of a burning candle, or a young girl whose face was burned off in an accident, or a writer providing a lit path through words, she challenged: what else can we do but become flames? I listened to her say that it is high time that we meet eternity and live where the known and the unknown intersect. This is both a frightening prospect and the most blessed task imaginable. Through her writing, I understood faith as mysterious yet livable. The pain of the world is unreasonable, but we must fulfill a duty to ease the grief. After all, “there is no one but us. There never has been” (57). In Holy the Firm I found that my old passions and a new language of faith were both possible.