Annie Dillard, that golden-tongued bellyacher. How beautifully can you say "Curse God and die"? There she sits, describing a created world so stunning that even her words are like a thimble trying to catch a waterfall--and then one plane goes down, and she can't get over it. She never stops whining long enough to hear the Answer out of the whirlwind.

Read in 2007, again in 2012.

Read again for the third of fourth time--still wonderful.

"The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose?"

Spirituality is always at the tip of our tongue. We know, or have remembered, that it requires engagement with the elements, embodiment in living. We want to find springs and lap water into buckets, see it spilling into light, we want to build fires and feel the darkness at our backs. But the world is in endless motion, our lives refuse stillness. And after all this, what do we make of violence? If we can start from Christian assumptions about God, his goodness and love, how can we look the world in the eyes and not retreat toward a limited or a distant view of God? How can we keep this taste on our tongues without reduction and abstraction?

So, like Isaiah with coal touched lips, Annie Dillard writes, she writes about the mountains and the sea of Puget Sound, she writes in movements, with a building sense of motion, simple sights become oddly hinged, almost wrecked. She writes about random violence, a plane crashes, a little girl's face is badly burned. How pain seems to be the only clear and unfading reality, the powerlessness of love. And she writes, finally, incredibly, about God and her desire to worship him.

This is a brilliant book and benefits from multiple readings. The writing is poetic, a highly variable rhythm, tending toward the unwieldy and chaotic. I found it personally clarifying and exciting on a number of fronts.

Holy the Firm is a remarkable series of 3 lyrical essays penned by Annie Dillard, first published in 1977. “Newborn & Salted” explores her daily connections with the infinite while living on Lummi Island in Washington State. The second, “God’s Tooth” tackles the difficult theological proposition of God allowing “natural evil to happen” when a plane crashes, and the third, “Holy the Firm” explores in part her church life on the island. Dillard’s visions of God are startling, yet profound. Although Holy the Firm is only 66 pages long, it took her 14 months, writing full-time, to complete the manuscript. In The New York Times Book Review novelist Frederick Buechner called it "A rare and precious book."

Nothing really happens in the book.
There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.
The main event is a plane crash in which a seven-year-old girl's face is horribly disfigured by the fire. This tragedy alone causes the narrator to experience a deep crisis. Holy the Firm is a metaphysical text, concerning the nature of reality, religion, love, longing, grief, death... and cats(?) :)

It's only 76 pages, so why in the world has it taken me this long to read this well-loved volume of essays by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard? I don't know, but now that I've read it I guess it really doesn't matter because I've tucked the words and images from this slim volume right into place between all the other Annie Dillard treasures already sunk away into my memory and imagination. And a shimmery store of treasures it is!

Reading these essays felt almost like an epilogue of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Once again the author is hidden away in a pleasant burrow of nature -- this time an island in the Puget Sound. Once again Dillard cuts herself off from all distractions threatening to blind her vision what's really going in this dusty earth. In Holy the Firm, she sits in a wooden room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person" and writes minutia and tragedy with the same pen, the moth in the candle flame and the girl falling out of the sky, each receiving the same deft touch. And, thus, adds her voice to the immortal conversation of how much good is in a God.

Read my favorite excerpts at my full review here: http://blog.thissacramentallife.com/2...

This book is a gift. And exactly what I needed to read right now.

Confusing as you can believe, heartbreaking, and absolutely gorgeous. This book deals more honestly with the problem of God and pain than anything else I've ever read except Job.
The majority of the book is about a young girl whose face is badly burnt in a freak accident. From what I understand, it is based on a real event, but Dillard names her child Julie Norwich; her mother's name is Anne. Thus the child is Julie of Anne Norwich. This is interesting in that there was a fourteenth century mystic named Julianne of Norwich, most famous for her vision in which an angel came to her with something the size of a jewel in his hand. When she asked what it was, he replied "it is everything that was made." Thus God is outside time and views all things from all angles; "He's got the whole world in His hands." Julianne of Norwich also said "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
Probably you should read this book.

2019 note. The Julie thing: it's not 'the majority.' It's less than a third of the very short book. But the whole is better than I remembered, because of course it is.

I guess I'd rather read Proust, or Scripture.

Dillard writes that “Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language at the corner where eternity clips time.” That, I suppose, describes this book. It is about, what? God of some sort is everywhere? Her opening line is that “Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.”

Each day, she writes, “discovers itself, like the poem” and the book itself is a poem. She rescues semicolons from obscurity and gives them a majestic place. You can feel their presence. They are stops, not full stops, but movement too. Colons stop the reader and attention is paid to what is due. Comas break the sentences into notes and rhythm. The book is cadence. Even if I don’t understand what she is saying, I can hear a voice that moves me along, as music without meaning.

Incredible writing. "Land is eternity's pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."

I don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of Annie Dillard's writing. I have tried so many times.