Holy The Form

“Never admire quietly. If I admire something about someone, I tell them. We humans are so fragile. It’s important we give people their flowers while they are still here. Never admire quietly.” —Chimamanda Adichie

I like that. Alright then. Out loud. Off we go.

A headmistress, in addition to her parents, had hopes she would go to college in the South where her rough edges might be smoothed. But ah the plans of mice and headmistresses. “I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface and exit through it.”

Wait, wha?! Who’s that girl?

At the end of this April that girl now woman Annie Dillard will celebrate her 80^th birthday. In other words, she’s in the late winter of her days and the cessation of her physical form looms on the horizon somewhere. Sure, there’s a chance she’ll eclipse all this death nonsense by pulling the Elijah card and get swooped right up to heaven in a fiery whirlwind. A somewhat fitting exit for the rough-edged prophet. But then again, I doubt that’ll happen as things seldom fit. No, someday in the foreseeable future the creek will call her name—Annie! Annie!—and the surface of the world will let her in, again, but this time to stay. Once upon a someday soon, she will cease. Annie Dillard will die.

And a part of me will die with her.

It’s not the first time a part of me has died. It won’t be the last. But this part, Annie’s part, is a strange one. It’s a chunk of admiration. A hunka hunka love. You see Annie Dillard was the first writer to intoxicate me. Yes, yes, she’s always had those beguiling eyes just a nose above that outlaw cigarette. But her hooks in me lay in her tongue, her language—in Annie Dillard’s holy form.

I wish I’d written the date of purchase in the front of my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [note to self, do that from now on]. It had to have been around 2000. I was a young minister in a small college town in LA (lower Arkansas). I’d grown quickly weary of the books young ministers were expected to have been reading, most of them a gag-inducing cocktail of scripture and leadership principles. And as she herself has said in almost every interview I’ve read: “I don’t like doing what I am expected to do.” Me neither, Annie. Me neither. So, I began to read amok. As so many before me, I went to the woods.

If I had to give credit, I most likely discovered her via Ed Abbey, possibly Barry Lopez, probably both. I purchased Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and the woo was on. I began to see.

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the cracks, and the mountains slam.

Cells unflaming?

Mountains slamming?

Spate through the cracks?

Good lord flatbed ford, it was love at first read. And that was just the first chapter.

Ed Abbey, Barry Lopez, Jim Harrison, Rick Bass, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, Pam Houston, they all truck in a tongue that sweeps me away. Those writers so love the world. But Annie Dillard? She shakes and stirs me for she so loves the world too but she does it while also wrestling angels and going toe to toe if not eye to eye with well, God. She uses the language of faith without using the language of faith and yes, Virginia, there’s a world of difference. Unlike those books that forced the coupling of holy writ with leadership bullets (could there be more unlikely bedfellows?), the form her words take is inhaled-exhaled, incantatory, earthy-heavenly-faith-doubt knotted spells of sound that consistently charm me. Rile me. Rend me. I know what she’s talking about, and I also don’t know. And I love it. Annie Dillard writes with transgressive invitation. Dillard (who friends say adores dancing) offers her hand on every page looks you straight in the eye and says, “C’mon now. Try and keep up.” I won’t say I’d found my muse back then in 2000. But I had found a friend, oh such a friend.

Fast forward a few years to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the summer setting for the halcyon days of Image Journal’s The Glen Conference. My writing instructor for the week, the brilliant Paula Huston, assigned our class a book by, you guessed it— Annie Dillard. In those in-between years, I’d gobbled up Holy the Firm, damn near memorized The Writing Life, dog-eared the hell out of Teaching a Stone to Talk, and had a satisfying man cry when I turned the last page of An American Childhood. I was all in. As Mary Cantwell wrote in the New York Times, “To read Annie Dillard, one has to be willing to go the whole hog.” Knocked breathless, every time. And then came, in my opinion, her home run, the very book Paula assigned us to read that week—For The Time Being.

Also in those in-between years, Colorado replaced Arkansas, writing/editing took the baton from preaching. Plus I’d had the wind knocked out of my faith more than once. The velveteen, it had frayed. I found myself more off to the side (thanks, Jim Harrison) than behind a pulpit or placed in a pew. Deconstructing before deconstructing was cool? Nah, I’d say just growing up, putting away some childish things, shedding some unnecessary skin. Annie Dillard grew up Protestant, became a Catholic in her 40s, left the Catholic Church in her 50s, and now is no doubt all that and something else.

“One way or another, Annie Dillard is forever thinking about God.”

—Mary Cantwell

Me too, Annie. Me too.

The form crouching in For The Time Being was a gift, dare I say a grace, a cat ready to pounce, a depth charge that still detonates fresh to this day. A 1999 Chicago Tribune review praises its “sestina-like structure” going so far as to call it “a new form.” For me it was simply the needed next holy form from a friend, both of us a little older, both of us on the road home leaning more, as Bryan VanDyke aptly described, toward interrogation rather than devotion. How long, O Lord? Dillard stitches her narrative with bird-headed dwarfs, the Talmud, clouds, dust, Paul Tillich, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin, to name a few. It’s a mishmash midrash sassafras of a roller coaster. My copy resembles a worn psalter, a journal of this striking world’s sober glory. As she writes on p.169 inside my tattered cover - “I don’t know beans about God.” I try to re-read this holy book each year.

One morning during that week in Santa Fe, Paula Huston drew our attention to a passage in For The Time Being, one that held a sentence she wanted us to chew on: “The baby generously extended to me a key ring.” There’s obviously a context for that sentence, a story, and I would invite you to seek and find if you’re cut from such locust and wild honey. But in the margin of that page, I copied down what Paula said about it: “Now that is a great sentence.” Yes, yes it is.

17 March 2025—Dear Annie, instead of flowers, I generously return what I’ll call the key ring of admiration you offered so many years ago now. I’ve kept it close as one does with cherished trinkets gifted by a friend. I give it back to you not under any pressure but willingly, like a grateful leper flinging himself back to the moment when it was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. Like a leper healed? No, far from it. I, like you, prefer the madness. By God you’re something else. An early Happy birthday to you. And thank you.

p.s. I keep watch for the tree with the lights in it.

Love,

John