In preparation for a class I will teach this summer, The Motif of the Wilderness in Christian Thought and American Life, I am reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She finds time in nature to be a spiritual experience, as I do, but she experiences God differently than I do.When I think of "wilderness," I'm inclined to imagine wild, harsh landscapes--like the high Colorado peaks I explored while growing up--places where God reveals himself in humbling, undeniable grandeur. Dillard, on the other hand, focuses her attention on small intricacies: the reflected light in a creek, the flash of a fish in a stream, the sudden appearance of a bird in a tree. These experiences certainly communicate the power of God to her. She comments that when she walks into the wilderness, "I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something that sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell" (14). Indeed, she states that in our interactions with the created order, "Something pummels us, something barely sheathed" (15).
God's power is not the only thing experienced in nature, however. The brief flashes of light in a creek or the surprise flight of a bird is revelatory in another way: it is easily missed. "Unfortunately," Dillard laments, "nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. . . . For nature does reveal as well as conceal" (18). In this way, nature confronts us with the hiddenness of the divine. Unlike the majestic peaks, which can be witnessed by all who take enough steps to approach them and can be revisited as often as one makes the effort, the flash of a fish in a stream, seen only in the periphery of our vision, catches us by surprise and then disappears before we can focus on eyes on it. God is more like that, Dillard wants to say. The pearl of great price, she notes, can be found but not sought. "The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and total surprise" (35).
Thus for Dillard, nature communicates something important about God through its propensity to conceal itself in the transitory, surprising, flashes of revelation. They are powerful flashes, pummeling us or striking us like a bell, but they are equally mystifying. They generate longing more than satisfaction. This is Dillard's God--a mysterious, oft-hidden, consuming fire.
I plan to ask my students this summer, "Is this the God revealed in the Christian scriptures? How does Dillard's experience with nature correct how we imagine God? Where might she lead us astray?"
What do you think?
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