To Live in Awe: Reflecting on the Writing of Annie Dillard

In this season where we have lost so many beloved cultural icons, it is the death of essayist Annie Dillard that hit me the hardest.

Dillard has shaped my faith more than any other author or thinker. When I first started going to a UU church, I set up a meeting with my minister. I went in feeling bold and a little entitled. I wasn’t sure about the whole church thing, or the whole God thing, and I wanted some straight answers. After all, I thought, what’s a minister trained for if not to tell me whether or not God is real?! To my initial dismay, he would not tell me whether or not God is real, but he did send me out the door with Annie Dillard’s “Holy the Firm” and I haven’t been the same since.

Dillard is famous for her nature writing, but it is not quaint or sentimental. In the natural world she finds equal parts beauty and terror. She rejects notions that nature is tidy and economical and speaks instead of a profligate creator that favors extravagance, imagination, and creation for creation’s sake. I am especially fond of her quote, "No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe." She approaches “this place we’ve been so startlingly set down” with curiosity and its creator with reverence and a healthy bit of fear—a posture best described as awe. For Dillard, creation is a powerful thing, a force not to be taken lightly.

So it makes a certain kind of sense that this recorder of the natural world also had a lot to say about church. For Dillard, both are spaces where we, in all our tender and fragile humanity, deign to approach the great mystery and power at the heart of the universe.

As a generally convivial extrovert, fond of fellowship hour, potlucks, pub theology and stewardship dinners, I find this a helpful reminder. At the end of the day, we are not a social club or a historic society. We are a church. Whatever your theology—whatever pre-fix you might put before “theist,”—we come to this place seeking something transcendent. And in that seeking, we are (or should hope to be) transformed. That is not for the faint of heart!

I am grateful I have Annie Dillard’s words to remind me of this dimension of our shared worship life. Every time I sit down to write a sermon, I hear Dillard whispering over my shoulder: “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

It is fitting then, that this Sunday we will gather to reflect on the themes of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. This marks the end of the ten day period known as, “The Days of Awe,” where the Gates of Mercy and Book of Life are thrown open and we are asked to approach with humility, reverence, and a renewed commitment to caring for all of creation.

May we gather faithfully and joyfully, with our hearts open and crash helmets strapped on, hoping the waking god will draw us out to a place of fierce love, greater justice, and extravagant mercy.

In faith,
Rev. Danielle