Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

I’ve been reading, re-reading, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I can’t recommend this book highly enough, if you haven’t yet read it – read it. If you read it once – read it again. Dillard’s style of writing is so rich, so full, this is prose you could happily drown in and enjoy drowning.

This is a wonderful passage at the end of this book.

‘I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up from them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in just but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.’ (pages 275-276 in the edition I have)

Anchored to her Creek, Dillard cannot but see. What she sees around her, and shares with us, is a world in which there is great extravagance and exceeding beauty. At times both overwhelm her. She recognises the temptation to ignore, to close her eyes, to loosen her anchor hold, yet her ‘vision of vastness and might’ is so dear to her that she will not be parted from it.

We who are fearfully and wonderfully made live in a world that is just as magnificently and majestically arrayed and too often we don’t see it. We have never learned to look. We fear being anchored, held in one place until we see the display of God’s glory bursting all around us and are left awed and humbled. In the light of God’s glory our hymn of praise should be ‘thank you’, eucharistein.

Open our eyes, Lord, we long to see more of you and your glory as you display it, reveal it in all you have created. Be pleased to receive our humble thanks and be glorified in our praise. Amen.