Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I continued my reading of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'. I’m not sure if Annie Dillard is a Christian, a Muslim or just an open Deist (or even New Age spiritualist), but I noticed that she does sense the spiritual in her reflections on nature. This is something that I identify with. I see the glory and beauty of God in creation. In his handiworks I see glimpses of His divine Majesty. With the experience at Fraser’s hill still clear on my mind, I thank God for this beautiful world. Not only that, but for our inherent ability to admire and marvel at it as well.

That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time, we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question.

It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. ~ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek