For the Time Being

by Annie Dillard

  God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men—or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome—than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call “acts of God.”

  Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?

  Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. “Later on,” a Hasid master said, you don’t see these things anymore.” (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn—for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable—to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.)

  Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God’s hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only “under certain conditions.”

  Does God stick a finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, hear, twitch, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is praying eudaemonistically—praying for things and events, for rain and healing—delusional? Physicians agree that prayer for healing can work what they routinely call miracles, but of course the mechanism could be autosuggestion. Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which God can use. Since God works in and through existing conditions, I take this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die or might live, then your prayer’s surrender can add enough power—mechanism unknown—to tilt the balance. Though it won’t still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, God’s activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity—the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger. I don’t know. I don’t know beans about God.

  Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world’s necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.

  N O W “Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape: they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it awhile, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life’s fine, impossible goal justifies the term “spiritual.” Nothing, however, can justify the term “path” for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage—except one thing: They don’t quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark.

  The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling: constellations shift without anyone’s gaining ground. They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness. Why do they want to do this? They hope to learn how to be useful.

  Their feet catch in nets: they untangle them when they notice, and keep moving. They hope to learn where they came from. “The soul teaches incessantly,” said Rabbi Pinhas, “but it never repeats.” Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind. Decades ago, they left behind doubt about this or that doctrine, abandoning the issues as unimportant. Now, I mean, they have left behind the early doubt that this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen is a reasonable way to pass one’s life.

  “Plunge into matter,” Teilhard said—and at another time, “Plunge into God.” And he said this fine thing: “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”

  Here is how adept people conduct themselves, according to Son Master Chinul: “In everything they are like empty boats riding the waves … buoyantly going along with nature today, going along with nature buoyantly tomorrow.” Was he describing people now extinct?

  “Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself—even to make of oneself a righteous person.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assassinate Hitler.

  “I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath,” said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes living “completely in the world” (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself “into the thick of human endeavor” (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker’s life, a shoe salesman’s life, a mechanic’s, a writer’s, a farmer’s? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks. Were these two men especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is? Authorities in Rome or the Gestapo forbade them each to teach (as secular Rome had forbidden Rabbi Akiva to teach). One of them in his density went to prison and died on a scaffold. The other in his density kept his vows despite Rome’s stubborn ignorance and righteous cruelty and despite the importunings of a woman he loved. No.

  We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious—the people, events, and things of the day—to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

  What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform, and complete the world, to—as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit—“subject a little more matter to spirit,” to “lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned,” to “establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence,” to “work for the redemption of the world,” to “extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost,” to “help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of creation in which we are living,” to “mend the shattered unity of the divine worlds,” to “force the gates of the spirit, and cry, ‘Let me come by.’”


  When one of his Hasids complained of God’s hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said, “It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding.” But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  B I R T H Our lives come free; they’re on the house to all comers, like the shopkeeper’s wine. God decants the universe of time in a stream, and our best hope is, by our own awareness, to step into the stream and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving.

  The birds were mating all over Galilee. I saw swifts mate in midair. At Kibbutz Lavi, in the wide-open hills above the Sea of Galilee, three hundred feet above me under the sky, the two swifts flew together in swoops, falling and catching. These alpine swifts were large, white below. How do birds mate in midair? They start high. Their beating wings tilt them awkwardly sometimes and part those tiny places where they join; often one of the pair stops flying and they lose altitude. They separate, rest in a tree for a minute, and fly again. Alone they rise fast, tensely, until you see only motes that chase, meet—you, there, here, out of all this air!—and spiral down; breaks your heart. At dusk, I learned later, they climb so high that at night they actually sleep in the air.

  Birds mated in dust, on fences and roads, on limbs of trees. Many of these birds migrated from Africa; like humans, they fed their passage north by following the fertile Rift Valley. I saw a huge-headed hoopoe fly from a eucalyptus to flounce on a fence. Excited, it flashed and dropped its crest over and over, as a child might fiddle with a folding fan. Another hoopoe flitted in a chaste tree nearby. They looked bizarre: pinkish, with striking black-and-white wings and tails, their heads heavy with ornament. Leviticus 11:19 forbids Israel to eat hoopoes, along with storks, herons, and bats.

  Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl: “All being itself is derived from God and the presence of the Creator is in each created thing.” This double notion is pan-entheism—a word to which I add a hyphen to emphasize its difference from pantheism. Pan-entheism, according to David Tracy, theologian at the University of Chicago, is the private view of most Christian intellectuals today. Not only is God immanent in everything, as plain pantheists hold, but more profoundly everything is simultaneously in God, within God the transcendent. There is a divine, not just bushes.

  I saw doves mate on sand. It was early morning. The male dove trod the female on a hilltop path. Beyond them in blue haze lay the Sea of Galilee, and to the north Mount Meron and the town of Safad traversing the mountain Jebel Kan’an. Other doves were calling from nearby snags. To writer Florida Scott Maxwell, doves say, “Too true, dear love, too true.” But to poet Margaret Gibson, doves in Mexico say, “No hope, no hope.” An observant Jew recites a grateful prayer at seeing landscape—mountains, hills, seas, rivers, and deserts, which are, one would have thought, pretty much unavoidable sights. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE MAKER OF ALL CREATION.” One utters this blessing also at meeting the sea again—at seeing the Mediterranean Sea, say, after an interval of thirty days.

  Later, in an afternoon drizzle, I watched snails mate on a wet stone under leaves. During the first hour the male knocked the female’s soft head with his, over and over. Some snails have a penis on the right side of the head. Her two tentacles recoiled. To bump heads, he had sprawled from his shell and encircled her. At first she, too, extended herself a bit, leaning his way, and on impact they looked as if they were kissing. Over the course of the second hour she withdrew her head completely, but not her foot, and he seemed to be sticking his head inside her shell as if to inquire if she still wanted to knock heads. I quit watching. All the religions of Abraham deny that the world, the colorful array that surrounds and grips us, is illusion, even though from time to time anyone may see the vivid veil part. But no one can deny that God per se is wholly invisible, or deny that his voice is very still, very small, or explain why.

  That night there was a full moon. I saw it rise over a caperbush, a still grove of terebinths, and a myrtle. According to the Talmud, when a person is afraid to walk at night, a burning torch is worth two companions, and a full moon is worth three. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, creator of the universe, who brings on evening; whose power and might fill the world; who did a miracle for me in this place; WHO HAS KEPT US IN LIFE AND BROUGHT US TO THIS TIME.

  The next morning, it was tiger swallowtails. He carried her around in the air. Her wings folded and joined over her back. Flying for two, he nevertheless moved not a bit awkwardly. He lighted on a sunny spot on a spruce branch seven feet up. His abdomen bent sharply to clasp hers.

  Lively spot, that kibbutz. Sun split the ground and rain cracked the buds. Wild mustard sprang from fields with speedwell and hard-eyed daisies; bees fumbled in mallows at ditches. Checking on the snails, I found under the soil a wet batch of eggs that looked like silver. Some snails bear live young: fully formed, extremely small snails. How many of these offspring—hoopoes, doves, snails, and swallowtails—would develop normally? It is a percentage in the high nineties, normality is. Of course, most offspring get eaten right quick.

  S A N D During the Roman assault on Syracuse, Archimedes, oblivious to the tumult around him, traced parabolas in the sand. When a soldier found him and tried to drag him to the Roman general, Archimedes said, “Pray, do not disturb my circles.” And he told the soldier, “Wait until I finish my proof.” Unwilling to wait, evidently, the soldier killed him on the spot.

  Near the end of Jesus’ life, legal scholars brought to him a woman caught in adultery: they stood her before him as he taught by the Temple. The law required stoning her to death. What did he say to this?

  But Jesus stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

  When they continued asking him, he lifted himself up, and said to them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

  And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

  Then they left, possibly convicted by their consciences, starting with the eldest and ending with the youngest. “And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus lifted up himself, he saw none but the woman.” He sent her on her way.

  I saw a barefoot woman drawing a bare tree: she wore a blue scarf and drew in sand with a eucalyptus branch. I saw a Palestinian child duck behind his camel’s legs and pee his name in the sand. (Arabic script lends itself, at least comparatively, to this feat.) Under the camel a runnel moved over the dust like an adder. Later, the child, whose name was Esau, asked me for a cigarette and, failing that, for my lighter. What would he do with a lighter? He would make coffee. He liked coffee? “Yes,” Esau said. “I am Bedu boy!”

  One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence: and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: Now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”

  C H I N A Early spring, 1930: Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard garden of his new friend, an American woman, Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed on a bamboo chair at a rattan table, laughing and talking. We have a snapshot. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way: she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants: it was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.

  He was forty-nine; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was over a year after the Peking man discovery: he was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party. They liked each other at once: “For the first time in years I felt young and f
ull of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended Episcopal boarding school and the Art Institute of Chicago. In Peking, she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures: throughout her life she exhibited widely. Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: They walked, took tea at five, and he returned across the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic “The Little King,” which Lucile found in her New Yorkers and translated for him. Their laughter’s sound carried over courtyard walls.

  “Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea recalled, “beloved by all who knew her. For she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest… the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”

  June, 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan. In the Gobi Desert—the “immense austere plains”—he lost a cigarette lighter. These things happen.

  He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves excavation to join an American expedition: the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition, officially called the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. Most of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; the Roy Chapman Andrews expedition would take him even farther afield. To fix Peking man in context, he wanted to discover the geologic history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. And in fact, over the expedition’s wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he found the evidence to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.