Life Preservers & Signal Flares
A longtime Presbyterian, Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist who writes like a poet, weighing each word for its perfect meaning and nuanced impact as she presses into cultural assumptions. Dillard describes the magical beauty of the natural world and the raw pain of human emotions with painstaking intentionality, and in Teaching a Stone to Talk, she ponders the idiocy of a church that does not radiate awe:
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, we find the captain, and all the ship's officers, and all the ship's crew. The officers chat; they swear; they wink a bit at slightly raw jokes, just like regular people. The crew members have funny accents. The wind seems to be picking up.
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. 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.
Are you mired on Deck C, leaving the weather-watching to others as you enjoy a stagnant view? How aware are you of the conditions around you, of the power within you, of the wind that is picking up just around the corner? We cannot share the hope and joy of Jesus Christ without a keen sense of who our neighbors are and what they need. What steps will you take this week to pull on your crash helmet, acknowledging the power God has to heal the wounds of the world around you?
Peace on your week,
Jennie