Godspells

By Annalyn Swan

HOLY THE FIRM by Annie Dillard Harper & Row; 76 pages; $6.50

There is a moment in Holy the Firm when Annie Dillard watches a candle flame consume a golden female moth. The moth's abdomen catches in the wet wax and her wings "ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing." Her antennae crackle, her legs disappear and her body is reduced to a glowing shell. "And then," relates Dillard, "this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick ... She burned for two hours, until I blew her out."

The moth and the flame is an old device that Dillard uses in a fresh manner.

Similar intense descriptions of nature stamped Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard's 1975 Pulitzer-prizewinning book.

But in HolyThe Firm--a record of three November days--she forsakes much of her inspired observation for such abstract gropings as "I cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed."

From her retreat on the edge of Washington State's Puget Sound--"one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person"--Dillard gazes out at nature and sees beyond the molecular realities ("Each thing in the world is moving, cell by cell") and even beyond Emerson's transcendental glorification to mull a final unknown: "Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home?"

Holy the Firm follows Dillard's monastic routine -- teaching, musing at her window, walking to a village store to buy Communion wine for her church -- and transforms it into a metaphysical journey.

At first there reigns a state of newborn innocence, snuffed out suddenly by the burning of a neighbor's child in a plane crash. "God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time," writes Dillard. She despairs of earthly happiness: "You can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone . . ." But in the end, she witnesses a baptism that heralds her own reawakening of faith. One Christian sect, she reads, posits a substance known as "Holy the Firm," a substance buried deep within planets that "is in touch with the Absolute, at base." She writes with irreverent abandon: "Yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung."

Few pilgrims of the spirit can avoid sounding cheaply pious or painfully oversincere. Dillard's literary salvation is tier sense of wonder and intensity. Sometimes she is ostentatious, as in her description of the Pacific coastline, "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." But at their best, Dillard's sentences have a clean, penetrating edge. "The higher Christian churches," she writes, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism. . . as though they knew what they were doing ... If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute." Henry David Thoreau could not have put it much better. --AnnalynSwan

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