Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm was published in 1977 – the year of my birth. This short memoir spans three days of her life living in a cabin in the Puget Sound. “Nothing is going to happen in this book,” she writes. “There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time” (24). Dillard’s violent images have stayed with me for decades: a moth gets caught in a flame and becomes a wick; a 7-year-old girl survives a plane crash that leaves her face badly burned. Dillard both loses God and finds God in these realities and images, sometimes dancing and sometimes wandering between the seen and the unseen, between reality and Reality. Dillard names the interconnectivity of all things Holy the Firm: the “fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam” (21). 

Twenty years after Holy the Firm was published, I wrote a paper on it for an English class at Dordt College. I had to read that little book three times to feel like I was even beginning to grasp the horror and the beauty of her work. I believe that the triple-readthrough and my subsequent ten-page paper were the beginning of my own fascination with interconnectivity, with what she calls holy the firm. 

Annie Dillard died on September 15 of this year, at the age of 81. That same day, I had the first online session of a six-week course with Jim Olthuis of the Institute for Christian Studies, wherein we are reading his 2006 book, The Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved. Olthuis’s writing and teaching are guiding my continued wandering dance at the fringey edge between elements and realms. Olthuis calls these between-spaces wild spaces of love: 

[They are] “spaces” because they are not voids or vacuums, but spheres alive with love’s coursings, the place and resource for healing, the matrix of love; and “wild” because they are uncharted, and therefore venturing into them is to take the beautiful risk. (48-49)

We certainly find wild spaces in therapeutic relationships (the main focus of his book), but these wild spaces of love are everywhere. All creation hums with them. Olthuis writes:

[T]here is only one reality, a creation that is thoroughly spiritual all the way down. In fact, creation exists only as spiritual–as a cosmic process of connections and interconnections that hold together in the love of God. Life is a matter of relationships – trees with stars, animals with flowers, humans with rivers, people with people, all creatures with God. Life from beginning to end, in its breadth and height, its depth and length, is life-with-God. (55)

In our virtual classroom, we laugh and cry together with Jim as we navigate the beautiful risks and wild spaces of learning from and with each other.

The bookends of my engagement with Dillard at 20 years old and Olthuis at nearly 50 years old have opened up for me a thread of personal reflection on interconnectivity. For thirty years now, I have been peering into the expanse of the wild spaces of love: from studying Dirk Th. Vollenhoven’s concept of law as the connecting point between God and the cosmos to sliding down the delightfully slippery slope into panentheism; from my love for celebrating the sacraments to my joy in teaching parables. 

Indeed, the central philosophical concept in my doctoral dissertation was my appropriation of Heidegger’s interconnective concept of poiesis – a revelatory process perhaps best understood in the world of art. An artist interacts with her environment, her tools, and the clay or the stone and the divine is revealed. Applying this to conflict engagement, I defined poiesis as the co-creative, convivial, and disarming work of God and a diversity of humans, through which emerges the phenomenon of a transformed community of shalom.

Dillard also finds her way to the work of the artist. The artist channels the energy of the fringey edge. The artist “is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home” (72).

In touch with. In touch with. In touch with. In touch with God. In touch with one another. At every turn. Olthuis writes: “Meeting in the middle, holding each other in the place of love, we give ourselves and are given over–even abandoned–to God’s love. Our home is in God even as God finds a home in us” (226).

The night before this blog came together for me, I had a dream. In my dream, I was walking through a common space at a university. Suddenly a pop-up choir began to sing the most beautiful song and I was caught – held – by the music. I could not leave the space. A small older woman with white hair began to weep for the beauty of it all and one of the choristers turned to her and he embraced her. And then a voice from a balcony called out, “Heidi! I know you! Do you remember me?!” And she came down to where I was.

My spiritual director, Sister Lucy, has told me that each character in my dream is me. I am the one walking through the hall, but I am also the singer, the old woman weeping, and the long lost friend calling out.

Could it not be that each character in my dream is also you? You are the one who is caught in the song, the singer, the woman, the friend.

And could it not also be that God meets me at every point in this dream, in my life? In the music and the stopping. In the weeping and the embrace. In the calling out, “I know you! Do you remember me?!” In the coming down to where I am.

Could it be that what Meister Eckhart said is true? “Between God and me, there is no between.” 

Or if there is a between, it is a wild space of love – a fringey edge where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.

I just read Holy the Firm again this week. My heart broke and healed at the same time. Annie, you are holy and you are firm. Thank you for spanning the gap for me. May you dance forever in the foam.

Header Photo: Toa Heftiba on Unsplash