Annie Dillard on The Spiritual Journey
I will never forget the first time I read Annie Dillard’s work. The book was her Pulitzer Prize winning work of non-fiction, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
“My God,” I thought. I’m falling in love with this woman’s mind.”
I was hooked and have now read all of her major works. She is my favorite writer and the single greatest influence on my own writing. I was flipping through “For The Time Being,” looking at my highlighted passages when I came across one with several stars by it. I’d like to offer it to you because Annie Dillard says something that seems true to me, and I think she says it in a way that I could not.
Enjoy:
“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 for 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.
Annie Dillard - For The Time Being (169-171)
rlp
11:46:22 AM 
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