October 8, 2008

The Surface of Mystery

2008 1528 page19 capspent three weeks in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse. I was there for a writing residency. Each day I alternated between writing and reading, writing and gazing out the window. I was fascinated by the vibrancy of the animal life: the teeming bugs and birds and critters.

In the evenings I would take walks, curious about what I would see. Once I came upon a beaver. Another time I came upon something eating lustily beside the road. It had girth, though not height, and the grass was such that I saw nothing more than rustling. It was the enthusiasm of the eating that I carried with me, the sheer glory of munching.

More commonly I came upon deer. While farmers must consider them pests, I was charmed and would pause and watch for as long as they would let me. At a stream I startled a doe. We were quite close, so we paused to observe each other: me delighted, her wary. An approaching tractor broke the spell and she was off.

After my constitutional—I loved the old-fashioned turning of my days—I fixed a meal with the other artist of the house and we ate supper on the patio, watching fireflies. They came out gradually, soon filling the backyard with their bioluminescent flashing.

2008 1528 page19One night the screen of my bedroom window shifted. When I turned off the lamp, I noticed a firefly cruising back and forth, abdomen glowing. I lay in bed and considered what to do. Should I just go to sleep, or should I get a cup from the kitchen, capture the bug, and return it to the yard?

I was still deliberating when the light began to blink from a single point on the ceiling. Here was my chance. I turned on the lamp, and there was the firefly caught in a web and a spider spinning it into a cocoon. I halfheartedly tried to knock the bug out—tossing a pen into the web. When my efforts failed, I decided against finding a chair and doing the job properly. Who was I to interfere? The spider had to eat, and for all I knew, the damage had been done.

But now, with my unhappy knowledge, the flashing light had a sinister implication. A small creature was dying, perhaps painfully. I rolled away from the panicked pulsing, then I saw it: a line of lights around the room; more spiders, more webs, more firefly deaths.

What was I to make of all this violence? Sometimes people call nature God’s second book. Solomon told us to observe the ant and note its diligence. But what to do with the praying mantis who bites off her mate’s head? The world of animals is both beautiful and brutal, instructive and ghastly. Nature is complex and should not be romanticized.

Nor should spirituality. When Job suffered a series of misfortunes, he asked God for an explanation. God did not give a linear answer. Instead He asked Job a series of rhetorical questions about nature. “Was it through your know-how that the hawk learned to fly, soaring effortlessly on thermal updrafts? Did you command the eagle’s flight, and teach her to build her nest in the heights?”1 The implication was this: I run the universe.

In my time in Pennsylvania I came across an early copy of Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a favorite, and so I felt as if I was meeting up with an old friend. The previous owner had underlined a passage, “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.”2 I liked that line, and I carried it with me for many days.

In the country I felt more connected to mystery, to God. In the mornings I watched a ruby-throated hummingbird sip from flowers, watched American goldfinches at the feeder. I got up after my watching and walked barefooted about the yard, clipping flowers for a vase. When the flowers died, as they quickly did, I carried them to the compost heap. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, I thought, and I was content to be mindful of that mystery.

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1Job 39:26, 27. From The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
2Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Bantam Books, 1974), p. 147.

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Sari Fordham is an assistant professor at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. She teaches in the Department of English and Communication.



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