Editor’s Note: On September 15, 2026, at age 81, American author Annie Dillard died. Our latest Magazine Classic comes from the Winter 1998-99 issue, a story written by Dillard in which she wrestles with the problem of evil. If God is good, loving and powerful, why does the world contain so much arbitrary suffering? And if God does not cause that suffering, what does God actually do? There’s no easy answer from Dillard, but her journey is worth the read.
In 135 C.E., Romans killed Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. They killed him by flaying his skin and stripping his bones with currycombs. He was 85 years old. A Roman currycomb in those days, was an iron scraper; its blunt teeth combed mud and burrs from horsehair. To flay someone — an unusual torture — the wielder had to bear down. Perhaps the skin and muscles of an old scholar are comparatively loose.
“All depends on the preponderance of good deeds,” Rabbi Akiva said. The weight of good deeds bears down on the balance scales. Paul Tillich also held this view. If the man who stripped Rabbi Akiva’s bonés with a curtycomb bore down with a weight of, say 200 psi, how many pounds of good deeds tip the balance to the good?
“Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?” a 20th-century novelist asked. “The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.” Akiva Ben Joseph was born in the Judean lowlands in 50 C.E. He was illiterate and despised scholarship; he worked herding sheep. Then he fell in love with a rich man’s daughter. She agreed to marry him only when he vowed to devote his life to studying Torah. So he did, He learned to read along with their son.
Rabbi Akiva systematized, codified, explained, analyzed, and amplified the traditional religious laws and practices in his painstaking Mishnah and Midrash. Because of Akiva, Mishnah and Midrash joined scripture itself in Judaism's canon. His interpretations separated Judaism from both Christian and Greek influence.
His contemporaries prized him for his tireless interpretation of each holy detail of Torah. They cherished him for his optimism, his modesty, his universalism (Which included tolerance of, and intermarriage with, Samaritans), and his devotion to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. He taught that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is the key idea in Torah.
Nelly Sachs wrote, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the silent, remaining silent through the suffering of His children?”
Emperor Hadrian of Rome had condemned Rabbi Akiva to his henchman and executioner Rufus. Rufus was present in the prison cell as the currycombs separated the man’s skin and muscles from his bones. Some of Rabbi Akiva's disciples were there, too, likely on, the street, watching and listening at the cell window.
Rabbi Akiva had taught his disciples to say, “Whatever the all-merciful does he does for the good” — the sentiment Voltaire ridiculed. During Akiva’s innovative execution he was reciting the Shema, because this was the time of day for reciting the Shema. It was then his disciples remonstrated ‘with him, saying, “Our master, to such an extent?”
Spooked that the dwindling rabbi continued to say prayers, Rufus asked him, conversationally, if he was a sorcerer. Rabbi Akiva replied that he was happy to die for God. He said he worshiped the Lord with all his heart, and with all his mind, and now he could add, “with all my soul.”
When Rabbi Akiva died, Moses was watching from heaven. Moses saw the torture and martyrdom, and complained to God about it. Why did God let the Romans flay an 85-year-old Torah scholar? Moses’ question — the tough one about God’s allowing human, moral evil — is reasonable only if we believe that a good God either causes or at any rate allows everything that happens, and that it’s all for the best. (This is the doctrine Voltaire, and many another thinker before and since, questioned — or in Voltaire’s case mocked.)
God told Moses, “Shtok, keep quiet. Kakh ala bemakhshava lefanai, this is how I see things.” In another version of the same story, God replied to Moses, “Silence! This is how it is in the highest thought.”
Rabbi Akiva taught a curious solution to the ever-galling problem that many good people and their children suffer enormously, while many louses and their children prosper and thrive in the pink of health. God punishes the good, he proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, God-fearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around.
Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the important ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? — our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations, our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation — now there is a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? We are ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.
We have no chance of being here when the sun bums out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. People have made great strides at obliterating other people, but that has been the human effort all along and our cohort has only enlarged the means, as have people in every century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy — probably a necessary lie — that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?
In the beginning, according to Rabbi Isaac Luria, God contracted himself — zimzum. The divine essence withdrew into itself to make room for a finite world. Evil became possible: those genetic defects that dog cellular life, those clashing forces which erupt in natural catastrophes, and those sins human minds invent and human hands perform.
Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity. The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through 10 holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm — some say creation itself — disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels (gelippot) imprisoned them. This is our bleak world. We see only the demonic shells of things. It is literally sensible to deny that God exists. In fact, God is hidden, exiled, in the sparks of divine light the shells entrap. So evil can exist, can continue to live: the spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being.
“The sparks scatter everywhere,” Martin Buber said. “They cling to material things as in sealed-up wells, they crouch in substances as in caves that have been bricked up, they inhale darkness and breathe out fear; they flutter about in the movements of the world, searching where they can lodge to be free.”
Jews in 16th century Palestine were in exile — “a most cruel exile,” Gershom Scholem called it. They had lived in Muslim Spain a thousand years — far longer than any Europeans have lived in the Americas. In 1492, Christians expelled Muslims and Jews. About 10,000 Spanish Jews moved to Palestine. In Safad they formed the core of the community of the devout. Here unmolested, they contemplated their exile which they understood as symbolizing the world’s exile from God. Even the divine is estranged from itself; its essence scatters in sparks. The Shekinah — the Divine Presence — is in exile from Elohim, the being of God, just as the Jews were in exile in Palestine.
Only redemption — restoration, tikkun — can return the sparks of light to their source in the primeval soul; only redemption can restore God’s exiled presence to his being in eternity. Only redemption can reunite an exiled soul with its root. The holy person, however, can hasten redemption and help mend heaven and earth.
The presenting face of any religion is its mass of popular superstitions. It seems to take all the keenest thinkers of every religion in every generation to fend off this clamoring pack. In New Mexico in 1978, the face of Jesus arose in a tortilla. “I was just rolling out my husband’s burrito . . .” the witness began her account. An auto-parts store in Progresso, Texas, attracted crowds when an oil stain on its floor resembled the Virgin Mary. Another virgin appeared in 1998 in Colma, California, in hardened sap on a pine trunk. At a Nashville coffee shop named Bongo Java, a cinnamon bun came out of the oven looking like Mother Teresa — the nun bun, papers called it. In 1996 in Leicester, England, the name of Allah appeared in a halved eggplant. Several cities — Kandy, Sri Lanka, is one — claim to own a tooth from the jaw of Buddha. A taxonomist who saw one of these said it belonged to a crocodile.
When he leads trips to Israel, Abbot Philip Lawrence of the monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, gives only one charge to his flock. “When they show the stone with the footprint of Christ in it,” he says, “don’t laugh.” There is an enormous footprint of Buddha, too, in Luang Prabang, Vietnam.
“Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable,” Thomas Merton wrote. “Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.” Suddenly!
One of the queerest spots on earth — I hope — is in Bethlehem. This is the patch of planet where, according to tradition, a cave és I “once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son whose later preaching — scholars of every stripe agree, with varying enthusiasm — caused the occupying Romans to crucify him. Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree. Centuries of additions have made the architecture peculiar, but no one can see the church anyway, because many monasteries clamp onto it in clusters like barnacles. The Greek Orthodox Church owns the grotto site now, in the form of the Church of the Nativity.
There, in the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeon-like corridors where hushed people passed. The floors were black stone or cracked marble. Dense brocades hung down old stone walls. Oil lamps hung in layers. Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space.
Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol. The stone dome bounced the sound around. The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.
Descending once more I passed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes. Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite. At a lower level, in a small room, | peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.
Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber singing harmonies in their various tongues. The music threaded the vaults.
Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest basement: the Grotto of the Nativity. The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level. This was the place. It smelled of wet sand. It was a narrow cave about 10 feet wide; cracked marble paved it, Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor. People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.
A 14-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall. This silver star was the X that marked the spot: here, just here, the infant got born. Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where God emptied himself into man. Actually, many Christian scholars think “Jesus of Nazareth” was likely born in Nazareth. Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy. Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy. It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.
In the center of the silver star was a circular hole. That was the bull’s-eye, God’s quondam target.
Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole’s flat bottom. When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole. I could feel some sort of soft wax in it. The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide: petri dish. A newborn’s head would be too small for it; a newborn’s body would be too big. I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.
Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God’s presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps — some humans’ idea of elegance — bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.
“Every day,” said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement.”
It is “fatal,” Teilhard said of the old belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It does not work. The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God's omnipotence. As Baron von Hugel noted, Aquinas said that “the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only the power to effect what is within the nature of things.”
Similarly, Teilhard called the explanation that God hides himself deliberately to test our love, “hateful”; it is “mental gymnastics.” Here: “The doctors of the church explain that the Lord deliberately hides himself from us in order to test our love. One would have to be irretrievably committed to mental gymnastics . . . not to feel the hatefulness of this solution.”
Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show your wisdom and love.” Each time I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That's a lie!” — just to put things on a solid footing.
“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. is “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.”
When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadorean Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesan Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering. Deus Otiosus — do-nothing God, who, if he has power, abuses it.
Of course God wrote no scriptures, neither chapter nor verse. It is foolish to blame or quit him for his admirer’s claims superstitious or otherwise. “God is not on trial,” I read somewhere. “We are not jurors but suppliants.”
Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to.
The Baal Shem Tov, by his own account, ascended to heaven many times. During these ascents, his friends said, he stood bent for many hours while his soul rose. He himself related in a letter on his return from two such vertical expeditions that he could not, much as he tried, deflect either moral evils or natural calamities. He could, however, report how God explained his actions. At that time Polish Christians were already killing Jews. On Rosh Hashanah (September 15, 1746) during an ascent to heaven, the Baal Shem Tov complained about the killings to God. He knew that some Jews apostasized, and they died along with the devout. Why — why any of it? God’s answer: “So that no son of Israel would convert.” (It would not even save their lives.) Later, an epidemic was scourging Poland. Again on Rosh Hashanah the Baal Shem Tov’s soul climbed to heaven. Why the epidemic? The epidemic, God gave him to understand, came because he himself, the Baal Shem Tov, had prayed, “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord but let us not fall into the hands of man.” Now God, into whose plaguey hands they had fallen, asked him on the spot, “(Why do you want to cancel?” — to cancel, that is, your earlier prayer. Now you want the Christian Poles instead of the epidemic? The best bargain the Baal Shem Tov could strike was to keep the epidemic from his town.
In other words, the Baal Shem Tov, who was not a theologian, believed that God caused evil events — both moral evil (the Jew-killing Poles) and natural evil (the epidemic) — to teach or punish. The Baal Shem Tov learned much about God, but theodicy was not his bailiwick, and he did not shed the old “fatal” explanation that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent.
In 1976 an earthquake in Tangshan killed 750,000 people. Before it quaked, many survivors reported, the earth shone with an incandescent light.
“Your fathers did eat manna and are dead,” Jesus told people — one of his cruelest remarks. Trafficking directly with the divine, as the manna-eating wilderness generation did, and as Jesus did, confers no immunity to death or hazard, You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.
Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a bee hive or an ant ‘colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature — but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right, mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: the seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes which dissolve and go to sea. This simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my-very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the Wind draws like a finger?
We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we're a lousy snowflake. Okay, we're a tree, These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?
“How can evil exist in a world created by God, the Beneficent One? It can exist, because entrapped deep inside the force of evil there is a spark of goodness. This spark is the source of life of the evil tendency. . . . Now, it is the specific mission of the Jew to free the entrapped holy sparks from the grip of the forces of evil by means of Torah study and prayer. Once the holy sparks are released, evil, having lost its life-giving core, will cease to exist.” So wrote Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, in 19th century Poland. It was the Baal Shem Tov who taught this vital idea.
God is spirit, spirit expressed infinitely in the universe, who does not give as the world gives. His home is absence, and there he finds us. In the coils of absence we meet him by seeking him. God lifts our souls to their roots in his silence. Natural materials clash and replicate, shaping our fates. We lose the people we love, we lose our vigor, and we lose our lives. Perhaps, and at best, God knows nothing of these temporal accidents, but knows souls only. This God does not direct the universe, he underlies it. Or he “prolongs himself” into it, in Teilhard’s terms. Or in dear nutcase Joel Goldsmith’s terms, God is the universe’s consciousness. The consciousness of divinity is divinity itself. The more we wake to holiness, the more of it we give birth to, the more we, introduce, expand, and multiply it on earth, the more God is “on the field.”
God is — for the most part — out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or God is the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in God like a hole in his side he never fingers. Certainly God is not a member of the loop like the rest of us, passing the bucket to splash the fire, kicking the bucket, passing the buck. After all, the semipotent God has one hand tied behind his back. (I cannot prove that with the other hand he wipes and stirs our souls from time to time; he spins like a fireball through our skulls, and knocks open our eyes so we see flaming skies and fall to the ground and say “Abba!”)
A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years he will be able to release the sparks, to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks’ return. This is tikkun, restoration.
Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they say, whatever that work is, if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all or it — just as it is.
Who is dead? The Newtonian God, some call that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children and repels strays, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and figuring, and who with the strength of his arm dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash, to 5.9 billion people — to teach, dazzle, rebuke, or try us, one by one, and to punish or reward us, day by day, for our thoughts, words, and deeds.
“The great Neolithic proprietor,” Teilhard called him, the God of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its mage. History, then, was a fix.
People once held a “Deuteronomic” idea of God, says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. God intervened in human affairs “without human agency.” He was a Lego lord. The first theological task, Paul Tillich said 5O years ago, by which time it was already commonplace, is to remove absurdities in interpretation.
It is an old idea, that God is not omnipotent. Seven centuries have passed since Aquinas wrote that God has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. Leibnitz also implied it; working within the “possible world” limits God's doings. Now the notion of God the Semipotent has trickled down to the theologian in the street. Teilhard in his day called the belief that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God “fatal,” remember, and indicated only one escape: to recognize that if God ‘allows us both to suffer and to sin it is “because he cannot here and now cure us and show himself to us” — because we ourselves have not yet evolved enough. Paul Tillich said in the 1940s that “omnipotence” symbolizes Being’s power to overcome finitude and anxiety in the long run, while never being able to eliminate them.
God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to be born as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men — or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia or sudden infant death syndrome — than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call “acts of God.”
Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?
Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells steam and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for 30 seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. “Later on,” a Hasid master said, “you don’t see these things anymore.” (Having seen, people of varying cultures tum — for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable — to aiding and serving the poor and afflicted.)
Mostly God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God’s hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he intervenes only “under certain conditions.”
Does God stick a finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, hear, twitch, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is praying eudaemonistically — praying for things and events, for rain and healing — delusional? Physicians agree that prayer for healing can work what they routinely call miracles, but of course the mechanism could be self-hypnosis. Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which God can use. Since God works in and through existing conditions, I take this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die or might live, then your prayer’s surrender can add enough power — mechanism unknown — to tilt the balance. Though it won’t still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, God's activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity — the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger. | don’t know. I don’t know beans about God.
Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world’s necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.
“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 watchfires, 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 a while, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what it is. Their life’s fine, impossible goal justifies the term “spiritual.” Nothing, however, can justify the term “path” for their 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.
“Plunge into matter,” Teilhard said — and at another time, “Plunge into God.” And he said this fine thing: “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”
Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. ‘One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself — even to make of oneself a righteous person. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assassinate Hitler.
“I can and must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath,” said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes oneself “completely in the world” (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself “into the thick of human endeavor” (Teilhard) as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker's life, a shoe salesman’s life, a mechanic's, a writer’s, a farmer's? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hobos, nuns, and monks. Were these two men especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is? Authorities in Rome or the Gestapo forbade them each to teach (as secular Rome had forbidden Rabbi Akiva to teach). One of them in his density went to prison and died on a scaffold. The other in his density kept his vows despite Rome’s stubborn ignorance and righteous cruelty and despite the importunings of a woman he loved. No.
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious — the people, events, and things of the day — to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the kabbalists and gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform, and complete the world, to — as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit — “subject a little more matter to spirit,” to “lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned,” to “establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence,” to “work for the redemption of the world,” to “extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost,” to “help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of Creation in which we are living,” to “mend the shattered unity of the diving worlds,” to “force the gates of the spirit,” and cry, “Let me come by.”
Our lives come free; they're on the house to all comers, like the shopkeeper’s wine. God decants the universe of time in a stream, and our best hope is to, by our own awareness, step into the steam and serve, empty as flumes, to keep it moving.
The birds were mating all over Galilee. I saw swifts mate in mid-air. At Kibbutz Lavi, in the wide-open hills above the Sea of Galilee, 300 feet above me under the sky, the two swifts flew together in swoops, falling and catching. These alpine swifts were large, white below. How do birds mate in mid-air? They start high. Their beating wings tilt them awkwardly sometimes and part those tiny places where they join; often one of the pair stops flying and they lose altitude. They separate, rest in a tree for a minute, and fly again. Alone they rise fast, tensely, until you see only motes that chase, meet — you, there, here, out of all this air! — and spiral down; breaks your heart. At dusk, I learned later, they climb so high that at night they actually sleep in the air.
Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl: “All being itself is derived from God and the presence of the Creator is in each created thing.” This double notion is pan-entheism — a word to which I add a hyphen to emphasize its difference from pantheism. Pan-entheism, according to David Tracy, theologian at the University of Chicago, is the private view of most Christian intellectuals today. Not only is God immanent in everything, as plain old pantheists hold, however loosely, but more profoundly everything is simultaneously in God, within God the transcendent. There is a divine, not just bushes.
I saw doves mate on sand. It was early morning. The male dove trod the female on a hilltop path. Beyond them in blue haze lay the Sea of Galilee, and to the north Mount Meron and the town of Safad traversing the mountain Jebel Kan’an. Other doves were calling from nearby snags. To writer Florida Scott Maxwell, doves say, “Too true, dear love, too true.” But to poet Margaret Gibson, doves in Mexico say, “No hope, no hope.” An observant Jew recites a grateful prayer at seeing landscape — mountains, hills, seas, rivers, and deserts, which are, one would have thought, pretty much unavoidable sights. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE MAKER OF ALL CREATION.” One utters this blessing also when he meets the sea again — at seeing the Mediterranean Sea, say, after an interval of 30 days.
All the religions of Abraham deny that the world, the colorful array that surrounds and grips us, is illusion, even though from time to time anyone may see the vivid veil part. But no one can deny that God per se is wholly invisible, or deny that his voice is very still, very small, or explain why.
That night there was a full moon. I saw it rise over a capetbush, a still grove of terebinths, and a myrtle. According to the Talmud, when a person is afraid to walk at night, a burning torch is worth two companions, and a full moon is worth three. Blessed are Thou, O Lord our God, creator of the universe, who brings on evening; whose power and might fills the world; who did a miracle for me in this place; WHO HAS KEPT US IN LIFE AND BROUGHT US TO THIS TIME.
Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This.