Annie Dillard died last week. We remembered her with appreciation, and we also learned with some surprise that a very different kind of writer, Eudora Welty, had been chosen by The New York Times to review Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it first appeared in 1974.
Welty did not go easy. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner by then, and Dillard just a novice. With typical wry wit, Welty remarked that “a reader’s heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled.” She called Dillard’s passage on stalking a muskrat “admirable writing,” but confessed that at other points she honestly did not know what Dillard was talking about. Welty’s sharpest lament was that Dillard seemed to be the only person in her own book, “self-surrounded” even while speaking of the universe.
And yet in the end Welty (like so many of us) succumbed to Dillard’s sense of wonder and her ‘dance of astonishment.’
And that’s the way Annie Dillard goes. Is the Pilgrim on her right road? That depends on what the Pilgrim’s destination is.
But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble.
Seven years later Parker Palmer published The Company of Strangers. And he too pondered what happens when the wonder disappears – but in this case he was thinking about the way wonder leaches out of our experience of church community.
“Many people experience an initial euphoria with the new marriage or the new friends or the new church,” Palmer wrote. “But soon ‘the honeymoon is over.’”
As the euphoria dies, as our images of community crumble, several options open up to us. Some people simply abandon their hopes for community and return to isolation and individualism. But they go back to that condition with the added burden of disillusionment and cynicism; the community that once existed for them as a beckoning dream no longer exists at all. Other people choose to stay in community – sort of – but withdraw their hopes and enthusiasms and energies, eventually creating the kind of community that Revelation calls “lukewarm.” This is the condition of many of our churches, I think.
It is also the condition of many of our church boards. Rarely are church boards described as blessed with too much wonder, or astonishment, or euphoria, or energy, or passion.
Church board members are usually drawn from among the most dutiful and responsible church members, people who already know how to act dutifully and responsibly, at work, in our families, as a parent or grandparent, and who are dedicated to trying to do the right thing. Duty and responsibility are crucial virtues, well-suited to the task of church leadership. But there are other virtues that are vitally important as well.
If duty is not accompanied by a sense of wonder and astonishment at the presence of the Living God – and if responsibility does not include passion, joy and praise in response to God’s acts of grace – chances are each of you will experience a lukewarm feeling that does not inspire you, your board, or the faith community you serve.
Church boards are not often described as engines of passion, let alone pilgrims guiding others on the road of faith formation. But we think that is exactly what your church board needs to be (and do) in this season of our common life.
Have you ever been blessed with too much wonder? What happened?
How about moments when you felt blessed with too little wonder? What was going on there, and what happened as a result?
What makes us withdraw our hopes and energies, even while we stay in community?
When do your church board meetings feel most “lukewarm’? What is happening in those moments?
When do passion and wonder show up in the room?
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