Recreation of the Heart

Annie Dillard is a writer I admire. She has a way of saying the most profound things in the most mundane yet artful way.

I’ll share here a bit of her elegant work that I used for a liturgy yesterday:

We are here to witness.
There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need.
All we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
We can stage our own act on the planet—build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.
We do not use songbirds for instance.
We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.
We can only witness them—whoever they are.
If were were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest.
If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them.
The show would play to an empty house, as do all the falling stars which fall in the daytime.

Her ideas about meditating on nature have taught me to turn off the radio and pay careful attention to things like trees and the sky instead.

I took that excerpt and wrote it for my church community (New Leaf Church) yesterday as we celebrated 3 years of life together:

We celebrate what God has done and will do
Through us and in spite of us.
We are here to witness and to share.
There isn’t much else we can do.
We can make plans
But the meaning in our activity–that is something we find
in others, in each other, in what God is doing in our world.