“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...” Annie Dillard, April 30, 1945. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974.
Frayed and nibbled as we are, may we this week bring our longing hearts to prayer. Only there will they find what we need to survive in this fallen world—that food which will truly sustain against that which is eating at our souls. In hearts at prayer is the only nourishment which will allow us to travel beyond the clean and shining beauty in which all seems to fit, perhaps, too well. There joining on a journey to an awesome place. Free passage, tending a splintered wreck, place of safest passage for us and our gnawed and bloodied, scarred and delicate companions whose beauty, daily, brings us to our knees. Amen.
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