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3. Preserving the Body: Annie Dillard and Tradition tradition: The action of handing over (something material) to another; delivery, transfer. . . . 1601 W. Watson Sparing Discov 13. In that a Priest is made by tradition of the Chalice, Patten, and Host into his hands. —The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition In an essay entitled ‘‘Expedition to the Pole,’’ first published in The Yale Literary Magazine in 1982 and republished as part of the collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard describes the experience of ‘‘attending Catholic Mass.’’ She has been going, she states, ‘‘for about a year.’’ Before that, she says, ‘‘the handiest Church was Congregational.’’1 It is a hallmark of Dillard’s writing that one cannot summarize much more than such a brief portion before breaking off to provide background, establish a working chronology, or simply fill the gaps. For example: although she maintains that ‘‘I knew in my twenties I was going to be Catholic ,’’ in 1982, at age 37, Dillard was somewhere between the Presbyterianism that she grew up in, the Episcopalian preference of her college years, and the Roman Catholicism that would not become her faith for another ten years.2 Therefore, although she will go on to say in ‘‘Expedition to the Pole’’ that she looks to the Mass for ‘‘mumbling in Latin’’ and ‘‘superstitious rituals,’’ she likely never knew anything but a post–Vatican II liturgy. That fact proves to be important because, as Dillard emphasizes, it is by no means the new liturgy that will attract her to Catholicism. ‘‘I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing,’’ she writes, ‘‘in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars.’’3 This particular Sunday in 1982 she is chagrined to find a singing group calling itself ‘‘Wildflowers’’ strumming the Mass and beating away at a tambourine. Subject to the ‘‘lagging emptiness and dilution of the liturgy,’’ the Mass Dillard attends suffers from ‘‘terrible singing,’’ ‘‘fatigued Bible readings,’’ and ‘‘the horrifying vacuity of the sermon.’’4 64 Preserving the Body 65 Yet, as she is careful to tell readers, on this visit it is ‘‘the Second Sunday of Advent.’’ If the service is enveloped in a ‘‘fog of dreary senselessness,’’ it nevertheless remains a part of something larger than itself. Her reference to the Church calendar alludes to a sense of context that is extremely important to Dillard and her writing. On this particular Sunday of Advent, she notes its significance by emphasizing the way the calendar influences human behavior . The shortcomings of the Mass are many, but they are overshadowed by the relentless quality of the ongoing tradition, by ‘‘the wonder of the fact that we came; we returned; we showed up; week after week we went through with it.’’5 On this Sunday Dillard returns to the church with a keen sense not only of the liturgical year, but also of the sequential movement within the Mass itself. Recognizing the way in which this Catholic ritual emplots time—the manner in which action builds through the confession of sins, the acknowledgement that ‘‘we have become the people broken,’’ and the ‘‘reluctant assent to the priest’s proclamation of God’s mercy’’—Dillard arrives at what she considers to be the climax of rite: ‘‘the solemn saying of those few hushed phrases known as the Sanctus.’’ Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of your glory . . . ‘‘It is here,’’ she reflects, ‘‘that one loses oneself at sea. Here, one’s eyes roll up, and the sun rolls overhead, and the floe rolls underfoot.’’ In an essay that weaves reflections about the Mass into several accounts (as the title suggests ) of expeditions to the Arctic Circle, this moment calls to mind the movement of the Northern Ocean as it ‘‘rolls over the planet’s pole and over the world’s rim wide and unseen.’’6 In the reciting of the Sanctus during this Second Sunday of Advent, Dillard is caught up in one of her two great themes: the relentless flow of time. Among the many descriptions of the Arctic that Dillard threads into her account of the Mass are those that call attention to the strange experience of time at the Pole. It is, for example, a place where one can trace temporal movement with remarkable clarity. ‘‘The film from . . . [a] camera located precisely at the Pole will show the night’s revolving stars as perfectly circular concentric rings...

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