Preface

Annie Dillard’s most recent novel, The Maytrees (2007), marks a culmination in her practice of a kind of spiritual discipline exhibited and cultivated through artful writing. Through this discipline she confronts deeply entrenched modern skepticism concerning the truth of Christian experience and moves through that skepticism to a spiritually resonant perceptiveness of the world that finds indications of God’s goodness and beauty permeating the present moment. Her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), confronted doubt concerning God’s goodness derived from a knowledgeable encounter with the apparent amorality of nature in which both death and fecundity in endless horrifying variations leave one wondering whether the created order could indeed be good. Dillard’s other writings have grappled with the reality of human suffering and the enormity of evil and faced up to such experiences with the insistent courage exemplified in a brief passage from her book For the Time Being (1999): “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.”¹ Dillard knows that the fullness of Christian experience can be achieved only if we face up to the endless discordant aspects that can be finally reconciled with a Christian understanding of the world at a deep spiritual level.

Although nearly every book or essay by Dillard draws richly upon the enormous range and depth of her avid reading, the response to skepticism in her writing relies in the end not on argument and theory but on a spiritually responsive engagement with the world as it arises directly through perception and experience. Perhaps the word “theoretical” in its obsolete sense might describe her account of a Christian experience of the world, drawing upon the earliest citation from the Oxford English Dictionary for the older meaning of the term: “Theoría, contemplation, speculation, deepe study, insight or beholding.” ² Just as Dillard’s writing gives evidence of her wide reading, it also makes evident how fully she has cultivated her power of contemplative immersion in the moment and how deftly she has developed a power of spiritual discernment in such immersion. Such discernment is evident, I think, in a sentence from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”³ In other words, beauty and grace are not products of our will and are not dependent on our sensory powers—but they do offer an invitation that we have the responsibility to accept. The constant and courageous readiness to accept such invitations marks nearly every page Dillard has published.

Writing for Dillard is not merely a means for conveying perception and insight but must itself be honed and formed by the same spiritual discipline that she brings to insightful contemplation of the present moment. She has the highest expectations as a reader and strives in her writing to live up to that expectation on behalf of her readers: “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”⁴ As a result, Dillard’s prose is demanding: sentence structures are often simultaneously spare and precise, vocabulary is wide ranging, and structure frequently departs from chronological sequence to bring to fulfillment the rich potential for insight-bearing temporal perspectives. The Maytrees is preeminently a product of such disciplined writing. Dillard has said that the original manuscript was fourteen hundred pages long but was pared down to its published length of 216 pages.⁵

The term “Christian apologetics” in a limited sense describes many of Dillard’s works, but that term does not extend to an interest in defending matters of Christian doctrine. Dillard converted to Catholicism in the early 1990s and the center of her spiritual interest is always with the reality of the core mysteries of Christian faith. The question at the heart of The Maytrees is the reality of family love. The...