Week 7: Architecture of Community

When you deeply, truly love this world, God can be found everywhere.

Hello friends!

My summer in California came to a bittersweet end this weekend, and I have once again found myself back in Wheaton. I am writing to you tucked away in my beloved library coffee shop. Isn’t it a tale as old as time, the idea that writers are compelled towards particular sacred spaces- that we require an environment to not only write, but to contemplate and consume vast amounts of iced chai lattes and eavesdrop on conversations that will inevitably make it into our novels one day?¹ All this to say, I am glad to be at one of my favorite places again, looking out to the local park’s green leaves, prematurely listening to my autumn playlist, and watching as the town around me yawns and begins to wake up.

This summer felt like a liminal space of sorts; I didn’t have much on my agenda other than work, so I consequently had a lot of time for inner dialogue and reflection- reflecting on my friendships, reflecting on my relationship with the Lord, reflecting on my ambitions and dreams. Pádraig Ó Tuama’s poem “How to Be Alone” comes to mind:

“There will be a party / where you’ll feel like / nobody’s paying you attention / And there will be a party / where attention’s all you’ll get / What you need to do / is to remember / to talk to yourself / between these parties.”²

A glimpse into my beloved coffee shop.

Ever since I first read this poem, I have resonated very deeply with the idea of learning to talk to yourself between parties. When I deleted my Twitter account in 2020, after six months of gaining engagement on Twitter with my tweets about beauty and books, I explained to everyone around me that “I needed to learn how to talk to myself again.” I thought of this line whenever I declined a social event or decided to take a long, much-needed walk this past year. And this summer, which has been one of self-exploration and healing and spiritual renewal, has very much been another installment in talking to myself between the two parties.

Anyway, I still have a bit of moving in to do today and consequently wish to be “offline” as much as possible, so I best get to talking about our book club. It is hard to believe that we only have one week left of discussing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek! Reading Dillard with all of you this summer has been an absolute delight. In Chapter Thirteen, Dillard talks extensively about parasites, considering this in relation to Catholic theology and her overarching thoughts on via negativa. Meanwhile, in the next chapter (which she has observed is her favorite), she goes on to discuss the process of dying to oneself in order to pay greater attention to the surrounding world. Dillard notes that when she begins to forget herself, she starts paying more attention to the beauty around her.

Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen: Thoughts

One of the most striking aspects of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and one that I felt was deeply emphasized in the last several chapters, is the idea that the natural world and domestic world are not truly distinct from one another. Dillard isn’t writing in the same vein as Thoreau, who penned Walden with self-reliance and complete isolation from the world outside the woods in mind.³ Her writing also isn’t entirely comparable to the solitary mysticism of Julian of Norwich. She was a contemporary woman with very real struggles and concerns in addition to the messy metaphysical paradoxes present within Tinker Creek. Interestingly enough, the novelist Eudora Welty, who wrote a 1974 review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in The New York Times, noted:

“Dillard is the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world… I recall no outside human speech coming to break the long soliloquy of the author.”⁴

As Welty perceived, Pilgrim is a book with an incredibly private tone, which can perhaps fool the reader into believing, at times, that Dillard is existing in an almost fictional world, independent of concerns like finances or family. The persona in the book may appear to be fiercely alone, but Dillard was actually married and living with her husband as she wrote the book in 1972, and she also spent much of her time volunteering and meeting regularly with a writing group. The solitude that Dillard crafts is intentional, and ultimately a reflection of what she viewed as necessary to her purpose.

Of course, this background makes me wonder this: what might Dillard be suggesting about the architecture of community?

In other words, what is her vision for community, and how is that relevant to readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek today?

Growing up in the evangelical church, I received messages about what community entails from a young age. Most of the time, these ideas were more concerned with being sustainable to the success of the church than anything else. I was rarely, if ever, encouraged to explore who I felt that I was created to be, allowing that to be my starting point for deep, intuitive connection with the Lord. Rather, I was told to deny the parts of myself that were not conducive to this prepackaged understanding of Christian community, meaning that I could not flourish in Christian community until I started changing things- i.e., myself.

I was taught that true believers will naturally desire “Christian community”, and because I generally didn’t, I felt like a fraud. Throughout my teenage years, my attendance in the youth group was spotty at best, and when I did go, there wasn’t much of me that felt that I was being genuine. I came home and wrote about everything that confused me in my journal- and there was a lot. I served in the children’s ministry on Sundays instead of going to the youth meetings, so when I passed the youth pastor, every “hello” felt more like “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was sorry for, but I had come to believe that Christianity was an endless exercise in shame- shame that I questioned the Bible more than I enjoyed it, shame about the OCD that ensured I was consistently anxious and scrupulous, shame that I didn’t possess the sort of outgoing personality that would help me to make disciples, shame that I rejected Christian community more than I sought it.

If I was sorry for anything, it wasn’t for how I behaved so much as for who I was. I didn’t feel distanced from God when I was walking through the trees and staring up into the shining blue sky, or when I was rereading the stories that I loved so dearly- Anne of Green Gables, The Penderwicks, Harry Potter, The Wind in the Willows. I never felt closer to God than when I was creating, when I was weaving words and writing poetry and sharing in bookish conversation with my loved ones. It was when I arrived at church- the one I wanted to love- that I started feeling irreparably detached.

In Chapter Thirteen, Dillard notes,

“I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering 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 beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.”⁵

I spent a long time trying to bridge the gap between current me- who was simultaneously too much and not enough for the church- and the right me- the me that would finally belong. I was told that I was too intense, so I tried to be more easygoing and less serious. I was told that I didn’t participate enough, so I tried to engage in more activities and events. I was told that sexual desire was bad, so I tried everything to avoid it. Eventually, I realized that there must be more to Christianity than shame-filled spirituality, a religion that made me feel that God was keeping track of every difficult aspect of my personality and every too much thing I have ever done.

Dillard’s vision of community, as evident from this paragraph, is not necessarily about complete and total isolation from the people around her. It’s also not about trying to adhere perfectly to any ever-extensive list of what is acceptable and what isn’t. Rather, it is about making a home in the world, and knowing that God can be found here, with us, too. Marketing God as accessible only to a specific kind of person (straight, white, heterosexual men) at a specific kind of place (the American evangelical church) loses so much of who God is and what the Incarnation really means for us. We don’t have to deny the truest parts of ourselves in order to become closer to God, or to experience the depth of Christian community. God loves us for all that we are and all that we are not.

As I was contemplating this week’s reading, a song that I discovered several years ago came to mind. It is called “The Hymn of Acxiom” by Vienna Teng, who worked in Silicon Valley prior to beginning her career in music. The first stanza goes like this:

“somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.
somebody hears you. you know that inside.
someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to
(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.
here you’re known.”

I find the parallel between social media, which is what Teng is singing about, and the church to be quite fascinating here. At its worst, social media possesses the ability to exploit our fundamental desire to be known and loved, our desire to belong to something greater than ourselves. And, also at its worst, the same can be said about the church. Now, what might Dillard say in response to this?

Earlier today, I was chatting with one of my friends about why my favorite tree is a willow. He noted, “Based on your description I can almost imagine a willow asking the question, ‘Am I too much?’ yet ultimately accepting the fullness of their expression.” The fullness of our expression has never been, and never will be, unwelcome to God. The fullness of our expression is, indeed, what creates community that is intentional, forgiving, empathetic, and profound.

If there is anything to have been learned from Pilgrim so far, it is that there are far fewer solutions in this world than we would commonly like to believe.

However, she offers us this in both her life and writing: when you deeply, truly love this world, God can be found everywhere. You will find God: in novels, in the Eucharist, in flowers, in conversation, and in the paradoxes at play in the natural world.

Practice resurrection, as Wendell Berry would encourage.⁶ After all, Christianity is not where suffering is dismissed or nonexistent- it is where it is transformed from the inside out. And, if community is indeed something that we have the power to co-create, perhaps it can be boiled down to this: being present in the world- paying attention- and trusting in the depth of God’s grace and love.

---

I’ve loved book clubs for years and years, and one of the reasons for this is that they are a wonderful way to connect with like-minded individuals in a low-stakes environment- all while delving into a book that you will probably love, and at the very least, be given a lot to think about! Summer book club has been exactly this, and I’m grateful for all of you and your presence in this little corner of the Internet.

For now, here are some discussion questions about the reading to chat about in the comments:

Have you faced pressure from your religion, or former religion, to change core aspects of yourself in order to belong to a community?

When/how do you feel closest to God? Why?

At this point in your life, how would you define “community”?

Peace to you this week, my friends. I’m wishing you all a beautiful week and look forward to chatting about Chapter Fifteen and the Afterword next Tuesday.

Warmly,

Julia

1. I can’t help but think of this hilarious, continually resonant article in McSweeney’s: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-not-write-unless-i-am-swaddled-in-furs.

2. Pádraig Ó Tuama, "How To Belong Be Alone," Dumbo Feather, republished on The On Being Project, https://onbeing.org/poetry/how-to-be-alone/.

3. Joy Clarkson wrote an interesting critique of Walden here: https://joyclarkson.substack.com/p/literary-pilgrimages-part-one?utm_source=publication-search

4. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/24/archives/pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-meditation-on-seeing-by-annie-dillard-271.html

5. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: McGraw-Hill College, 2000).

6. Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).