Free For the Time Being by Annie Dillard Page B

avoid situations for which there is no earthly solution.
    Guy Simon was a Presbyterian minister in Michigan. He sailed some friends out on Lake Charlevoix; the boat capsized, and a child and a man drowned. After he got ashore,he walked up and down the beach hitting his hands together and saying, “Oh, pshaw! Oh, pshaw!”
    N O W              There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
    There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter, or the day Peterwalked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet
may
rise, or you
may
see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you
may
avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.
    Purity’s time is always now. Purity is no social phenomenon, a cultural thing whose time we have missed, whose generations are dead, so we can only buy Shaker furniture. “Each and every day the Divine Voice issues from Sinai,” says the Talmud. Of eternal fulfillment, Tillich said, “If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all.”
    There is, or was, a contemporary religious crank named Joel Goldsmith, for whose illogical, obscurely published books I confess a fond and enduring weakness. He says that God (aka “It”) has nothing to give you that he (It) is not giving you right now. That all people at all times may avail themselves of this God, and those who are aware of it know no fear, not even fear of death. “God” is the awareness of the infinite in each of us. Repeatedly and reassuringly, God tells Joel Goldsmith (and for this I cannot dismiss Goldsmith, clearly an American, possibly a football fan), “I am on the field.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    B I R T H              This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both
ways
, in and out of time. On wards above and below me, men and women are dying. Their hearts seize, give out, or clatter, their kidneys fail, their lungs harden or drown, their brains clog or jam and die for blood. Their awarenesses lower like lamp wicks. Off they go, these many great and beloved people, as death subtracts them one by one from the living—about 164,300 of them a day worldwide, and 6,000 a day in the United States—and the hospitals shunt their bodies away. Simultaneously, here they come, these many new people, for now absurdly alike—about10,000 of them a day in this country—as apparently shabby replacements.
    At the sink in the maternity ward, nurse Pat Eisberg is unwrapping another package. This infant emerged into the world three weeks early; she is lavender, and goopy with yellow vernix, like a Channel swimmer. As the washcloth rubs her, she pinks up. I cannot read her name. She