Holy the Firm

Summary

Holy the Firm is a 1977 book on Christian spirituality by American naturalist and author Annie Dillard. Dillard, whose 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, is often championed for her ability to describe and narrativize the natural world. In Holy the Firm, Dillard applies this ability to what happened during a three-day period on an island in Puget Sound. Dillard ultimately stayed on this Island for two years, living and writing in relative solitude. Over the course of November 18-20, Dillard interrogates the nature of reality, time, the relationship between sacrifice and art, and the power of the Christian God to end suffering. Dillard wrote the book to articulate her personal religious misgivings and revelations, but it has also been interpreted as an argument for converting to Christianity. Holy the Firm has been reprinted many times; this guide uses the 2003 Harper Perennial edition as its reference.

Holy the Firm is set in and around the room that Dillard stayed in while in Puget Sound. Formally, the book is closer to a prose poem than a straightforward narrative of Dillard’s experiences, and it relies as much on the author’s thoughts, observations, and reflections as it does on the events that Dillard sets out to relate. In the first section, “Newborn and Salted,” Dillard describes her room and its occupants, including a cat named Small, a spider, and a few moth husks. These moth husks remind Dillard of two summers prior, when she watched a moth self-immolate in a candle flame. To Dillard, the moth’s burning symbolizes the universality of suffering. She finds herself recalling the memory whenever she meditates on living creatures’ relationship with God. In this section, Dillard also contemplates the religious significance of salt, particularly in Abrahamic baptism rituals.

The second part, “God’s Tooth,” opens with a plane falling from the sky. Dillard tells the story of Julie Norwich, a seven-year-old girl who was on that plane. Nobody dies during the crash, but while disembarking, Julie suffers severe burns on her face from a fuel explosion. Dillard imagines Julie in the hospital and struggles with possible responses to the pain the young girl experiences. Dillard contemplates what kind of God would allow such misery to occur and questions whether God is truly benevolent. Dillard settles on the idea of God being bound by time and unable to interact with the human world.

In the third part, “Holy the Firm,” Dillard expands on her understanding of God through personal revelation and an appeal to concepts from the esoteric tradition of Christian belief. Still focused on God’s limitations, Dillard now sees any expectation of God’s personal involvement in the human realm to be short-shortsighted—even if the questions humans ask of God are worthy of being asked. Not even God, in Dillard’s understanding, can control time. On her way home from purchasing communion wine for the church she has been attending, she has a vision of Christ coming up from the water of Puget Sound, with each water drop on his body containing a complete world in itself. This revelation helps Dillard make sense of her own world. She sees the natural world as evidence of God’s existence and power, and she toys with the idea of the world as emanating from God. Dillard latches onto “Holy the Firm,” a substance that esoteric Christianity believes to be at the base of all matter. Holy the Firm acts as a conduit between the material and the divine. The idea of this connection, however tenuous, brings Dillard comfort even in the face of suffering and despair.