Of What He Cannot Do

by Edward Traub

I picked up a new copy of Annie Dillard's Holy The Firm to read a second time.  Here is what I read today and it has brought a deep pause (breath!) to my day:

We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days. And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God’s blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) We forget ourselves, picknicking; we forget where we are. There is not such thing as a freak accident. “God is at home,” says Meister Eckhart, “We are in the far country.”

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
— Dillard, Annie. "Holy The Firm." New York: Perennial/Harper Collins, 1988. pp. 61-62.

I'm going to let that linger for a while.