Holy the Firm

Holy the Firm’s three parts reflect Dillard’s own spiritual journey. In the first part, she deals mostly with abstract, theoretical ideas about the nature of suffering and the experience of earthly life through analogs of the human experience. In the second part, she sees those theories put to the test in Julie Norwich and the fallen plane. In the third part, Dillard figures out how to put what she has learned into practice. Though Dillard has previously attempted to describe and codify the outside world through her poetic descriptions and her map of the islands, she does not engage with the natural world directly, but through artifice. Dillard herself recognizes the inadequacy of this approach when she confesses that she is unable to “picture” the land as she describes it (23).

In general, the third part of Holy the Firm is humbler in tone and (literally and metaphorically) more down-to-earth. Dillard opens by subordinating herself to God and admitting that she “know[s] only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand” (55). Part 2 foreshadows this sudden shift in Dillard’s disposition to knowledge of the divine when Dillard quotes Dionysius telling his disciple to “[a]bandon everything” (45). Relatedly, Dillard demonstrates a willingness to accept “such shocking random […] mystery” as the universe supplies and a desire to worship God through “any means ready to hand” (56, 55). The “mystery” Dillard alludes to here resembles what she called a “joke” in Part 2—the sudden, “shocking,” and likely painful event that pierces everyday life and reminds us of our powerlessness. Her tone has shifted, however, and she now sees such events as opportunities for faith.

Related to this new conviction, Dillard considers the history of the humble and authentic people to whom “God should reveal himself” (56). Dillard sees the romantic discourses that surround these people as wholly opposed to modern life. Where these historical people are “simple in themselves” (56), the average modern person is “various, complex, and […] busy” (56). This suggests that God does not visit the types of people that currently populate the world. However, Dillard challenges this notion by questioning the validity of the assumption that these past people’s “innocence has ever been” (56). Maintaining the idea of the past as a simpler, more innocent time would be to “mistake vision for history” (57). Instead, Dillard sees the people of the past as leading lives similar to those we lead now—lives that were just as busy and just as impure (56). In effect, all those whom God has revealed himself to were ordinary people: “There is no one but us” (56). Dillard’s later vision of Christ’s baptism reaffirms the notion that God will reveal himself to “ordinary people” (66).

As part of Dillard’s religious practice, she attends the island’s Congregationalist church. She sees this attendance as a matter of course, simply stating, “There is one church here, so I go to it” (57). There she finds a minister who shares many of her concerns about God’s disengagement from lived human experience. Though he does not emphasize these concerns in his sermons, his exasperated “Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week” allows Dillard to connect with him despite her affinity for the “higher” churches (58)—that is, churches with a pronounced emphasis on hierarchy, tradition, liturgy, etc. Dillard’s appreciation for these churches springs from their reverential and ritual-based worship. Dillard suggests that we risk taming God through the higher church’s rituals and formalities, while the lower churches, though informal, maintain a greater respect for God’s power. Despite Dillard’s claims, her own engagement with God seems closer to the informal practices of the lower churches.

As part of Dillard’s participation in this church, she offers to supply wine for communion so that they could drink it instead of grape juice. This change would bring the ritual of communion closer to its original form and perhaps, for Dillard, closer to something authentic. However, it soon becomes clear that Dillard is in over her head. She considers that “There must be a rule for the purchase of communion wine” (63), revealing that despite her aspirations to be part of a higher church, she is not well informed about their intricacies. Still, Dillard understands the wine’s symbolic weight as Christ’s blood and considers making the wine herself in order to do justice to its significance (63). Even the “California red” she buys from the local store is a “backload of god” (64)—a claim validated by the vision of Christ she sees while carrying the bottle up the hill. The revelation of Christ’s baptism is deeply steeped in religious imagery and elaborates on Dillard’s conception of time. The water droplets that cover Christ’s body hold “all that time contains” (67). In one way of reading this image, Christ is covered and bound by time in the way that Dillard previously speculated God might be. The water manifests in “balls as heavy as planets” that weigh Christ down (67).

Dillard’s investigation of time appears earlier in Part 3 as well. While she wonders whether the “works of God should be made manifest” through individual suffering as they are in the story of Christ and the blind man (60), she arrives at the notion that forms of suffering and punishment are necessary to remind people that we are victims in the universe’s orchestration. We need to be reminded

[…] 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 (61-62).

Time is not only a catalyst for understanding oneself as created, but a destroyer of meaning. This truth, as Dillard understands it, suggests the impossibility of ascribing agency to seemingly random events such as Julie’s accident.

Julie maintains her position as Dillard’s symbol of senseless suffering in Part 3. Julie plays a significant role in Dillard’s consideration of Christ and the blind man—it is a meditation on Julie’s profound suffering and the suicide rate among burn victims that leads Dillard to that story. Julie’s most notable appearance in Part 3 is at its end, when Dillard connects her with Christ. While Christ is baptized in water, Julie is baptized and “salted with fire” (73), connecting her back to the themes and ideas of the book’s first section and echoing John the Baptist’s words anticipating Jesus himself: “[H]e shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” (Matthew 3:11). The accident that burned Julie’s face is thereby refigured as a spiritual cleansing, and Dillard tries to compel Julie to become a nun, mirroring Julie’s own attempts to shove Small into a nun’s habit and further solidifying the connection between her and Dillard. Dillard’s description of the artist as one whose face “is flame like a seraph’s” also makes an implicit connection between her and Julie (72). The connection between Julie and the moth becomes explicit as Dillard sees Julie “held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer” (76).

Dillard sees Julie’s accident as having made the girl ill-equipped for a normal life and suggests that she “Forget whistling” with her ruined lips and instead “Learn Latin” so she can join a convent (74). The burns on Julie’s face are immediately reconstituted as a “black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, [that] is your veil” (74). It does not take long for Dillard to realize that she herself has already taken on the role she’s prescribing for Julie. Dillard sees this role as a sort of sacrifice, and the assumption she makes is that only she or Julie will have to make it, further solidifying their connection. If Dillard takes on the role, substituting herself for Julie in a Christ-like way, Julie has a chance to live a normal life. This chance relies on “holy the firm” (69), the only theory of divine interaction with the material world that Dillard has not yet rejected.