Annie Dillard and Jim Bakker

 As one who feels closest to God in nature and silence, I am firmly in Annie Dillard’s camp. It’s probably 30 years since I last read one of her books. I think it’s time to reread— now with a 79 year old mind. This is an excerpt from an article in the WaPo today.   https://wapo.st/4hPY6iA

“Dillard’s great project, through her nonfiction books, essays, poems, novels, unpublished notebooks, watercolor paintings and live-wire conversation — not to mention her voracious reading, long walks, beachcombing, enthusiastic dancing and spirited sing-alongs — was to learn as much as she could about God. Unlike those metaphysical seekers who content themselves with the study of scriptures and other secondhand sources, Dillard examined God through the world he made, the way it does and does not work, the things revealed and the things left mysterious.

She concluded, among other things,.that most of us are not serious when we talk about God and, bless our hearts, don’t realize how unserious we are. In perhaps her most-quoted summation of this insight, from her essay collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” she wrote: “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”
Religions profess to believe in an infinite, all-powerful God, omniscient, beyond time — and in the same breath reduce him to the pages of a book, an inscription on marble tablets, a hired gun to train on one’s enemies, a genie summoned to grant wishes.

Religions profess to believe in an infinite, all-powerful God, omniscient, beyond time — and in the same breath reduce him to the pages of a book, an inscription on marble tablets, a hired gun to train on one’s enemies, a genie summoned to grant wishes.
Bakker’s formative years were immersed in the Assemblies of God, which taught of an unbridled, immanent, miraculous deity, an unpredictable God who might ignite a believer’s heart or bestow the gift of tongues without warning. But by the time he and his wife, Tammy Faye, came to prominence under the auspices of broadcaster Pat Robertson, Bakker had become an exponent of the so-called prosperity gospel, with its modest God of tollbooth transactions”