Maya Angelou wrote “When Great Trees Fall” to mark the death of James Baldwin in 1987. In the poem, she moves from images of trees shuddering the landscape as they come down to what reverberates in us when great souls die. In the space of a few stanzas, she walks the reader from a place where the world shrinks around us toward a place where we reclaim our role as the living.
Over the last weeks, we’ve lost a number of “the greats”: Dolly, Wendell, Gloria, and Annie Dillard. Wesley and I have both leaned on Dillard’s words in recent sermons, and Scott will soon be reading some of her work with the Gleaners. Though she may not have been a household name the way Dolly was, Annie Dillard had an outsized impact on many an armchair theologian. She famously made no quarter for a domesticated God, no “Buddy Jesus” or “God is my co-pilot” theology here. She helped—actually helps, present tense—She helps me remember that we worship the magnum mysterium, the great mystery. When I read her words, I recall how small I am and how vast and wild the universe is, and thus how much more vast and more wild God must be to encompass it all.
And so on a shelf in my office, I have a glass jar of water, not from the Holy Land nor the Mississippi. It’s from a small creek that runs through Roanoke called Tinker Creek. When I lived in northern Virginia, my friend (and fellow Annie-Dillard devotee) and I drove about four hours south to wade in the namesake waters of Dillard’s prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; we were on a pilgrimage ourselves. Now, more than twenty years later, this little jar of water in my office reminds me of a warm day wading around in a stream with a friend, of a writer who reshaped my understanding of the world, and ultimately, of a God who mysteriously both fits inside that jar and is also much too large to be so contained.
Annie Dillard was a great tree in the forest of those who shaped my faith. A forest that includes family members, teachers, poets, friends, a few people I can reach by text, and countless others who lived in other centuries and other lands. I grieve, and I give thanks.
And I wonder, who are the trees in your forest of faith? What did they teach you? How do you remember them?
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.+ Maya Angelou