When I first picked up Annie Dillard’s “Holy the Firm,” I was in no mood to read. My irritation began to grow as I read the first few lines . Who was this cruel woman who talked of  feeding moths to spiders. Why was she looking at bugs so much? I had been told that Annie's story was spiritually uplifting. Moths  "like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes.” Burning moths, camping, and James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire? Geez. I'm a busy man. I'm a seminarian who has precious little time for such gook. Just what do these have to do with dead German theologians, the eschatological preaching of Jesus, Paul Tillich, or hermeneutical bridges? I started to skim.

My skimming didn’t last long as I came across this passage:
 

 
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out. She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning-only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burned out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe. I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper , enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke, At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax--a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

When devoted men sacrifice to other deities with faith,
they sacrifice to me, Arjuna, however aberrant the rites.
(Ninth Teaching, 24).

Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.

“Yes I’m a Christian, but I’m having problems.”
“With what?”
“Partying,” was all I could think of to say.
“Well, I had that problem too. I would go to parties and drink too much. I would backslide, but Jesus always takes me back. He loves us too much to let us slide from His hand.”

“God please don’t let me become embarrassed!” 
“ . . . stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.”

“Amen” he said.

I drove up and down the highway in front of the arcade. The uneasiness had not left and the consuming fire was even more intense. “. . . no sacrifice for sins is left, only a raging fire that will consume the enemies of God,” (Hebrews 11:26-27).  It is like the Divine Judgment, the testing of the deeds of the believers at the Judgment-Seat of Christ,

For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames (1 Cor. 3:11-15).

His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters,”
(Revelation 1:15-15).

"glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint . . ."

 I can’t help but think of the magnificent Gothic cathedrals from the Middle Ages. They wanted tall stained glass windows that, "like the light of God," the light of the sun would shine through the delicate panes, illuminating them, but not destroying them. Like those panes of glass, I too can feel His light emanating through me.
 

Dillard, Annie, Holy the Firm, ( The Annie Dillard Reader ), (New York): HarperCollins, 1994.