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Dillard, Annie - Teaching a stone to talk - We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove
Identifier
023495
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Annie Dillard – Teaching a stone to talk
God used to rage at the Israelites for frequenting sacred groves. I wish I could find one. Martin Buber says:
"The crisis of all primitive mankind comes with the discovery of that which is fundamentally not-holy, the a-sacramental, which withstands the methods, and which has no 'hour,' a province which steadily enlarges itself."
Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the high places and along the banks of sacred streams. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. Silence is not our heritage but our destiny.