I had been trying to read Annie Dillard a few months before you died. Just now on my desktop I found these are the quotes I chose to write down from those the two books I got through:
"Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) We forget ourselves, picnicking, we forget where we are. THere is no such thing as a freak accident. "God is at home," says Master Eckhart, "We are in the far country."
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. "
Annie Dillard- Holy the Firm
"Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery; the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous."
Annie Dillard- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
breaking my neck for home...