Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek establishes that the book is spiritual as the narrator poses sweeping theological questions about the nature of God. In particular, the narrator struggles with whether God can be known and whether nature presents truths about God’s cruelty or beauty. The first half of the book emphasizes the beauty of nature and suggests that God’s nature is revealed through it. As the narrator watches fish swim in Tinker Creek, she becomes lost in her observation. Later, she describes this experience as a loss of self-consciousness and an absorption in the present moment. The power of the present becomes the marker for spiritual experience. Each time the narrator loses her sense of self and notes the complexity of present existence, she experiences intense emotionality. As the narrator confronts extreme beauty or extreme cruelty in nature, she describes feeling overwhelmed and unable to breathe. Her experiences mirror biblical descriptions of encounters with God or angels.

The second half of the book centers on the theological concept via negativa, which asserts that God is unknowable. The question overlaps significantly with the problem of suffering because the world’s cruelty seems so incomprehensible from a human