I just finished Christian Wiman’s book My Bright Abyss. It is a difficult book to summarize. Wiman’s honest struggle with questions about suffering, the meaning of life, God come from a modern sensibility and a poet’s sensitivity so different from my own background. When I came to the end, I thought of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. God’s relentless pursuit of this man through the years, something even Wiman reflects upon when he finally comes to Christ, tells much about God’s grace and love. This book is not your usual conversion testimony, however.
Wiman had some traditional exposure to Christianity as a child but turned away to live as a thoroughly modern man, i.e., someone with no need of religion. He still has problems with creeds and doctrinal theology and traditional church structure which he sees as too rigid. He does not reference the Bible in his book. His one allusion to “the still quiet voice” of God (rather than in the storm) has a glaring mistake as he refers to Isaiah rather than Elijah. He appears to be not very well-grounded in Scripture, but to him it is about “experiencing God”. He does understand the necessity and centrality of accepting the resurrected Christ.
He states that there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood. “Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come as a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed.” “If you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, you have denied the reality of your life.” Life experiences do inform our beliefs.
Wiman didn’t consciously reject God as much as put any thoughts about him aside. “When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities. Perhaps it is never disbelief, which at least is active and conscious, that destroys a person, but unacknowledged belief, or a need for belief so strong that it is continually and silently crucified on the crosses of science, humanism, art or the overweening self.”
He asks, “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? “ He recognizes and identifies with modern man’s angst and anxiety, but then realizes a cause for this is that “anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern”.
Though Wiman in looking back on his life realizes God was there even when Wiman didn’t recognize it though he hungered for meaning, it was when he was diagnosed in his thirties with a rare but aggressive cancer that God got his attention. Yet he sees that experiencing God has to include the mundane as well as the traumatic.
“Is God only knowable in emotional extremity? For all the intensity of our meditative moments and mystical experience, until our faith is rooted in and inextricable from our daily reality, those moments are likely to wreck us because we cannot live up them.” One needs to “find God here and there among the ongoing delights and demolitions of daily life.”
Wiman suffered great physical pain from his cancer and the treatments. A difficulty with following what really are his synthesized journal thoughts over years, is that how he perceives life and pain sometimes does a u-turn. He feels “pain islands you”; yet, he decides that “the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion” because Christ’s compassion flows through human compassion. This working through his thoughts to almost opposite sides of his first statements can make for hard reading. He intersperses his thoughts with poems by himself and others. While I did take a course on Christian poets, including George Herbert whom Wiman loves, grasping the heart and meaning of poetry is not natural to me.
He finishes with “So much of faith has so little to do with belief, and so much to do with acceptance. Acceptance of all the gifts that God grants us. Acceptance of the fact that we are accepted. Acceptance of grace.”
Rather than fall into an existential abyss of angst and meaninglessness, one falls into the bright abyss of experiencing and belonging to a loving God even though we can never fully comprehend Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment