...I say God and mean more
The following is from this beautiful essay:
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing emerges,
into which every intact thing finally goes.
-from 2047 Grace Street, by Christian Wiman
I have been nattering on incessantly about Christian Wiman for months to friends of mine who experience the presence of God through the avenue of poetry. I think he's pretty great.
I was talking once this winter with Thia about a few different authors we love and the different ways they seem to live (or have lived, past tense) in the world. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen were two of the writers we were talking about, and I remember saying that I felt like their writing was covering over a strange, deep-seated sort of existential fear. I was remembering a review of a DFW novel I had read where the reviewer said something like "Wallace is a very clever writer who writes for very clever boys who have never learned how to feel anything." I don't think that review was entirely true, or very fair, because my sense of DFW has always been that he felt everything so much that he had to separate himself from the world by the use and mastery of language - as if by standing apart and perfectly describing something, he could contain the overwhelming feelings inside the page. Nevertheless, there was something true about it, I think. And Jonathan Franzen had an interview with TIME where he said something about thinking, once, that he ought to adopt a kid; the catch was that he thought having a kid would improve his writing, give him another avenue into seeing the world and writing about it.
This is a mark, I remember saying to Thia, of a man who is terrified.
Christian Wiman was interviewed in On Being and talked about three events that split his life wide open when he was in his late 30s. He started writing again, after a long drought; he fell in love and got married; and he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer on the day of his 39th birthday. In the course of his conversation on the podcast, he talked about a belief he once held, a belief from before these three events, which was that a life devoted to poetry demanded the willingness to give up all other things. Now, though, he continued, he had come to the conclusion that devotion demanded he give up even that idea.
What he means, I think, is that if a person is willing to give up their life for the sake of their art, then they will end up not really living at all. In the end, ironically, the art that they were sacrificing for will be the thing that suffers.
He read a poem he had written from before his diagnosis, and said something really interesting to me. He said that the poem he read was written by someone who was afraid. He has called it a love poem by a person who is incapable of love. The strange and lovely thing is that he seems less afraid now than he was then, even though he has been very close to death, and will probably die much younger than he should.
In talking about a novel by E.M. Forster, Wendell Berry once said, "The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk: truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger." (emphasis mine) I think one thing underlying the fear that I sense sometimes in DFW's and Franzen's work is an inability or unwillingness to use this sort of language; and it follows from this that there is an inability or unwillingness to entertain the notion of other hard-to-define words, words like spirit or soul.
I guess that what I am saying is that the thing I love about Christian Wiman is how he has opened himself to the use of these words & ideas, even though the era that he is writing in does not trust these concepts. It feels like a brave and hopeful act for the (now past) editor of a journal like Poetry to write and speak honestly about love and hope, death and fear; to write a book about belief that is straightforward enough for his editor to say "There is too much Christ in this chapter."
One other thing that is striking to me is how he talks about love. "...the notion that love could open up the world for you in that way. We just published a poem in the magazine by a poet named Spencer Reece, who's become an Anglican priest, as it happens. He's talking about the whole poem is an elegy for someone he knew and is trying to get at the truth of his life. And he says, "All I know is that the more he loved me, the more I loved the world." I think in any genuine love, and it's not simply romantic love …We tend to think of love as closing out the world and we can only see the face of the beloved. You know, everything else goes quiet or goes numb. But actually what I experienced was that — and I've experienced it again with my children — is that the love demanded to be something else. It demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. You know, it kept demanding more."
-from 2047 Grace Street, by Christian Wiman
I have been nattering on incessantly about Christian Wiman for months to friends of mine who experience the presence of God through the avenue of poetry. I think he's pretty great.
I was talking once this winter with Thia about a few different authors we love and the different ways they seem to live (or have lived, past tense) in the world. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen were two of the writers we were talking about, and I remember saying that I felt like their writing was covering over a strange, deep-seated sort of existential fear. I was remembering a review of a DFW novel I had read where the reviewer said something like "Wallace is a very clever writer who writes for very clever boys who have never learned how to feel anything." I don't think that review was entirely true, or very fair, because my sense of DFW has always been that he felt everything so much that he had to separate himself from the world by the use and mastery of language - as if by standing apart and perfectly describing something, he could contain the overwhelming feelings inside the page. Nevertheless, there was something true about it, I think. And Jonathan Franzen had an interview with TIME where he said something about thinking, once, that he ought to adopt a kid; the catch was that he thought having a kid would improve his writing, give him another avenue into seeing the world and writing about it.
This is a mark, I remember saying to Thia, of a man who is terrified.
*
What he means, I think, is that if a person is willing to give up their life for the sake of their art, then they will end up not really living at all. In the end, ironically, the art that they were sacrificing for will be the thing that suffers.
He read a poem he had written from before his diagnosis, and said something really interesting to me. He said that the poem he read was written by someone who was afraid. He has called it a love poem by a person who is incapable of love. The strange and lovely thing is that he seems less afraid now than he was then, even though he has been very close to death, and will probably die much younger than he should.
In talking about a novel by E.M. Forster, Wendell Berry once said, "The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk: truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger." (emphasis mine) I think one thing underlying the fear that I sense sometimes in DFW's and Franzen's work is an inability or unwillingness to use this sort of language; and it follows from this that there is an inability or unwillingness to entertain the notion of other hard-to-define words, words like spirit or soul.
I guess that what I am saying is that the thing I love about Christian Wiman is how he has opened himself to the use of these words & ideas, even though the era that he is writing in does not trust these concepts. It feels like a brave and hopeful act for the (now past) editor of a journal like Poetry to write and speak honestly about love and hope, death and fear; to write a book about belief that is straightforward enough for his editor to say "There is too much Christ in this chapter."
*
One other thing that is striking to me is how he talks about love. "...the notion that love could open up the world for you in that way. We just published a poem in the magazine by a poet named Spencer Reece, who's become an Anglican priest, as it happens. He's talking about the whole poem is an elegy for someone he knew and is trying to get at the truth of his life. And he says, "All I know is that the more he loved me, the more I loved the world." I think in any genuine love, and it's not simply romantic love …We tend to think of love as closing out the world and we can only see the face of the beloved. You know, everything else goes quiet or goes numb. But actually what I experienced was that — and I've experienced it again with my children — is that the love demanded to be something else. It demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. You know, it kept demanding more."
It reminds me of a class I took at EMU about the poetry of Dante & Milton; my professor constantly talking about this question: "What is the civic duty of love?"
What he meant by that question was that love has the potential to open us wider, rather than close us in. That, if we chose to let it, love will let us see the world as it has potential to be, rather than as it is. And this can spur us into action to try to make this better world around us...the "civic duty of love," if you will. (Wendell Berry again: "Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.")
*
From the transcript of the On Being podcast:
"Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.
"I am a Christian. I believe that Christ comes alive in communion between people, and sometimes I'll think all kinds of things are wrong with my life. You know, my job is messing me up, my writing is messed up, something's messed up, and then I'll have a conversation with someone about a religious topic or it's spiritually informed in some way and it's honest. And even if we don't get anywhere, even if we disagree, the air has been cleared in me and I realize that, in some ways, that I was dealing with all these things that weren't bedrock, you know. They weren't the ground of my being, and I'm trying to take care of the structures on top instead of the ground of my being. And I find that often all you need is some kind of conversation with someone, even if it's just expressing pure anxiety."
"I am a Christian. I believe that Christ comes alive in communion between people, and sometimes I'll think all kinds of things are wrong with my life. You know, my job is messing me up, my writing is messed up, something's messed up, and then I'll have a conversation with someone about a religious topic or it's spiritually informed in some way and it's honest. And even if we don't get anywhere, even if we disagree, the air has been cleared in me and I realize that, in some ways, that I was dealing with all these things that weren't bedrock, you know. They weren't the ground of my being, and I'm trying to take care of the structures on top instead of the ground of my being. And I find that often all you need is some kind of conversation with someone, even if it's just expressing pure anxiety."
*
The following is from this beautiful essay:
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
“It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,” [Simone] Weil writes, “in order to find reality through suffering.” This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not to be suddenly “at ease in the world.” I don’t really think it’s possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can tease our minds toward eternity and love’s abundance make us dream a love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.
So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any “existential anxiety” I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
“It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,” [Simone] Weil writes, “in order to find reality through suffering.” This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not to be suddenly “at ease in the world.” I don’t really think it’s possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can tease our minds toward eternity and love’s abundance make us dream a love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.
So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any “existential anxiety” I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.
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