Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and until recently the editor of Poetry magazine, has written what may become a spiritual classic.

He opens his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) with a four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing
will not go once more I come to the edge of all I
know
and believing nothing believe in this:

He closes the book with the same four lines, with one exception: the colon after “this” becomes a period.

Thus he captures the paradoxical journey of faith he is on, at “the edge of all I know,” looking forward. Then, at the end, “believing nothing believe in this,” a sure but tentative faith.

In a preface, Wiman says he “wanted to write a book that might help someone who is at once as confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness as I am.”

Wiman’s language about faith is refreshing because it does not employ the usual insider phrases. He often contrasts faith and belief, noting that “faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more intellectual and superficial. “How astonishing it is,” he writes, “the fierceness with which we cling to beliefs that have made us miserable, or beliefs that prove to be so obviously inadequate when extreme suffering—or great joy—comes.”

Another theme under the rubric of paradox is the commingling of God’s presence and absence. Wiman writes: “If grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”

In 2005, Wiman learned that he had an incurable cancer of the blood, which he calls “as rare as it is unpredictable, ‘smoldering’ in some people for decades, turning others to quick tender.” He wrote this book in sections over a period of years. Some parts are written during the early stages of cancer treatment, when he faced a more immediate chance of dying. He describes this with incisive feeling: “It is qualitatively different when death leans over to sniff you, when massive unmetaphorical pain goes crawling through your bones, when fear … ices your spine.”

One of Wiman’s recurring themes is the affinity of poetry and faith. He points to the importance of imagination in experiencing God: “Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.”

He says he is a Christian because of Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ’s suffering, he writes, “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering,” and “Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.” And he is a Christian, he writes, “because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people.”

Wiman writes of his experiences of this love through his wife and his twin daughters, who have helped carry him through seven years of cancer.

In the end, he concludes that at the heart of faith is “acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us.”

My Bright Abyss demands but also rewards careful reading and reflecting.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.