"I have tried to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don't mean that Christianity doesn't seem to "work" for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and reformed within the life of God, and dogma is a means of making this happen: the ropes, clips, and to spikes whereby one descends into the abyss. But I am also a poet, and I feel the falseness - or no, not even that, a certain inaccuracy and slippage, as if the equipment were worn and inadequate - at every step. And that's in the best moments. In the worst, I'm simply wandering through a discount shopping mall of myth, trying to convince myself there's something worth buying."
"Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape for pain; it can give one's loss a form and dimension that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything else but drugs, useless." {both quotes from My Bright Abyss - Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman}
I had planned to finish and publish an essay for today, but I will do that at another date because the immediacy of the book above has hit me hard. It is by a poet who, in his late 30's and not long after marriage, discovered that he had a pernicious form of bone cancer that was not curable, but was very unpredictable - he might die in a month, he might last for decades. With that hanging over his head for seven years, he put together this book and how it has affected his understanding of God.
He had only recently come to believe again before the diagnosis, like many of us who seek freedom from dogma in youth, but pain, horrible pain at the edge of death, has come to clarify his, and I think our, understanding of God. And it is not tidy or pretty. What is so wonderful about this book, although it is at times difficult to understand, is its complete honesty. He is in no mood to fool around, to write chirpy little essays on St Francis and the birds, or of shining cities of gold lighted before his dying eyes. No. In his deepening belief - deepening, mind you - he finds that God is no bulwark against his pain or his fear; he finds that finding God is difficult beyond possibilities. For God, through us, is mobile, as we are; God for us lives in our pain and our fears and our cruelties. God,for us, like Jesus, IS one of us; He suffers and doubts, is overwhelmed with terror and despair; cries again and again, to Himself, through us, through Christ, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"
For all of us who have suffered loss or great pain or great fear or the black emptiness of doubt - and that would be most of us past a certain age - Wiman gives us a voice better than we can give to ourselves. When one's father, once a noble man, dies in pain and fear like a frightened child, where is the glory? When one's son is found spattered with blood at the bottom of a ravine, where are the angels? When one's mind is chewed up by Alzheimer's or rocked to the core by mental illness, where are the sweet kisses from above?
And yet, as Wiman knows, without sappy sentimentality and often even without hope, God is there. It is mystery, it is a magnet, it unfolds in us, brings us forth, rolls through us like a tide that has reason beyond us, but that IS us. Quoting from believers who have lived through the holocaust, of Saints who speak of religion as the "dry desert" that we must pass through to find our true end in death, of people who embrace the uncertainty of God because God will forever be our uncertainty, he shocks us as a poet does. He stymies our logic, destroys our simple images and beliefs, but then makes of them something deeper and truer still. Religion is, he says, flawed, even ridiculous, boring unto tears, and yet, even then, it is the way; in its tradition, in its words, it is the wisdom of our past, our words, the deepest we can move together within our limited time and space. And God is unknown, unknowable, pain and cruelty as well as love and joy, all together through us and opening to - we do not know where. But he beckons us even through our terror and pain. He even, as Wiman tells us after all his pain and uncertainties, strengthens in him, in us. Somehow.
It is a terrible and beautiful thing he writes. It is death and the rolling hills and the joy of a simple touch. It is the dishonesty of our certainties, and the honesty which must be made of them, in the end. It is a hard thing, a thing that could not be harder. But it is his, and our, calling. In rebellion, in pain, in anger, it is always and always will be our calling, and we only know 'why' in a far-away thing that is and always will be a mystery. FK
"Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape for pain; it can give one's loss a form and dimension that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything else but drugs, useless." {both quotes from My Bright Abyss - Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman}
I had planned to finish and publish an essay for today, but I will do that at another date because the immediacy of the book above has hit me hard. It is by a poet who, in his late 30's and not long after marriage, discovered that he had a pernicious form of bone cancer that was not curable, but was very unpredictable - he might die in a month, he might last for decades. With that hanging over his head for seven years, he put together this book and how it has affected his understanding of God.
He had only recently come to believe again before the diagnosis, like many of us who seek freedom from dogma in youth, but pain, horrible pain at the edge of death, has come to clarify his, and I think our, understanding of God. And it is not tidy or pretty. What is so wonderful about this book, although it is at times difficult to understand, is its complete honesty. He is in no mood to fool around, to write chirpy little essays on St Francis and the birds, or of shining cities of gold lighted before his dying eyes. No. In his deepening belief - deepening, mind you - he finds that God is no bulwark against his pain or his fear; he finds that finding God is difficult beyond possibilities. For God, through us, is mobile, as we are; God for us lives in our pain and our fears and our cruelties. God,for us, like Jesus, IS one of us; He suffers and doubts, is overwhelmed with terror and despair; cries again and again, to Himself, through us, through Christ, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"
For all of us who have suffered loss or great pain or great fear or the black emptiness of doubt - and that would be most of us past a certain age - Wiman gives us a voice better than we can give to ourselves. When one's father, once a noble man, dies in pain and fear like a frightened child, where is the glory? When one's son is found spattered with blood at the bottom of a ravine, where are the angels? When one's mind is chewed up by Alzheimer's or rocked to the core by mental illness, where are the sweet kisses from above?
And yet, as Wiman knows, without sappy sentimentality and often even without hope, God is there. It is mystery, it is a magnet, it unfolds in us, brings us forth, rolls through us like a tide that has reason beyond us, but that IS us. Quoting from believers who have lived through the holocaust, of Saints who speak of religion as the "dry desert" that we must pass through to find our true end in death, of people who embrace the uncertainty of God because God will forever be our uncertainty, he shocks us as a poet does. He stymies our logic, destroys our simple images and beliefs, but then makes of them something deeper and truer still. Religion is, he says, flawed, even ridiculous, boring unto tears, and yet, even then, it is the way; in its tradition, in its words, it is the wisdom of our past, our words, the deepest we can move together within our limited time and space. And God is unknown, unknowable, pain and cruelty as well as love and joy, all together through us and opening to - we do not know where. But he beckons us even through our terror and pain. He even, as Wiman tells us after all his pain and uncertainties, strengthens in him, in us. Somehow.
It is a terrible and beautiful thing he writes. It is death and the rolling hills and the joy of a simple touch. It is the dishonesty of our certainties, and the honesty which must be made of them, in the end. It is a hard thing, a thing that could not be harder. But it is his, and our, calling. In rebellion, in pain, in anger, it is always and always will be our calling, and we only know 'why' in a far-away thing that is and always will be a mystery. FK
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