Christian Wiman is an extraordinary author and poet who has written movingly of his own life experience of losing and regaining his faith amidst facing death from a rare and incurable form of cancer. I first posted on him here, back in February 2012.
You can read his 2007 essay "Gazing IntoThe Abyss" here.
So I was interested to see that his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer has been published earlier this year and so this post is a continuation of sorts and also fits with some of my own thoughts these past few days.
In this New York Times May review of Wiman's book," My Bright Abyss," Kathleen Norris ( another favourite author of mine), says :
"The poet comes to the fore, insisting on the right to embrace contradiction without shame. Wiman says “I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.”
One of Wimans' poems," Every Riven Thing" takes us further into that suffering..
"Riven means broken, it means shattered or wounded or unhealed, and I think that notion is very important to me and my notion of God and of religion: that we are broken creatures, very broken creatures. And I don’t think of God as necessarily healing that brokeness as much as participating in it."
You can listen to Christian Wiman explain how his poem "Every Riven Thing" came to be written and he reads the poem here.
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.
This is an excellent post on Christian Wiman and Every Riven Thing by David Lose at his blog" In the Meantime" from here.
D.S. Martin reviews "Every Riven Thing" Here.
Click here for some more mp3 poem readings by Wiman.
This Mind of Dying
God let me give You now this mind of dying
Fevering me back
Into consciousness of all I lack
And of that consciousness becoming proud:
There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.
My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
To a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
More than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.
You can hear and read an interview with Christian Wiman here at "On Being" with Krista Tippett
Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers" from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz.
You can read his 2007 essay "Gazing IntoThe Abyss" here.
So I was interested to see that his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer has been published earlier this year and so this post is a continuation of sorts and also fits with some of my own thoughts these past few days.
In this New York Times May review of Wiman's book," My Bright Abyss," Kathleen Norris ( another favourite author of mine), says :
"Wiman finds that the integrity of a poem, which is “its own code to its
own absolute and irreducible clarity,” is similar to that of a God who
lives “not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes
patience and imagination to perceive.” Both require the use of metaphor,
“which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into
strange new truths.”
Christ’s repeated use of metaphor and story, Wiman
asserts, is an effective way of asking people to “stake their lives on a
story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved but a narrative
to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.”
And there is the rub, the necessity of a personal commitment to a
particular faith, with its own specific language, rituals and
traditions. “You can’t really know a religion from the outside,” Wiman
writes, and no matter how much you learn about it, it remains “mere
information, so long as your own soul is not at risk.” With so much at
risk for him, he takes the plunge.
And in accepting that the words and
symbols of Christianity say something true about reality but are also
necessarily limited in their scope, he sees an analogue with poetry.
“You can’t spend your whole life questioning whether language can
represent reality,” he writes. “At some point you have to believe that
the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith
with which you use them.”
Christianity scandalized the ancient world because it was for common
people, open to anyone, rich or poor, slave or free. It offered no
secret, specialized knowledge that could be acquired by a select few.......... Coping
with his cancer has drawn him closer to other people, and also to the
Jesus who suffered on the cross. “The point,” he writes, “is that God is
with us, not beyond us, in suffering.”
Kathleen Norris continues.....
"The poet comes to the fore, insisting on the right to embrace contradiction without shame. Wiman says “I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.”
One of Wimans' poems," Every Riven Thing" takes us further into that suffering..
"Riven means broken, it means shattered or wounded or unhealed, and I think that notion is very important to me and my notion of God and of religion: that we are broken creatures, very broken creatures. And I don’t think of God as necessarily healing that brokeness as much as participating in it."
You can listen to Christian Wiman explain how his poem "Every Riven Thing" came to be written and he reads the poem here.
Every Riven Thing
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.
This is an excellent post on Christian Wiman and Every Riven Thing by David Lose at his blog" In the Meantime" from here.
D.S. Martin reviews "Every Riven Thing" Here.
Click here for some more mp3 poem readings by Wiman.
This Mind of Dying
God let me give You now this mind of dying
Fevering me back
Into consciousness of all I lack
And of that consciousness becoming proud:
There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.
My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
To a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
More than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.
You can hear and read an interview with Christian Wiman here at "On Being" with Krista Tippett
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| Image source |
I found this wonderful poem by Stanley Kunitz, in the comments section.
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
The Layers
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.
- See more at: http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-call-to-doubt-and-faith-christian-wiman-on-remembering-god/4535#commentform
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.
- See more at: http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-call-to-doubt-and-faith-christian-wiman-on-remembering-god/4535#commentform
The Layers
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.
- See more at: http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-call-to-doubt-and-faith-christian-wiman-on-remembering-god/4535#commentform
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.
- See more at: http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-call-to-doubt-and-faith-christian-wiman-on-remembering-god/4535#commentform
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