My Bright Abyss

by Christian Wiman

Eight years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss , composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith―responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition―might look like.
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives―and for our deaths―if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that some of us call God?

One of Publishers Weekly 's Best Religion Books of 2013

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Religion, Spirituality, Theology, Christianity

182 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2013

About the author

Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003 he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know, some books take a while to percolate down to your subconscious. This delightfully unassuming book - in itself a literary sleeper, a supernatural depth charge - has, over time, changed my LIFE. This is my personal nomination for My Favourite Non-Fiction Book of 2022.
***

Christian Wiman was at first at loggerheads with my deepest intuitions.

And I have let intuition guide my life, whereas Wiman relies on discursive thought and meditation to produce his sensitively intelligent life and poetry. His life has at its centre a sensitive, mystical void. In my life I possess in all its fullness the mystic banal. For me that's enough.
***
My plenitude is dull; his abyss is bright. I'm afraid to change places with him. For if he's right, the Truth is Terror.

And it's funny - I started reading this one in the days before the full horror of COVID was even anticipated. Well, COVID then forced me into a further retreat from the intricate head games of the world, thankfully, into the dull plenitude of a dutiful househusband's daily routine.

That for me was always enough. Alone with my whittled integrity, the presence of God was within. He certainly can't be in the nebulous nothingness Wiman discerns in his tentative forays through time and space!

Those bear a remarkable resemblance to the strange bursts of opaque white light that dominate the late canvasses of the abstract expressionist painter Jean-Paul Riopelle - as if they had appeared to him in a vision.

They almost scare me.

And as I - along with the world - have perforce spent long periods of time with myself, my wife, and our pet in isolation, with the virus I initially felt the chill fingers of dread crawling into my heart, as Wiman did when suddenly sidelined, disabled by a serious illness.
***
My heart responded to the challenge with love. Wiman sought clarity while I cannot help but dwell on in aporetic endurance.

You know, your heart is either alive or seriously muted. Perhaps mine was dead. Wiman's is always muted by intellectual poetic objectivity. Is that emptiness? Mine underwent a radical reboot in the aloneness of social distancing, but then sputtered.

When, after suffering from a broken psyche 52 years ago I recovered and started to emotionally flourish, I just left it at that, and tried to think without thinking. I threw objectivity out the window. That was the start.

The Absurd then cut clean through all my discursive red tape. And started to cut to the core of my heart.

But is Wiman perhaps further along the right track?

Perhaps the Bright Abyss is that absurdity - resolved and dissipated into emptiness.

Maybe Wiman is right. Maybe I should get off the sidelines!

Thus I mused. So I applied his thoughts to my life. And guess what?

I can now say am finally able to let go of a LOT of my awful past.

So maybe it's time to throw away ALL my diffidence, my ego -

ALL My doubts, all my words, and everything about my plain discursive thought -

Into My Bright Abyss...

And into the Sunlight of Being!

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this collection of meditations and essays an emotionally and cognitively challenging work - even more so than Wiman's earlier Ambition and Survival. This book is suffused with the author's physical, mental, and spiritual pain in the shadow of his terminal cancer diagnosis, and it is haunted by a search for meaning. Wiman finds meaning in Christian faith (cf. other poet-writers Mary Karr, Anne Lamott, Kathleen Norris ...), and as a nonbeliever I struggled in the early pages with his assertions and claims ("God calls to us at every moment, and God is life, this life.). I am more responsive to this fragment from George Oppen (that Wiman quotes):

I think that there is no light in the world
but the world

And I think there is light

So Wiman's faith-claims got my back up a little; I felt as if I were being told what to believe.

But, that's an adolescent way of reading. I had to remind myself to read the meditations as poetry - and poets are allowed to declare things ("The world is charged with the grandeur of God"). Later in the book when discussing his own reaction to Bonhoeffer Wiman puts into words the very solution:

It hardly matters whether or not one "agrees" with any of this. The words have an authenticity and authority beyond mere intellectual assertion: they burn with the brave and uncompromising life -- and death -- that lie behind them.

By the end, after I more generously gave myself over to the writing, I couldn't help but be appreciative and moved by Wiman's words. I have typed this long quote for my own keeping, as it must be one of the best descriptions of religion I have ever read:

... when I hear people say that they have no religious impulse whatsoever, or when I hear believers, or would-be believers, express a sadness and frustration that they have never been absolutely overpowered by God. I always want to respond: Really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond your self, some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you? Never? Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent. It is a means of preserving and honoring something that, ultimately, transcends the elements of whatever specific religion you practice.

[Philip Yancey · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this book came about, about seven years ago, I ranked it as my favorite book of the year. A searing and courageous story of returning to faith by the editor of "Poetry" magazine

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended for all "atheist Christians," like myself.

This is the most poetic, reasoned, thought-provoking, deeply-personal-yet-instructive "journey" toward God that I have read.

Just a few of the many, many paragraphs that left my brain swirling:

"There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world."

"Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it. It is never neutral. Either it impels one back toward life or is merely one more means of keeping life at arm’s length. (The subject matter and tone of art have less to do with this than many people think: nothing palls the soul like a forced epiphany, and one can be elated and energized by a freshly articulate despair.)"

"Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us. It follows that any notion of God that is static is— since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge— blasphemous."

"Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms."

"To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility."

"I always have this sense that something is going to resolve my spiritual anxieties once and for all, that one day I’ll just relax and be a believer. I read book after book. I seek out intense experiences in art, in nature, or in conversations with people I respect and who seem to rest more securely in their faith than I do. Sometimes it seems that gains are made, for these things can and do provide relief and instruction. But always the anxiety comes back, is the norm from which faith deviates, if faith is even what you could call these intense but somehow vague and fleeting experiences of God. I keep forgetting, or perhaps simply will not let myself see, what true faith is, its active and outward nature. I should never pray to be at peace in my belief. I should pray only that my anxiety be given peaceful outlets, that I might be the means to a peace that I myself do not feel."

I look forward to reading other books by Wiman.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

For 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.

A non-linear series of essays on what it means to be an artist of faith in the face of immense personal and existential suffering, My Bright Abyss plumbs the depths of ambivalence and emerges with glimmers of grace.

This is not a theological treatise; instead, it explores doubt and the struggle to believe in God. At times, Wiman can be bewilderingly opaque as he spins readers from quotes from Ulysses to poems by Mandelstam to Meister Eckhart mysticism and you find yourself rereading passages to catch up to his intellectual fever. Then he springs something like this, and clarity arrives like a sunrise: Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions.

I dogeared so many pages, highlighted several passages, and copied quotes into my journal, finding resonance in Wiman's return to his childhood faith after many years of eschewing religiosity. As a writer, I connected with his explications of literary texts in communicating faith, from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to the novels of Marilynne Robinson. I also found purchase in the struggle to overcome the inherent squeamishness of our post-modern culture for faith, including the stains of anti-intellectualism and harm. Wiman casts a side-eye to American evangelism, but counters the sneers of anti-religionists with the wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton.

Ultimately, Wiman embraces the "motion of the soul toward God," and divine love—"Love which awakens our souls and to which we cling like the splendid mortal creatures that we are, asks us to let it go, to let it be more than it is if it is only us." This is a beautiful exploration of the mystery of faith, one I will return to for its many reflections, poems, and inspirations.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of those perfect books that met me at the precisely perfect moment in time. After hearing Wiman speak at our church, I bought this book and began reading immediately. There's relief that floods over you when you find a book like this, when you are reminded that in this deepest part of yourself, you are not alone in your feelings. You are not the only one struggling to reconcile faith and everyday life. You are not the only one who doubts God, who doubts if any of this even matters at all. Wiman, a gifted poet and teacher, speaks with particular power from his vantage point of having cancer for the past seven years. His relationship to death is so much closer than mine is; thus, his relationship with God is brought into sharper focus. Wiman is honest and sincere in this wandering memoir and meditation. This was such a comforting book to me. It may be to you as well.

[Grace Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

For every heck yes I had a heck no.

[Joel Larson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels unfair to give a work like this anything like a star rating, but just for the sake of consistency in how I review things, 3.5 stars.

My Bright Abyss is a collection of verse-like reflections, written throughout the many years of Christian Wiman's experience living with terminal cancer. The subject of the book travels freely from topics of God/faith/doubt, creativity and the role of the artist, poetic theory, landmark poets of the past, memoir-style passages describing his own experience with church, marriage, love, and his diagnosis. The memoir portions and discussions of art alone made this book worth reading.

The writing is exceptionally lyrical, to the point where it becomes overly dense in places. I found myself wanting to zoom through this as quickly as possible because of the beauty of Wiman's words, but then frustrated at my inability to eke any meaning out of the prose as I read faster. I truly think this book is one to savor and read slowly, meditatively, though some passages certainly read more quickly than others.

"Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us.…is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying "I am here,' and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in…all that you would call not-God."

Overall, Wiman has given us an incredible gift in his vulnerable plumbing of life and death (even to write this is to oversimplify his work), and I would recommend this to anyone for whom the cheap answers of much modern-day religion ring as hollow and false.

"So much of faith has little to do with belief, and so much to do with acceptance. Acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us. Acceptance of the fact that we are, as Paul Tillich says, accepted. Acceptance of grace."

Also, now I know I need to read George Herbert.

[David Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife loved this book, and I expected and wanted to like it, but I didn't. I'm not sure why. I definitely feel for the author, who is suffering from a rare and unpredictable form of cancer. He writes very well; I like his own poetry that he included in the book. But somehow, his struggles with faith all seemed terribly abstract and intellectual to me. He speaks early in the book of not feeling at home in the world, and I'm very familiar with that feeling, but have found the cure for it is simple sitting meditation, wordlessly inhabiting the world, rather than thinking about it or talking about it. I felt that every time Wiman got close to a true feeling, he would quote a poet, which would somehow distance him--and me--from the experience. I felt that Wiman was struggling in a way that I once struggled, and that I found a release from those struggles through meditation, and giving up the effort to figure everything out. It was an enormous relief.

So many other reviews are glowing that I feel as if I missed something here. Maybe there's something about me that isn't able to see the true worth of this book. But if that's so there's nothing I can do about it. This book just didn't work for me. I felt that in a weird way Brad Warner's book (which I reviewed just previous to this one) is on exactly the same subject, but it spoke to me much more. It's uneven and not nearly as elegantly written, but it's much more emotional and honest and personal. Also, in an odd way, more humble.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Bright Abyss is a collection of essays by poet Christian Wiman. As the subtitle states, the essays are meditations on what it means to be a person of faith in today's world, what faith even is (or is not). Wiman spends a great deal of space on how faith consists often of doubt and struggle.

Wiman's writing is informed by his own diagnosis at a young age of an incurable brain tumor. He speaks as much for the failures of faith in his life as their successes. Despite his cancer, he has married and has children and lives, when possible, joyfully.

The essays are powerful. I read them slowly, underlining almost every other sentence. It's the kind of book I'd like to memorize (cover blurbs include some of my favorite writers such as Marilynne Robinson and Kathleen Norris). Wiman is a poet and both his craft and his art shine here. His use of the work of other poets, from Seamus Heaney to Auden to T.S. Eliot enhances his thoughts on why and how we believe in God.

The volume is brilliant and moving and just generally wonderful. Although it's not long it was not a quick read for me but it was more than worth the time it took. I can't wait to re-read this one (as well as turn to Wiman's poetry).

[Sophia Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable… Thus we love within the lines that experience has drawn for us, we create out of impulses that are familiar and, if we were honest with ourselves, exhausted. What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love.”

Dog-eared a lotta pages in this one!!!

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wiman, a poet and self-confessed Christian (although certainly not of the orthodox type), provides his journal-like musings on theology, poetry, the use of language, and the connections in between. Wiman opens his book with the observation, ““There is an enormous contingent of thoughtful people in this country who, though they are frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary religion, nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God. I wanted to try to speak to these people more directly.” And he does so with great intelligence, sensitivity, and poetic force.

Wiman speaks of his childhood faith in west Texas and his return to it after a period of rejecting it entirely. He is not oblivious to the potential psychological ramifications of that return, or of faith in general – but with a poet’s eye, he uses his own experience to offset the stale critiques of ‘religion’ that are so often offered with facile repetitiveness in our current culture. (For example, Wiman states, “If God is a salve applied to unbearable psychic wounds, or a dream figure conjured out of memory and mortal terror, or an escape from a life that has become either too appalling or too banal to bear, then I have to admit: it is not working for me.” Me neither, brother.) He explores the relationship of sorrow and the absolute necessity of incarnation, truth as imagination rather than belief, the religion in EVERYBODY’s life (including atheists!), and the necessity of intellectual humility.

My favorite quote, with which I led the syllabus of the constructive theology course I am teaching this quarter: “There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment. This realization is not the end of theology, but the beginning of it: trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author’s personal faith is not actively at risk.” Theologians, scientists, politicians, and family members would all live in a more ethical and honest world if we all took such calls more seriously.

Rarely am I compelled to call a book both beautiful and true. Wiman’s penetrating honesty and winsome confession immediately brought to mind both.

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contained herein is a profound reflection on life and death, suffering and joy. It would be easy to say that I wish Wiman were more confessional, more explicit (I do). But there are moments within this work that Wiman seems to disagree with himself, his own being drawn asunder by various theological instincts and impulses.

I hope to revisit this someday: Wiman is a master of language. There are times where he confuses me, but in those, I believe he himself is confused by the throwness of this life.

All in all, Wiman is a beautiful writer and, despite our disagreements, he offers thoughtful reflections on life and suffering.

[Ben McFarland · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book My Bright Abyss is subtitled Meditation of a Modern Believer, but the believer of the subtitle (Christian Wiman) is a poet who deconstructs and inverts the very word belief. It's not for nothing that someone else called Wiman the "atheist Christian." He's fond of apophatic language (describing God, not by what God is like, but by what God is not like), paradox, and the search for meaning in silence despite a loud, modern world set against anything quiet. But this is not Chesteron's sometimes-too-triumphant paradox, it is a true puzzle that no one knows. What shapes Wiman's whole perspective is a seven-year struggle with a rare cancer and the intense intimacy with pain and struggle that comes with that. Wiman also believes that Christ is God and that God was crucified (he also quotes Jurgen Moltmann on this) -- that God was somehow calling out to Godself when he cried "Why have you forsaken me?"

Overall, this book is billed as modern, and Wiman is thoroughly modern, but his perspective on suffering and the cross feels old, like a medieval saint's reflections, with shades of Kierkegaard. This book is hard going at times, just like life is, but it is dense and rewarding. There are a few head-scratching moments, like when Wiman mistakes Isaiah for Elijah, and I would like to know more about what Wiman thinks about scripture's poetry, the stories we share as Christians, although there are frequent enough allusions to it. I'd like to know more. Hopefully there will be a next book, the Gilead to this book's Housekeeping (to continue the Robinson references). I think sometimes Wiman tilts too far toward the question when there is a partial, through-a-glass-darkly answer to ponder. I occasionally found this book frustrating and slow but in a good way, like a hard poem. Wiman's voice is a unique creation and well worth hearing in the harmony of the believers.

[Shawn Enright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is made of books. One way to read Wiman is to imagine him in a hospital bed, pulling the books from his bedside onto his lap, using them him as artistic life rafts while he undergoes bone marrow transplants. He’s a (sort of) theologian, a poet, and a secularist fumbling toward God — and you must read him as all those things.

My feelings:
Wiman is a mature writer. This book will likely generate silence in your high school small group, or, maybe more exciting — accusations of heresy. So, this book is for the seasoned, critically minded Christian reader. It can be devotional at times, but mostly it is written for Wiman, not the reader. Fine by me.

My thoughts:
The form of the book mirrors it’s content. There is nothing unifying or cohesive about cancer, so Wiman writes in fractured, frenzied vignettes that require slow, careful engagement. It’s a bit of a slog at times, and he borders on the type of abstraction that becomes so nebulous you get lost in his words, let alone what he means by those words. Brennan said that this book is worth reading even if you only love one paragraph, because that paragraph will be so good that it lodges itself inside you. I agree.

[Aaron Guest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third time I've read this in two years. No book has found me in so many different places, and reached a hand down like this book has. I will read it again soon I imagine because it is marvelous. It will probably offer me something new then, some new limb to grab onto in this journey while waves slip below.

January 2019: fourth time now. Running out of highlighter colors. Feels even more profound, speaks even deeper to me, to my writing, to my faith— whatever that is these days. A book filled with crucial, soul-opening “spots of time” (pg 163) that I didn’t even realize could be spoken too, that I had thought were holed up in my own “lightless caverns” (resurrection, separating faith and belief, art)

[Dougw · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing, searing book about faith, God, death, meaning--and meaninglessness. I will return to this book; there is much to take in, ruminate upon, argue with. Wiman offers no comfortable truths and indeed, there are moments when language fails--a sign, surely, of an honest grappling with faith. HIghly recommended. Discomfiting and thought-provoking.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven years into a cancer journey, Wiman, a poet, gives an intimate picture of faith and doubt as he has lived with them in the shadow of death. Nearly every page has a passage that cuts right to the quick of what it means to be human and in interaction with other people and the divine.

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Perceives, rather than believes, life beyond.

[This is why poetry is essential for faith, no two ways about it!]

[AJ Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gorgeous meditation on poetry, faith, and suffering. Written by Christian Wiman, a man who grew up Christian, drifted away from faith, and then came back, it is a gorgeous look at all the way complex ways we interact with our faith. This is not grade school Christianity. The book is also driven by the urgency of Wiman's diagnosis with a rare cancer that is unpredictable, that could kill him in a few months, or that he could fight off for years. I underlined lines on nearly every page as he articulated ideas about poetry or God in ways that I either hadn't thought of, or that I hadn't figured out how to express. Like:

"Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable." (49)

"Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us." (61)

"Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms." (61)

"Innocence, for the believer, remains the only condition in which intellectual truths can occur, and wonder is the precondition for all wisdom. . . . To be innocent is to retain that space in your heart that once heard a still, small voice saying not your name so much as your nature, and the wherewithal to say again and forever your worldless but lucid, your triumphant but absolute, yes."

----- This one really resonated with me, as for years, I tried to will myself into belief, or faith, forgetting all about the need for wonder, the need for love.

"the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it." (90)

"We live in and by our senses, which are conditioned in and by our deaths . . . . And this is why poetry is so powerful, and so integral to any unified spiritual life: it preserves both aspects of spiritual experience, because to name is to praise and lose in one instant. So many ways of saying God." (119)

"We do not need definite beliefs (i.e. details of specific religions) because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. . . . Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery - those moments when we suddenly know there is a God, about whom we "know" absolutely nothging - accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots." (113)

As such:

"To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality." (141)

And then here I'm going to quote an entire page, because he articulates exactly how and why I am a Christian:

"I'm a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this), and not because I think Christianity contains more truth than other religions (I think God reveals himself, or herself, in many forms, some not religious) . . . I am Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren't the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree: the point is that God is WITH US, not beyond us, in suffering). I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolute solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion . . . Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ's compassion - to the point of death, even - possible. Human love CAN reach right into death, then, but not if it is MERELY human love." (155).

I could go on quoting, because the book keeps on growing from here, but this gives a pretty good taste of the book, I think, and these are the quotes to which I want to make sure I have the quickest access.

I recommend this book to any Christian, or anyone interested in religion, or in the transcendent power of poetry, or in how someone copes with the suffering of terminal cancer.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christian Wiman is an exquisite wordsmith and his beautiful prose is on full display in his memoir "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer." Wiman, who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, offers his reflections on God, life, death, doubt, belief, art, and his own return to faith. Wiman spends a lot of time analysing poetry and drawing out its meaning and truth. Along with poets like George Herbert, Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney, Wiman also engages with the pantheon of luminaries admired by liberal Christians, such as Paul Tillich, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton and Jürgen Moltmann.

As another reviewer has remarked, Wiman tends to indulge in apophatic aphorisms about God ("God comes as an annihilating silence, a silence we must ENDURE as well as enjoy," pg 108). As I worked through the book I found myself becoming increasingly vexed. Part of that is the form - the book is a collection of short fragments, more often than not less than a full page and not in a linear fashion. Perhaps it's just that in the Internet age EVERYONE feels they need to express their opinions in a blog post (I am pro-priesthood of all believers but not blogosphere of all believers) and Wiman, as he has confronted the strenuous experience and torment of cancer treatment, is certainly a great deal more eloquent and thoughtful than most bloggers, but the form of the book almost makes it seem like just a collection of blog posts strung haphazardly together with no overarching structure. But I also read "My Bright Abyss" quickly, taking time to pause, but perhaps it will resonate more with me in a few years at a slower pace.

But I felt far more exasperated by how Wiman spends so much time insisting on how we cannot fully comprehend God while at the same time suffusing every page with his own metaphysical speculations. I find this rather tedious because he so seldom interacts with Scripture - with what we HAVE been given that discloses our knowledge of God. It's ironic to me that a deep thinker so convinced of God's unknowability (and yet not, because Wiman ascribes God's hand in everything, including non-Christian religions) casually dismisses evangelical beliefs with poetic flourish while making his own pithy proclamations. I acknowledge the need to muse and ponder freed from the bonds of the Bible, but it is always the anchor that keeps our thoughts in check lest we wander hopelessly off course. For a man so obvious erudite and well-read, I find myself shaking my head at some of the silliness, such as when Wiman approving "quotes" the statement attributed to St. Francis that exhorts Christians to "Go forth and spread the gospel by every means possible. If necessary, use words." You'd think a poet would recognize the power of words FOR conversion, for the experience of mystery, not to mention the obvious fact that Jesus Christ did not follow such an admonition when he went about giving the Sermon on the Mount and speaking in parables.

As a "modern believer," Wiman's memoir deserves to be read. It is deeply personal and reveals the wrestling that many modern people have who are both drawn to faith and repelled by aspects of traditional religion.

[Lauren Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world”

A stunning, wandering prayer, one I hope to come back to often

[Katelyn Beaty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in 2013, then read it again recently after a close friend said that it had rewired her spirituality. This is a work of apophatic theology, singular, profound and beautifully rendered. It did strike me on this read that I was more comfortable with Wiman's storytelling and speaking from personal experience rather than his musing on Christian theology, which he critiques almost entirely, save for the mystics, for its 'deadness' and tired language. There's much to be rightly critiqued for theological exercise that has little to do with life with God and more about trying to 'master' God or trying to be right. And also, to be a Christian is to be part of a tradition that transcends your personal experience with God, and to accept the language and constructs that has been passed down over the centuries. Most people can't live from experience to experience with God, and Wiman grants this explicitly. We need a structure that gets us through, helps us survive and make intelligible our life in the in-betweens, and there's something to be said for a tradition that has lasted through the centuries. TLDR; I think Wiman is best as a poet (obviously!) and as a storyteller, less so as a theologian.

[Kee Wei · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Bright Abyss is a mesmerizing piece of work. In this book of poetry and prose, Wiman gives us a glimpse of the storm brewing in his mind as he wrestles with hard questions of faith in the midst of a contemporary religious landscape that is, for the most part, plagued with easy binaries and false dichotomies. By gifting us with a precise and pristine language of paradox in a culture that is often careless and callous with words, Wiman’s work allows people, whether faith-full or faith-less, to imagine “new” ways to think about our faith. And this might be the genius of it all: that the seemingly new ways of apprehending our faith are actually not as novel as one might think them to be. Wiman draws from a deep well of literary treasures ranging from writer-theologians like Simone Weil and Jurgen Moltmann (“The Crucified God”) to poets like Paul Celan (“Psalm”) and Geoffrey Hill (“Two Chorale-Preludes”).

I found this book cognitively challenging and intellectually honest, and I cannot recommend this enough. In “Mortify Our Wolves”, Wiman writes a hauntingly human and poignant piece to his then-young twin daughters that made me tear up. I cannot wait to re-read and review this book again.

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers 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. He uses metaphors because something essential about the nature of reality – its mercurial solidity, its mathematical mystery and sacred plainness – is disclosed within them.” – Christian Wiman

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable. I picked this up from the library on accident, thinking it was a collection of Wiman's poetry. He speculates on theology now and then—and I think he'd admit as much—but, wow, a beautiful, beautiful book on art, faith, suffering, meaning, poetry, love... Now on to more of his poetry.

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wiman is an extremely 'unorthodox' Christian and his work so much richer for it.

I may not agree with every assertion he makes, but he in fact, makes very few assertions, and hedges the few he does make. The point of this book is not dogmatic assertion, it is not a feel-good 'come to Jesus' moment as a result of his illness - it's an exploration, meditation, on faith, and doubt, and suffering. Of absence and presence, of what faith is when there are no answers, no apparent meaning. He discusses ideas of death and afterlife - afterlife in the sense of the persistence of the soul, not in the typical western christian notion of it - and despite this focus on the looming specter of death, the book is full of life.

If there is a single assertion that Wiman definitively makes, it is about the nature of faith in the mundane and the everyday, how a 'modern believer' must struggle to live between the far apart moments of the numinous. Of how to not simply live with the uncertainty, but rejoice in it. The sheer trust and faith that requires, the letting go of what we do not, and cannot, know. The impossible paradoxes at the heart of Christianity, and how that is the very thing that gives it meaning.

I'm doing Wiman no credit here with some haphazard, poorly written thoughts.

I would not hesitate to call this a great reflection on contemporary Christian existentialism, though I'm not sure Wiman would agree with that term. In the wake of latent OCD, of learning and unlearning aspects of dogmatic childhood faith, in trying to find a way to survive and believe, and /live/ with the uncertainty that plagues me, plagues contemporary life, meaninglessness, suffering, in coping with all of that, there are moments of, not peace, but Something, because of, not despite of, the uncertainty. A type of faith that can only flourish in both accepting and rejecting uncertainty, we return to the paradox at the core of Christianity, and perhaps it is the unknowable paradox that counterintuitively creates meaning and makes the divine knowable.

There is an element of Le Guin here, of 'Praise then, creation unfinished!'. Perhaps I am just too caught up in myself and clinically obsessive about uncertainty.

[Jonathan]

One of the books that states so many things I’ve thought and felt in a way I never could. Wiman insists on both his faith and his critiques of religion and theology, and absolutely rejects convenient resolution or forward progress on any of the questions he raises. His writing is fearless and harrowingly precise, the book is like watching chess master compete against his own mind. I loved it, and will be thinking about it for a while.

It’s interesting to have read this and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living With a Wild God” in the same year. Both brilliant intellects tackling the same question of God in totally different ways. Wiman embraces Christ and distinctly Christian interpretation while also dismissing anyone who claims the Bible or Christianity gives any hard or fast answers about who or what God is.

Ehrenriech’s solution is deeply rooted in both the body and scientific investigation. Her answer (which feels less satisfying, but true to her talents and convictions) is that god is a lingering remnant of a time when we were more connected to, and threatened by the world around us. God was predators, cold, and ultimately the sense of something beyond humanity.

[sheereen]

a wonderful easter weekend read. and i really admire all the thought and vulnerability that went into this

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discovering allusions yields no small pleasure.

Begin here:

"Christ is contingency, I tell her as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised, but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creek-bed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can sustain, trying day and night to 'figure out' just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer…"

- Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. (Specifically Sorrow’s Flower). Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York. 2013. p. 16.

Then trace the river of language back:

While the Constabulary covered the mob
Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
Only the bullying sun of Madrid.
Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
Rose like a reek off a flax-dam.
At night on the balcony, gules of wine,
A sense of children in their dark corners,
Old women in black shawls near open windows,
The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.
We talked our way home over the starlit plains
Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil
Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back’ one said, ‘try to touch the people’…

- from “4. Summer 1969”

- Heaney, Seamus. Poems: 1965-1975. (Specifically from North). Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York. 1987. p. 224-225.

If a person has read Wiman’s “Ambition & Survival: On Becoming a Poet” and doesn’t immediately go read Seamus Heaney, then she didn’t pay attention to Wiman’s (almost) imperatives.

On another note, the allusion bears some digging. The “her” in Wiman’s essay (Sorrow’s Flower) is a woman Wiman had known in his youth. As the essay progresses we realize that he has taken some sort of retreat in middle-age as he has both come to faith in Christ, and as the essay says, been diagnosed with cancer. The woman on the other hand has recently gone through a divorce that essentially wrecked her faith. He and she have run into each other. Brief recollections of their conversation carry the narrative of the essay. Wiman quite self-consciously realizes how abstruse (ridiculous, he says) his statement “Christ is contingency” sounds in the midst of her suffering - especially against the backdrop of his monthlong sabbatical he has taken to “figure out” what he believes. Who among us can take a month off of work to scribble a few paragraphs about something as cloudy as belief? And while people suffer. Hmph.

Wiman gets that sentiment though. And I think the allusion is intended here, not just as a flourish for description, but to embellish the irony of his errand. Like Wiman, Heaney’s narrator is on a retreat, but instead of spiritual matters, this voice has held up in a Spanish flat to study Joyce (who but a poet can afford such luxuries) while a revolution oppresses the natives from whom he’s renting. Someone tells him to go back and touch the people, but instead he retreats to the Prado and ends with a meditation on Goya, the Spanish painter. Wiman knows this; he hopes the reader does too.

I read a review (*1) of Wiman’s book wherein the reviewer criticizes Wiman for writing a memoir “full of God but quite empty of people.” Besides taking the genre to task, the criticism is misguided (*2) and for these purposes the Heaney allusion is informative: Go back and touch the people, the critic said; but the poet instead searches the flesh-rending brutality of history (*3) then moves to the nightmares of Time and Chaos (*4). What does a poet do when confronted with such horrors? What does a carpenter do? Or a farmer? They fall back into the rhythms of their trade and craft examining what meaning their labors have provided in the past. So Wiman fills the book with fine meditations on poetry, writing “with fists and elbows, flourishing”, in Heaney’s words, “the stained cape of his heart as history charges.”

That’s pretty damn touching, and so are Wiman's meditations.

*1 - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/boo....

*2 - The criticism is misguided because Wiman writes: “It is not meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.” - from Wiman’s essay “A Million Little Oblivions” p. 164.

*3 - Goya's "Shootings on the 3rd of May"

*4 - Goya's "Saturn Devours His Children"