My Bright Abyss

Some books are so incredibly good that they simply elude review. This is such a book. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, is so ripe with meaning, so full of insight, that it is impossible to summarize or adequately comment. It's the kind of book that, on every page, you simply write down the name(s) of the people you want to buy a copy for. Lots of books offer great theological reflections, but often the prose is wooden. Other books, though beautiful essayistically, lack the rigor of a work of theology. Wiman somehow manages to accomplish both, consistently, repeatedly. This is prose as poetry, and it is theology as essay and confession. Wiman suffers from an incurable cancer. This becomes a topic at times in the book, but ultimately, the book is not just a living with cancer book--as helpful as those are--but something that encompasses his suffering and then transcends it, even as it descends into and is swallowed by it. The only thing I can compare it to in terms of quality and concision is Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Wiman's book is not written with quite the same intent. But it can function in a similar way. It is now the book I will repeatedly give away as a gift, or suggest to friends, who are considering faith, considering God, struggling with suffering, seeking to make meaning out of the intimations of faith that keep creeping into their lives in spite of their doubts. I offer a few quotes, as teasers. But I can't say it enough, or more clearly than this, "You need to read this book. You want to read this book. It will be your companion and friend." "Christ comes alive in the communion between people. When we are alone, even joy is, in a way, sorrow's flower: lovely, necessary, sustaining, but blooming in loneliness, rooted in grief. I'm not sure you can have communion with other people without these moments in which sorrow has opened in you, and for you; and I am pretty certain that without shared social devotion one's solitary experiences of God wither into a form of withholding, spiritual stinginess, the light of Christ growing ever fainter in the glooms of the self." "Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moment of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn." "One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that Scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man tho whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the Scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see." "The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Even here, in some of the entries above, I see that I have fallen prey to it. In truth, experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing--I am just beginning to realize--may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go." No list of quotes would be enough. I want to quote the whole book here. It's that good.

Wiman, C. (2013). My bright abyss: Meditation of a modern believer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Christian Wiman is Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts, Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. He wrote this book after learning he had a rare, incurable and unpredictable cancer, his writing explores life in the face of death. Wiman frames his exploration: "There is an enormous contingent of thoughtful people....frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God." This book is his reflections upon God, belief, and meaning associated with each. It's not a book about a man living with cancer, but instead poetry and prose about critically questioning source of art, inspiration, consciousness, death, and faith. Some quotes: Artistic inspiration is sometimes an act of grace, though by no means always. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man. For as long as we can live in this sacred space of receiving and releasing, and can learn to speak and be love's fluency, then the greater love that is God brings a continuous and enlarging air into our existence. If our inner lives are always in transition, then our goal should be to acquire and refine a consciousness that is capable of registering the most minute changes in sensation, feeling, faith, self. No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. Still there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one's being, one's material, and Being itself. Inspiration is when these three things collide - or collude. 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. This is as true in life as it is in art. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist's relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God, but of being subjected to God - our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us. Existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. . . .. I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit's need to be. There is a kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it. It is passive rather than active; it involves allowing the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.

A humbling tour de force. A lot of wisdom packed into this thin volume. But readers beware: it's not for the faint of heart or the faithless. And it's a good idea to have had a personal battle or two with the Christian faith somewhere in your background. Wiman is a master of the word, and he manages to draw together so much history, theology and literature into a single book, so as to have defined a prototype reference guide to Faith and the Human Condition. I'm grateful to know a fellow traveler like Wiman can even exist in our contemporary world of mindless, comfortably numb religiosity.... We need more Wiman in our diet, but only when he's ready to deliver. No need to rush a good thing, and compromise the message......thank you, sir.

My Bright Abyss is captivating. Spirituality at its bear essence! Every paragraph can stand on its own like a prose poem. Phenomenal writing... Packs so much meaning in a few words... Just one of my highlights that resonates in me: "Is faith, then--assuming it isn't merely a form of resignation or denial--some sort of reconciliation with the implacable fact of matter, or is it a deep, ultimate resistance to it? Both. Neither. To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you--not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. Heading home from work, irritated by my busyness and the sense of wasted days, shouldering through the strangers who merge and flow together on Michigan Avenue, merge and flow in the mirrored facades, I flash past the rapt eyes and undecayed face of my grandmother, lit and lost at once. In a board meeting, bored to oblivion, I hear a pen scrape like a fingernail on a cell wall, watch the glasses sweat as if even water wanted out, when suddenly, at the center of the long table, light makes of a bell-shaped pitcher a bell that rings in no place on this earth. Moments, only, and I am aware even within them, and thus am outside of them, yet something in the very act of such attention has troubled the tyranny of the ordinary, as if the world at which I gazed, gazed at me, as if the lost face and the living crowd, the soundless bell and the mind in which it rings, all hankered toward--expressed some undeniable hope for--one end."

One of the best books I have ever read. My copy is dog-eared, highlighted, and full of marginalia. In fact, it's held together with rubber bands. Brilliant, knowing, and wise.

I have marked this 3 stars. But I could easily given it only 1 star if I were a passionate atheist. Or I could have given it 5 stars were I a devoted Christian apologist. But I am neither so take a middle ground. I hope you will see why. The author opens and closes with the same short poem: "My God my bright abyss into which all my longing will not go once more I come to edge of all I know and believing nothing believe in this:" Here it ends - twice - at both the beginning and end of his story. A conclusion escaped him even after years of painful reflection and 180 pages of text. God is a deep hole, an abyss, that is not responsive to his longings. He has done much literary research; he has exhausted all he feels and knows from his life as a poet. Yet he still does not know what he believes about his "bright abyss". Mr. Wiman grew up a Baptist in a West Texas town. While always considering himself a Christian, the commitment waned when he left home, grew older, was educated, and became an adult - a common evolution I suppose. But then at the age of 39, a year after he married a woman he dearly loved, he was diagnosed as having an "incurable" blood cancer that threatened his life. The news struck him like a bolt. He groped for return to his lost Christian faith. This book describes his battle coming to grips with a potentiality fatal disease in terms of a Christian faith. It is written as a series of reflections and poetic compositions that evolved from, and centered on, his own psychological and spiritual suffering. There is an intense obsession with death as the likely outcome of his disease. The disease per se is never described but we find a number of clinical clues suggesting it may have been a "plasma cell dyscrasia" like multiple myeloma or a related disease - at least to this long retired physician. Much of his suffering appears rooted in the age old "theodicy problem" confronted by philosophers over the years, though he does not mention it per se. "If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all merciful, how can evil and suffering exist in the world?" It is a complex problem and Wiman does not confront it directly. He does, however, discuss many difficulties with organized Christianity today. Frankly, I see many of the same issues. But Wiman never confronts the necessary issue of the existence of God or the utility of the Christian belief system. And yes, I still go to church (Episcopal) almost every Sunday. He is absolutely mired in, and obsessed with death, and how it might reflect his life. He quotes from many poets and discusses his own reflections at length in search of insights. But he never finds them. It's pure agony. There is no notion of a loving God, a popular concept, and certainly no claim that "Love Wins" (Rob Bell, 2012). Rather, his theology offers interesting thoughts about God and Christ not found in the Christian Creeds. They certainly are not Trinitarian. Citing another poet, he describes God as distant and difficult. But distance from God is not so terrible. Rather, it is a false comfort because it asks nothing from us other than perhaps moments of meditative communion. The primary contact is intellectual, interior, and self-enclosed - a variation on the Indescribable - "a riff on the Ineffable." Jesus, on the other hand, is very different because He is close to us. While God is a more distant concept, Christ is "like glass in your gut" and is "God crying, 'I am here'". He not only uplifts and exalts but also appalls, offends, and degrades with clarity in a most unlovely and ungodly way. God can be kept in a comfortably intellectually place, but "Christ abhors (such) vagueness." Jesus suffered on the cross and that suffering is personal for Wiman. He quotes Jesus' well known and disheartened lament several times, "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?" that appears in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Luke describes a more measured Jesus on the cross and John has him in complete control. The events at Gethsemane are treated in like fashion focusing on Mark and Matthew in which a distressed and trouble Jesus prays for his own life and begs his disciples to stay with him during this troubled time. Luke has him much more controlled concerned primarily that his disciples not enter into temptation. In John, he simply passes through the garden. So again, the author focuses on Jesus' suffering - emotional, spiritual, and physical. Perhaps Jesus' suffering on the cross is so appealing to the author because he can identify with it as his own suffering. "My God, why have you forsaken me?" Wiman describes physical pain as well as emotional and spiritual pain. In fact, it gets a little dark at times. He mentions the complete and utter impermanence of everything and alludes to the concern about one's own self so prevalent in our culture these days. So he did achieve worthwhile insights. It is a shame he could not put them all together. He struggled with the meaning and utility his faith but never did question that faith or the existence of a monotheistic God. Had he done so, he might actually have found, or reaffirmed, a faith. It is interesting that there is a book called "God's Problem: How the Bible fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer" (Bart Ehrman, 2008). Wiman might have found interesting insights that could have helped. I am pleased that the story seems to have ended well. He finally received a bone marrow transplant that was successful. He has been cured or at least is in complete remission as the book ends and he seems happy. Indeed, his search for a faith seems to have caused more suffering than comfort. Bone marrow transplantation was not available only a few years ago. Odd, isn't it? The compassion and relief the author sought was not found in a Christian (or any other) God, but with a bunch of hematologists, immunologists, pharmacologists, and nurses - a medical team that could have included Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics or even atheists. It is useful in that regard to read Bishop J.S. Spong illustrating his recent council to bring today's Christianity into the modern world. We once prayed to heal the sick - still do in many liturgies. But then we discovered that disease was caused by such agents as bacteria, viruses and cancer cells. So we now treated people with antibiotics, chemotherapy, radiation and the like instead of prayers and sacrifices. Thus, "Sickness became secularized and God was largely removed from the medical arena" says Spong. (See Spong, "Unbelievable", 2018, page 41) That is a priest's insight, not a poet's, but its realization may nonetheless be helpful.

How to best recommend to your restless soul “My Bright Abyss”? Hard to add to David Brooks’ review/endorsement/admitted source of inspiration for his 22 December 2014 New York Times essay, “The Subtle Sensations of Faith.” He called "My Bright Abyss" “The best modern book on belief (in God, in the resurrected Christ)” (Though God and Christ are parenthetically left unspoken in Brooks’ essay no doubt for secular readership palatability. To be clear, Christian Wiman offers his redemptive ideas to all souls of every faith tradition seeking/searching; though he wisely suggests you stick to your "native tongue" when re-starting.) So here is my effort to encouraging your reading the book if you're checking out reviews: a “best of” list of passages. Finding your own “best of” list among the thousands of poetic truths (about the possibilities and impositions of Belief & Faith) in this book will be the best possible use of your searching. Page numbers may not help the Kindle readers? These are from the hard copy I received from Amazon. Preface, ix. “I am a poet.” Page 3, 178 “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 this:” (the book opens with this stanza and closes with the same stanza though, with a period mark.) Page 4 “To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another.” Page 7 “To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love.” Page 12 “When I assented to the faith that was latent within me…” Page 17 “Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.” Page 68 “(The sermon’s) essence was how the void of God and the love of God come together in the mystery of the cross.” Page 75 “…the truth of spiritual experience: it propels you back toward the world and other people, and not simply more deeply within yourself.” Page 77 “What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.” Page 91 “Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not.” Page 103 “Why? Why should existence be arranged so that our alienation from God is a given and we must forever fight our way not simply toward what he is but toward the whole that he is?” Page 120 “…distance from God—the assumption of it—is often not the terror and scourge we make it out to be, but the very opposite: it is false comfort, for it asks nothing immediate of us…” Page 139 “Faith is nothing more—but how much this is—than a motion of the soul toward God.” Page 164 “I believe in grace and chance, at the same time.”

I spent three months reading a 177-page book, Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer." I read a number of other books during the same time, but "My Bright Abyss" was never far from my mind. * Some days, I could read only a paragraph. I spent two weeks in London, and did not bring the book with me to read on the plane. It was too much; it would have been too much to read and assimilate at one time. * So what happens when you learn you have a terminal disease that may, or may not be controlled? How do you make sense of it? And what happens when you stop one day in the church on your block, and are pulled back to the faith you learned in childhood, that faith that was often cold and hard like a West Texas wind? One thing you do is keep a journal. * My difficulty with "My Bright Abyss" was not one of shared experience. I don't have a serious illness like cancer. My difficulty lay more in how much of what Wiman writes about illness can be applied to growing older. Minutes pass faster, sometimes so fast that you realize, as Wiman does, that "strictly speaking...the past and future do not exist. They are both, to a greater or lesser degree, creations of the imagination." * Growing older, I suppose, is a kind of death. I'm learning that, as I age, some things are more sharply focused. Not more importantly, necessarily. More focused. Clearer. I understand as I never did before how much two or three teachers shaped my entire understanding of literature. Never before did I understand how important the idea of death is to literature. * Wiman talks much of death, and not only about the possibility of his own. The idea of death powerfully influences every younger poets and writers, because it represents an intensity of experience, one that slips or falls into a vanishing point. * Wiman, for years the editor of Poetry Magazine, is now on the faculty of the Yale Divinity School. In January, I reviewed "Every Riven Thing," a collection of his poetry. I noted "My Bright Abyss" was being published. I said it sounded like a Psalm 23 experience. I was only slightly right. * What he wrote in his journal ultimately became this book. Like all journals, it has long and short entries, sometimes a single thought or a poem, followed by several paragraphs or a longer essay. Sometimes years separate the entries. This seems to me to be a lot like life. * I read "My Bright Abyss," and I come to understand that each life, including my own, is an unfinished poem. Each life always will be.