In “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,†the poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes about his religious faith, which intensified after he met his future wife and then intensified again when he was afflicted with a rare type of cancer at the age of 39. In his review, Dwight Garner called it a “slim and simmering book†that “works both sides of the tracks â€" the intellectual and the mystical â€" in its considerations of faith.†In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Wiman discussed why he’s a Christian, the writers who mean the most to him, the state of his health and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You returned to the faith you were raised in, and you point out that this generates suspicion in people, including yourself. What’s suspicious about it
People think it’s all psychological. You’re terrified because your world is falling apart and you want to stand in one still place. The past seems like a still place (what an illusion!), and so, according to the skeptics, you try to recreate the security you once felt. In fact, there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood. As I say in my book, if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived.
How long after your illness was diagnosed did you begin to feel a significant change in your religious thinking For how long before your diagnosis would you say you considered yourself unreligious, or did you
I actually began to notice a change when I finished my second book of poems. I was 34 or so. That book ends with a crazy character named Serious having a mortal â€" and, as it happens, fatal â€" confrontation with God. It came out of nowhere and left me stunned. Not stunned enough to act, however. That took a jolt from life, not art. When I fell in love with my wife at the age of 38, it became clear to me that I believed in something. When I got sick, it became clear to me that I needed to decide what that something was. I never had a conversion or anything. I simply assented to the faith that had long been latent within me.
At one point in the book, you describe you and your wife wondering “whether people who do not have the love of God in them†can “fully feel human love.†How do your atheist friends feel about that
I’m so glad you asked this! The Times reviewer of my book, Dwight Garner, really attacked this sentence, which suggests to me that either I wasn’t clear enough, or Mr. Garner was on a tight deadline and didn’t have time to read the rest of the paragraph. (You see how wonderfully charitable my religion makes me!) The sentence you mention refers to the ideas of the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and I have a complicated reaction to it. It’s certainly true that for me human love and divine love are raveled up with each other in ways I don’t fully understand, but as I say quite explicitly, “I can’t speak for other people.â€
Why is it important to you to be a Christian specifically rather than an adherent of another faith, or of various faiths
It wasn’t important to me until I reached a crisis in my life. I floated along like so many modern people, alert to a sense of otherness in some of my experiences but unwilling to give it a name. I’m a Christian because it’s the language I know. I’m a Christian because the doctrine of the incarnation expresses a truth that I intuit with every cell of my being. I’m a Christian because a god that does not suffer with us, a god that is not suffering with us right now, is either hopelessly remote or mercilessly cruel. I’m a Christian because, as my grandfather used to say, at some point you gotta fish or cut bait.
Christian WimanYou name Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson and Fanny Howe as three writers who mean a lot to you. I’m very familiar with the first two names, but not with Howe’s work. Why does it have such meaning for you
No doubt the subject matter is important to me â€" she often writes about the intimate relationship between atheism and orthodoxy â€" but mostly I just love the sentences, the formal ingenuity, and the eccentric, electric heart and mind that lie behind those things. She’s a great writer. Someday the world will catch up to her work.
Pivoting off something Howe wrote, you say “there must be a shattering experience†in order to “build a vocabulary of faith.†You’ve had a shattering experience, with your health, but many haven’t. How should they build the same vocabulary, or can they
Everyone has shattering experiences. It may be falling in love or having a child. It may be the death of someone you love or thwarted ambition. It may be just some tiny crack in consciousness that deepens so slowly over the years that, by the time you notice it, it only takes a spilled drink or missed flight to tear it â€" and you â€" wide open. One way to look at this is: no one is spared. Another way: everyone is gifted.
You write about dealing with death: “I also feel quite certain that the old religious palliatives, at least those related to the Christian idea of heaven, are inadequate.†Elsewhere you say joy can be found in the “void of godlessness.†Do you ever find yourself in contentious conversations with adherents of sunnier brands of Christianity and other religions
Oh, yes. I think some groups who have invited me to speak end up being quite surprised by the heresies coming out of my mouth, and I have found myself in some prickly circumstances. I’m not interested in religious arguments though. I agree with the main character of Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Gilead,†who says, “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.â€
Is there something about writing prose that allows you to get at things about your faith or your illness that poetry doesn’t allow Or the reverse
Writing poetry is a much more powerful and destabilizing experience for me than is writing prose. The former plays hell and havoc with my life and mind. The latter is an exercise in sanity. That said, there are certainly areas of experience to which prose gives me access that poetry does not. I can plan on what I’m going to write about in prose. Poems aren’t real poems unless they shatter â€" there’s that word again! â€" all of your intentions.
How is your health at the moment
Excellent. I had a bone marrow transplant 18 months ago, and I’m eternally grateful to the folks at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and especially to my wonderful doctor Leo Gordon, for keeping me alive through some perilous times.
