Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.

“I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much.

If Jesus’s first miracle can be a kind of pointless party trick—he turns water into wine! Voilà!—maybe the lesson we are meant to learn from this is that we have to turn everything over to God, including those niggling feelings and hesitations we have that the whole rigmarole of sifting scripture like bird’s entrails, and bowing one’s suddenly brainless head, and “believing” in something more than matter—this is all just a little ridiculous, isn’t it? An embarrassment even. The province, perhaps, of little children.

But do I think that sometimes life and language break each other open to change, that a rupture in one can be a rapture in the other, that sometimes there are, as it were, words underneath the words—even the very Word underneath the words? Yes, I do.

the forms that the imagination both perceives and creates. (Any work of true imagination, I would argue, always fuses those two actions.)

You have to assent to the invisible if you are ever to see it.

Why is life sacred? Because we experience it within ourselves as something we have neither posited nor willed, as something that passes through us without ourselves as its cause—we can only be and do anything whatsoever because we are carried by it.

One cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.

I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life.

How does one take seriously the love of God when it has been so thoroughly—and so often—transformed into an engine of death?

Until someone you truly love slips out of this world forever, the pain and promise of Christ remain abstract. That’s all right, so long as you let Christ’s reality—which is to say, simply, reality—work against that abstraction in your heart.

I feel sure that there is some one pain to which every one of us is called to witness and perhaps ease.

Some griefs are keepsakes from a place you’ve never been. Some luck is love incompletely seen.

True hope goes backward as well as forward. It can transfigure a past we thought was petrified. It can give voice to certain silences or make us more fluent in silence itself. It can turn history into tragedy.

By “creative” I mean disclosing and furthering reality, equipping human consciousness to grow.

A writer is not obligated to fight despair. Sometimes the best gift can be the starkest depiction of an intractable reality, that head-clearing unsquinting astringent allover intake of a truth.

“There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”

My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.

I am beginning to despair and can see only two choices: either go crazy or turn holy.

Me, I can’t conceive of a god who can’t laugh.

Humor not only recognizes the comic discrepancy in the human condition, it also relativizes it, and thereby suggests that the tragic perspective on the discrepancies of the human condition can also be relativized. At least for the duration of the comic perception, the tragedy of man is bracketed.

Why does one create? Two reasons: an overabundance of life and a deficiency of it;

I love you, the Father says to humanity as he assents again to humanity’s endless need to annihilate him.

Selves are nothing but memories of selves, and memories but the wispy entities that time and mind have conspired to keep.

When God entered contingency, when the miracle of existence—that Being should be at all—became the bare, implacable fact of matter, there was no going back: either the incarnation is absolute, or it simply didn’t happen. Either God is gone, or he never was.

For that’s what Eve brought into the world, consciousness, or perhaps more accurately the sin of separating consciousness from God. The loneliness no human love can ever quite answer. And if you are not lonely under this dividing and indifferent blue, if you do not feel, even amid your moments of happiness, some absolute inwardness that is absolute otherness, then, friend, you are either preternaturally enlightened or completely unconscious.

It will be pain to me To reject You, but I do it, in Your own world, Where everything that is will speak of You, And I will be deaf.

“Not until you start asking a question, do you get something,” Wheeler said. “The situation cannot declare itself until you’ve asked your question. But the asking of one question prevents and excludes the asking of another.”

knowing is always alert to the ultimate truth that it cannot know any ultimate truth,

Vattimo, an Italian Catholic who believes that all essential questions about God are unanswerable and therefore irrelevant,

Bonhoeffer became a theologian because he sensed that his primal loneliness had its origin and end in God, and because he gave his life over to this pursuit, he became in some way unfit for ordinary happiness.

“Because he was lonely he became a theologian, and because he became a theologian he was lonely.”

But I long for that bracing, immersive shock of style, the infiltration of an entire consciousness that both unsettles and restores my own, rather than the detached admiration of some singular aspect.

(Augustine: “If you think you have understood God, it is not God.”)

But to believe in nothing is a belief. It is a consolation to declare that you will never be consoled.

One of the functions of art, says Kearney, is to make us active rather than passive with regard to our memories and therefore our futures, to help us move “from melancholy to mourning.

How many days I wasted chasing God when I could have been in bed with you.

It’s not that of two truths you’ve chosen wrongly, but that in choosing you’ve wronged it all.

faith is the failure love demands,

Identity can be liberating and it can be oppressive. It can be liberating to discover and claim who you truly are. It can be oppressive to feel yourself trapped in identities that other people define.

Jesus promises both the fulfillment and annihilation of identity.

You only love when you love in vain.

You ask the secret. It has just one name: again.

Poetry is not simply “good at” creating spaces for this paradox (the speech that gives presence to that which will not be spoken); it can enact and enable the proper fear one feels when approaching any absolute (including, if need be, the absolute truth of contingency), and it can enact and enable its (the fear’s) falling away.

The despair is too much to turn one’s attention to, so most of us turn away.

To train myself to find, in the midst of hell what isn’t hell.

something wrong with me, who had, in terms of my family and my relations to them, sunk into the form of despair that doesn’t simply refuse hope but actively snuffs it out.

I am tired of the word “despair.” The drama that attaches to it detracts from the dull actuality that usually obtains, when one can’t even read poetry, much less write it; one can’t believe in life, much less God.

Don’t be too sure that Being is not filled with meanings that are the task of one’s life to discern.