Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

But in good truth I’ve wandered much of late, And sometimes, to my shame I speak, have need Of my best prayers to bring me back again.

When you’re young, if you’re at all “artistic,” despair has an alluring quality. You affect it, deploy it, stroke it gently like a sedated leopard.

I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art.

What exactly does that mean: to pray? And is it something one ought to be teaching a child to do?

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.

it is a prayer to be reconciled to a world in which prayer does not work.

What might it mean to pray an honest prayer? Maybe it means, like Meister Eckhart, praying to be free of the need for prayer. Maybe it means praying to be fit for, worthy of, capable of living up to, the only reality that we know, which is this physical world around us, the severest of whose terms is death. Maybe it means resisting this constriction with the little ripple of spirit that cries otherwise, as all art, even the most apparently despairing, ultimately does. And maybe, just maybe, it even means praying for a parking spot in the faith that there is no permutation of reality too minute or trivial for God to be altogether absent from it.

I believe that the question of faith—which is ultimately separable from the question of “religion”—is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.

I have found faith to be not a comfort

as Saint Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand.

“At a time like the present,” Weil continues, “incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross if the unbeliever loves God, if he is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but who cries out because he is hungry.”

matter is pregnant with spirit. Reality is always in excess of perception,

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’m no gardener … but here I am, going at it again in my aimless way of flinging seed, where faith is the failure love demands, and even the wrong sloth rots upward in time.

Sometimes we want a despair to be ultimate because it absolves us of action.

The need for certainties, for “belief,” is a symptom of intellectual adolescence, and it can afflict a culture as well as an individual consciousness.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

The speech is a reprimand, yes, but God also allows that Job has “spoken right.” It’s not obvious what God is referring to here. Job has said a lot of things. But the one thing that he has truly hammered home is that cry of dereliction, destruction, and profane (yet not faithless) rage.