My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

by Christian Wiman

I have tried to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all.

We live in and by our senses, which are conditioned in and by our deaths.

To believe in—to serve—Christ, on the other hand, is quite difficult, and precisely because of how near he is to us at all times.

To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how “ungodly” that clarity often turns out to be.

But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on 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 nothing—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.

Does the decay of belief among educated people in the West precede the decay of language used to define and explore belief, or do we find the fire of belief fading in us only because the words are sodden with overuse and imprecision, and will not burn?

The soul at peace—the mystic, the poet working well—is not simply inclined to silence but inclined to valorize it. Poets say that the better part of poetry is what is not said; mystics and other meditative savants say that the final fruition of prayer is silence. And they are correct.

The purpose of theology—the purpose of any thinking about God—is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning—by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings—more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.

We want to fill what wants to be empty; we seek meaning in what seeks to be free of that.

goes both ways, though: mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches.

It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit.

Faith is nothing more—but how much this is—than a motion of the soul toward God.

What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?

Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.

The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness. So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful—perhaps the most powerful—side of God.

I’m suggesting that Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible. Human love can reach right into death, then, but not if it is merely human love.

What I do know, or sense, is that within the love that once opened up the world to you—from the birth of a child to meeting your mate—is a key that can let you back into the world when that love is gone.

Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self.

They need not be only grief, only pain, these black holes in our lives.

If we can learn to live not merely with them but by means of them, if we can let them be part of the works of sacred art that we in fact are, then these apparent weaknesses can be the very things that strengthen us.

The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is.

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.

once again I am left with the vital and futile truth that to live in faith is to live like the Jesus lizard, quick and nimble on the water into which a moment’s pause would make it sink.

that Christ’s life is not simply a model for how to live, but the living truth of my own existence.

Christ is not alive now because he rose from the dead two thousand years ago. He rose from the dead two thousand years ago because he is alive right now.

Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience.

It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours.”

The task is not to “believe” in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.

We are each of us—every single one of us—meant to be a lens for truths that we ourselves cannot see.

So much of faith has so 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.