My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

by Christian Wiman

But God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. “I think there is no light in the world / but the world,” writes George Oppen. “And I think there is light.”

but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”

Faith is not faith in some state beyond change. Faith is faith in change.

I should never pray to be at peace in my belief. I should pray only that my anxiety be given peaceful outlets, that I might be the means to a peace that I myself do not feel.

“Go forth and spread the gospel by every means possible,” said Saint Francis to his followers. “If necessary, use words.”

God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him—to find him—does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All too often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.

The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse.

Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance.

One must learn to be in unknowingness without being proud of it.

God’s absence is always a call to his presence. Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other.

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. And not simply glimpsed—because certainly revelation is available outside of dogma; indeed all dogma, if it’s alive at all, is the result of revelation at one time or another—but gathered in. 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.

” someone who all too often forgets that it is much more important to assert and lay claim to the God that you believe in rather than forever drawing the line at the doctrine you don’t.

Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine. —H. J. IWAND

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

It is not belief. Belief has objects—Christ was resurrected, God created the earth—faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves “toward” God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul. Faith is the word “faith” decaying into pure meaning.

And once you’re in, once you’ve turned at all to God, then you are stuck with the language and rituals of whatever faith you know. Like it or not, religion rises between the man of God—or the man who would be of God if he could believe in him—and his death.

You can’t really know a religion from the outside, and you can’t simply “re-create” it to your liking. That is to say, you can know everything about a religion—its history, iconography, scripture, etc.—but all of that will remain intellectual, mere information, so long as your own soul is not at risk. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.

“you can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general” (George Lindbeck), and that the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge and experience of the all-too-temporal symbols and language of a particular religion.

There is an analogue with poetry here: you can’t spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.

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?

Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you.

I feel your futures opening out from you, and in those futures I know my own. I will be with you. I will comfort you in your despair and I will share in your joy. 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.

But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls.

You must let go of all conception of what eternity is, which means letting go of who you are, in order to feel the truth of eternity and its meaning in your life—and in your death. *

The task is not to “believe” in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it. Perception is not projection: we are not meant to project our experience of this life into another, nor are we meant to imagine, by means of the details of this life (which is the only resource we have for imagining), some impossible beyond. Life is not life without an afterlife, and there is no afterlife beyond the life we treasure and suffer and feel slipping from us moment by moment.

“If you are searching for God,” Pascal says, “then you have found him.”

Is it an achievement to reach a point at which I trust that the meaning, which I do not feel, is there, a condition that elsewhere in this book I have called faith? Or should I reach the end of an effort like this, having felt acutely the end of a life like mine (both intensely devoted and terminally confused, haunted and inhabited by a God of grief, of love, of absence, of always), with more certainty, more assurance that I am loved by God, some freedom from these cracks that open in my brain, rifts splitting right down to the bright abyss that is, finally, devoid of any meaning but the one I give it?

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.