My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

by Christian Wiman

Radical change remains a possibility within us right up until our last breath. The greatest tragedy of human existence is not to live in time, in both senses of that phrase.

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

And still: some who cry the name of Christ Live more remote from love Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated

Turning inward turned me outward too, to a world made radiant by my ability to believe in it.

To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.

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.

the oldest sin in the Book: intellectual pride.

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.