He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

by Christian Wiman

WHEN I LEFT COLLEGE and set out to be a poet I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever. That’s just how I phrased it: live forever. It seemed to me the only noble ambition, and its fumes were evident in my contempt for the lesser aims I sniffed out in other writers. It was, I suppose, a transparent attempt to replace the soul with the self—for all the talk of the “extinction of personality,” I suspect there is no artist who does not cling to the belief that something essential of himself inheres in his art—and it was the first casualty of Christianity for me.

Nothing survives, I suddenly realized. Dante, Virgil, even sweet Shakespeare, whose lines will last as long as there are eyes to read him, will one day find that there are no eyes to read him.

As a species, we are a microscopic speck of existence, which, I have full faith, will one day thrive without us.

What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting?

When you are ending, it can seem like everything is, and the last task of some lives is to let the world go on being the world they once loved. But what song—or what but song—can contain that tangle of pain and praise?

Poetry itself—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger—thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been.

Ego is a tricky business in art.

Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.

Fame is the common currency of American cultural life, even among people and institutions who profess to have scorn for it.

have required great order in my habits to counteract the great disorder in my mind.

“Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”)

It has been my own experience that the reason why there are no atheists in foxholes, so to speak, is not because of the roar of death and destruction that makes a person terrified, but because when one is truly confronted with one’s own end, everything goes icily quiet. (James Kugel writes well about this.) You don’t turn to God in a crisis because you are afraid, at least not primarily. You turn to God because, for once, all that background chatter in your brain, all that pandemonium of blab, ceases, and you can hear—and what some of us hear in those instances is a still, small voice.

It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.

The eyes with which you are reading these words are formed from matter and energy that had its origin in an unimaginably massive and mysteriously creative “bang” almost fourteen billion years ago.