He Held Radical Light Quotes

“It’s almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it. The resistance is not practical—how will I make money, can I live with the straitened circumstances, etc.—but existential: Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself within it? Reluctant writers, reluctant ministers, reluctant teachers—these are the ones whose lives and works can be examples. Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it. “The impeded stream is the one that sings.” (Wendell Berry)”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“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.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“The hunger that gives rise to art must be greater than what art can satisfy.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“I don’t mean to sound mystical, except inasmuch as there is a persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence, which art both derives from and sustains. This mystery is not, in any ultimate sense, explicable to anyone, but it is available to everyone who will not actively resist those moments when the self and all it suffers are finished—again, in both senses of the term. It may happen in art, your own or that of others. It may happen in love, grand or minor. It may happen at any moment in life when, “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy” (Wordsworth), we cease to be ourselves and become, paradoxically, more ourselves. Our souls.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“No, the casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“How stale our spiritual language can sometimes seem in the face of a rare, clear spirit.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“Hope is not hope until all ground for hope is lost, to paraphrase Marianne Moore.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“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.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

“One of art’s functions is to give form to feelings that would otherwise remain inchoate and corrosive, to give us a means whereby we can inhabit our fears and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”
― Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art