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Christian Wiman QUOTES

Christian Wiman QUOTES

41 " My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

42 " 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

43 " Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

44 " I am so glad To come accidentally upon My self at the end of a tortuous road And have learned with surprise that God Unworshipped withers to the Futile One. —PATRICK KAVANAGH, FROM “AUDITORS IN "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

45 " How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How many women who are not mothers spend years mothering some mysteriously wounded man? How many apparently strong and successful men seek out love like a kind of topical balm they can apply to their wounded bodies and egos when they have withdrawn from combat? Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ’s weakness equals a supernatural strength. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

46 " When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities—a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism—nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

47 " 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. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

48 " Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. "

― Christian Wiman

49 " For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God "

― Christian Wiman , Every Riven Thing: Poems

50 " 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. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

51 " 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. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

52 " this consciousness I’m describing is gendered (and I think it is), it is clearly feminine. 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. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

53 " I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

54 " One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

55 " Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

56 " if he loved his life so much, how could he be happy that it was ending so early? The answer, I think, lies in that dynamic of life and death that I’ve just described, that capacity of dying into the life that one has loved rather than falling irrevocably away from it. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

57 " I listen to a radio segment about scientists measuring the radioactive decay after such large-scale catastrophes as September 11 or the 2003 tsunami in Indonesia. It turns out that nuclear decay, which is, if not a constant, as close to such a thing as we can get, inexplicably increases after these events. As if contingent matter echoed or shadowed or even shared our sufferings (and our joys?). As if creation itself cried out with us. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

58 " 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. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

59 " God in these terms might seem for some people deeply troubling (not to mention heretical), but I find it a comfort. It is akin to the notion of God entering and understanding—or understanding that there could be no understanding (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)—human suffering. If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God cannot be a half measure. He can’t float over the chaos of pain and particles in which we’re mired, and we can’t think of him gliding among our ancestors like some shiny, sinless superhero. "

― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

60 " 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