123
" What does faith mean, finally, at this late date? I often feel that it means no more than, and no less than, faith in life- in the ongoingness of it, the indestructibility, some atom-by-atom intelligence that is and isn't us, some day-by-day and death-by-death persistence insisting on a more-than-human hope, some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with eyes to see it, love.... and I feel that to be faithful to her, faithful to this person that I loved as much as I have ever loved anyone, I must believe in the scope and momentum of her life, not the awful and anomalous instant if her death. In truth, it is not difficult at all. Nor is the other belief- or instinct, really- that occurs simultaneously: that her every tear was wiped away, that God looked her out of pain, that in the book of an eye the world opened its tenderest interiors, and let her in. "
― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
127
" We are each of us—every single one of us—meant to be a lens for truths that we ourselves cannot see. “The system cannot include the systematizer,” Kierkegaard once said, a clunky but accurate formulation of a problem that applies even to people who don’t have a philosophical bone in their bodies. Our lives burn up, and our minds within them, and all that we have sought so hard to retain in art or durable projects or familial memory. But to live in faith is to live toward a truth that we can but dimly sense, if at all, and to die in faith is to leave an afterimage whose dimensions and meanings we could never even have guessed at. Something of us—something most us, and least us—is saved and made available for others. This is as true of the politician as it is of the poet, as true of the teacher or the preacher, the mother or the father, as it is of a Danish philosopher. "
― Christian Wiman , My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer