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My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer QUOTES

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer QUOTES

141 " unobserved "

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

142 " If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. "

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

143 " You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure. "

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

144 " Life is short, we say, in one way or another, but in truth, because we cannot imagine our own death until it is thrust upon us, we live in a land where only other people die. "

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

145 " Of course I say all this as someone who gets so bored in church that I often recite poems to myself in my head, someone an interviewer once called (approvingly, I think) an “atheist Christian,” someone who all too often forgets that 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. "

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

146 " It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him. "

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

147 " faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you—not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. "

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

148 " Silence is the language of faith. Action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation. "

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

149 " Why should existence be arranged so that our alienation from God is a given and we must forever fight our way not simply toward what he is but toward the whole notion that he is? "

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

150 " I should never pray to be at peace in my belief. I should pray only that my anxiety be given peaceful outlets, that I might be the means to a peace that I myself do not feel. "

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

151 " Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable. This is as true in life as it is in art. "

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

152 " But faith is not a new life in this sense; it is the old life newly seen. "

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

153 " All love abhors habit, and poetry is a species of love. "

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

154 " Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not. I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world—directly, immediately—yet I want nothing more. "

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

155 " In other words, we need both the past and the future to make our actions and emotions and sensations mean anything in the present. "

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

156 " Death is the only lens for true transcendence, but paradoxically, transcendence is possible only when we cease being conscious of our own deaths. "

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

157 " How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? It is one thing to encourage contemplation, prayer, quiet spaces in which God, or at least a galvanizing consciousness of his absence (“Be present with your Want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne put it), can enter the mind and heart. But the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that this consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time? "

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

158 " What happens is some mysterious resonance between thing and language, mind and matter, that reveals—and it does feel like revelation—a reality beyond the one we ordinarily see. "

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

159 " Something in you must remain in you, voiceless even as you voice your deepest faith, doubt, fear, dreams … "

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

160 " Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person. "

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