by Christian Wiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 192 pages
I recently came through an unexpected medical crisis, and Christian Wiman’s book spoke to me in myriad ways. As a poet, some of his thoughts are abstract and require careful unpacking by the reader. I tore through it on the first reading, so enthralled was I by the beauty of the language and the raw truth of the thoughts. I’m reading it again, more slowly and meditatively. A friend wrote me that “My Bright Abyss” is like a gourmet chocolate bar — it’s best when we eat a small amount and then sit back in wonder and save the next bit for later.
Wiman unpacks the Wallace Stevens phrase “Death is the mother of beauty.” It is our awareness of the ephemeral nature of life that sharpens our awareness of poignancy, tenderness, vibrancy, and so many other non-tangibles that make life worthwhile. Rather than rush through life, squeezing as many experiences as possible into our limited frame of existence, Stevens in his poem “Sunday Morning” calls us to savor the moments, to slow down and appreciate them rather than move quickly into the next like some kind of event glutton. Wiman concurs with this approach to life, but it became harder, he says, when he “found himself staring through the actual lens of death.” He did not know if what he had inside was enough to carry him through the abyss. I know that feeling.
Wiman writes that he “craves both the poetry and the prose of knowing,” and his implication is that it is his chronic, incurable cancer that has driven him to make an effort to integrate artistic inspiration with the more pragmatic need to articulate one’s faith in the midst of life’s capricious uncertainty. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all teeter on the edge of that abyss of uncertainty every moment of our lives. Wiman’s gift to us is to open the possibility that the abyss might be a place where we can encounter the Divine in a deeper way, if we do not turn away from it in horror.
In the first hours of Feb. 8, 2013, I lay on a cold table waiting for a cardiac catheterization to begin. Whatever the doctors found would determine what had to be done next to save my life. It’s the one time when I have confronted my own physical vulnerability in such an immediate way. I wondered if my faith was strong enough to sustain me through whatever happened. I prayed for evidence that God was with me, but was mostly met with silence. It occurred to me later, however — and Wiman has helped me express this — that the very fact that I was seeking God at such a time is evidence of … something. Perhaps it was the “saving otherness” to which Wiman refers, or the “still small voice” in Isaiah. In any case, I refuse to believe that I was alone.
“My Bright Abyss” will be one of those books that I return to again and again. Christian Wiman has helped me see that we are not alone in our aloneness, that God’s silence is also part of the relationship. Without the silence, we would not experience so sharply “the meetings that we recognize.” And, as Wiman says, “of them faith is made and sustained … .” And that is just one of the many insights Wiman offers.
LESLIE A. KLINGENSMITH is pastor of St. Matthew Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Md.
