#bright abyss

[nocturnalpicnic]

the bright abyss michael pontieri 34x55cm 2017

[viciousminuteshour]

'Bright Abyss,' A Poem By Karen Mary Berr, Read By RM.

[preciseandtowering]

Best Book Read This Year

The calendar year 2014 was not kind to my reading habits. There were other, rather large, events that obtruded into the stack of stuff I had aimed to read, even during the “off” months of the summer. Mind, those big events were incredibly more significant to my life and the loss of reading was not unwelcome.

Thus, my mediocre-sized list of Books Read in 2014: David Bentley Hart’s penetrating The Experience of God, Dennis Bergkamp’s story Stillness & Speed, Francis Spufford’s arresting Unapologetic, Nate Wilson’s wonderful Empire of Bones, Seamus Heaney’s gentle collection Human Chain. All of these were very worthwhile books.

What I enjoyed most, what most astounded me, what was used by God most deeply in this year of tribulation was the pairing of two books by Christian Wiman, books which seem to me best viewed as companion pieces: Wiman’s prose meditations called My Bright Abyss and his collection of poems Every Riven Thing.

I won’t rehearse Wiman’s story of departure from Christianity and his return to it following his diagnosis with a rare form of cancer. It is that story, however, that irradiates these books with such urgency for me. His experience with cancer, his insight into what’s typically seen as “the modern condition,” his skill with the English language, and his sheer peculiarity of Christian belief made these two books a refreshing drink in the midst of a year in the desert. I keep coming back to them.

So much so that I assigned My Bright Abyss to my senior systematic theology students as a pastoral response paper. Some did well in hearing Wiman’s profession and speaking into his life of suffering and doubt and faith, some not so well. This was difficult because Wiman’s language is so different from the commonly accepted modes of expression in Christian evangelicalism; not only does his personal experience shape his speech but his training as a poet shifts his language away from easily-tracked propositions. Listening becomes hard at that point. But, for me, the effort of trying to hear someone unlike myself express his deepest pain and hope in fresh language that he can own has been a tremendous blessing. Just because a person refuses to phrase his beliefs about God in traditional language—or even in “biblical” language—does not necessarily justify our judgment of that person’s “salvation.”

One of the most prominent instances of this sort of conflict comes in what is one of the great themes of the two books: that of God as (for lack of a better phrase) “ground of being.” Conservative theology hears only echoes of Paul Tillich here and Wiman then receives the corresponding judgment. When this comes to the reader along with dashes of Moltmann and the more radical-sounding Bonhoeffer, the conservative reader often ends his effort at understanding Wiman on his own terms. Yet this theme has been one of the biggest, most orthodox graces I’ve received this year.

The prose book begins and ends with the same stanza, of a poem that Wiman says he cannot finish: “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”. For those who are trained to suspect any vague, formless God and to demand “contours” (like systematic theology professors), this talk of God as bright abyss seems, at first, far too convenient.

But this has to be paired with the poetry, especially the title poem “Every Riven Thing.” The poem concerns God and his relation to the world, that God is in and with and under every thing, yet is not Himself any of those things. Attending to that world, really seeing every thing that God has made will give one glimpses of God Himself: they “sing his being simply by being the thing it is” and “bring him near” since “God goes belonging” to them.

Every thing is, now after the Fall into darkness, sin, suffering, and death, “riven,” broken open for its insides to be seen, including Wiman himself. But if we meditate upon those things, upon ourselves, in this riven condition we will not find the typical abyss which is emptiness, darkness, black on the inside. Instead we find, as Wiman did in his poem “From a Window,” “some excess / of life to which a man seems witness, / that life is not the life of men.” It is as if it is this broken condition of everything, the sorrow that is admixed with the joys of life, that allows us to see more clearly that God is at the beginning and end of all existence, that He is the heart of the world, and thus that we and the universe have nothing, are nothing, that we did not receive.

Cancer for Wiman, and for me this year in a much less experiential manner, has revealed the total dependence of all living things upon God and his infinitely perfect being, as the “fountain of life.” Even in the seasons of life where searing, burning suffering strips away all sorts of beliefs, even much conscious thought, this realization of the gifted-ness of all life, even of “the mind that makes him go” can be defined as “faith.” No, this isn’t creedal confession but it is an essential biblical affirmation of the doctrine of creation, one that is organically inseparable from the doctrine of redemption. “Life” has been seen, by many theologians, as the central theme of all of Scripture and redemptive history and Wiman is getting at something very important here. At least, very important for me this year.

Because, with Wiman, we should see that wind-blasted tree, that giggling child, that cancer-ridden loved one and realize the gift that each one is, realize that God’s light and Life stands in and with each one, that there is Logos behind it all. And then we will say, again with Wiman, “and that is where the joy came in.”