About my bright abyss

Mostly quotes from Christian Wiman's memoir

One of the stand out books for me in 2023 was My Bright Abyss - Meditation of a Modern Believer. It’s hard to categorise what exactly it is, but it is a kind of memoir by poet Christian Wiman, about his coming to faith while facing a terminal (and seemingly extremely painful) cancer. I wouldn’t endorse every view in it (and the word “modern” in the title might give hints as to why, as I don’t believe the Christian faith needs any modernising), or all of his theological leanings, but what he shares is fascinating. That and there’s always encouragement in the stories of people who have found and believed Christianity to be true and beautiful and sense-making and life-giving, when the world would try to tell us it is none of those things. The author is evidently widely-read and intelligent (oh to spend your life reading and writing). It’s in my pile of books to go around again, because some books you feel you read too fast the first time through to absorb all the goodness. But from my first read, here are some of the more conventionally Christian quotes (there is much also he says about art and poetry that is worth quoting).

Nearer the end of the book the author says of his coming to belief in God:

Despite all that I have gone through, and despite all that I now face, I am still struck by the singular nature of the pain in the weeks after my diagnosis. It was not simply the fact itself searing through all the circumstances of my life, nor was it, as many people might suspect, the full impact of meaninglessness, the arbitrary nature of our existence, the utter illusion of God. No, it was an excess of meaning for which I had no context. It was the world burning to be itself beyond my ruined eyes. It was God straining through matter to make me see, and to grant me the grace of simple praise. (pg 156)

The paragraphs from closer to the beginning I found compelling (I think the first can apply to all forms of human love, not just romantic relationships which have a more formal ending than some):

Love does not die without our assent, though often (usually) that assent has been given unconsciously long before we come to give it consciously. Love is not only given by God, it is sustained by him. There is a constant interplay between divine and human love. Human love has an end, which is God, who makes it endless. (pg 29)

***

What you must realise, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester in egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it. (pg 29)

There was something illuminating for me in this next paragraph. It’s so subtle it’s hard to explain why, as I have always (well, mostly) prayed “thy will be done” when asking God for things, and believe and would say that nothing comes to pass apart from God’s will. But still there are dreams that went unfulfilled and circumstances I wish could be otherwise, and something about leaning into Christ and saying as much about what is and isn't - right now (not just about future things I’m requesting) -instead of just enduring it or trying to make the most of it against my own wishes was helpful:

There is another way. It is the way of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading for release from his fate, abandoned by God. It is something you cannot learn as a kind of lesson simply from reading the text. Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience. It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours”. This is in no way resignation, for Christ still had to act. We all have to act, whether it’s against the fears of our daily life or against the fear that life itself is in danger of being destroyed. And when we act in the will of God, we express hope it its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Vaclav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs. (pg 166)

And for something a little less conventional, a quote about “glimmerings”, which if you have read here a while will know are a fixation of mine. Though I am still mulling on this one: 

“Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of,” writes Seamus Heaney, an interesting—and, I think, accurate—thought, if the word “glimmerings” is read as both literal and metaphorical: the soul is not simply the agent that does the seeing (the entity to which metaphorical glimmerings are given), it is in some way the things that are seen (the world that glimmers); or, perhaps more accurately, the soul is the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality—or the self and other selves—possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion. (pg 93)

Image by dre2uomaha0 from Pixabay