Poet Christian Wiman.
Poet Christian Wiman found faith when he fell in love at 37, and at 39 was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Spiritual Director Dr Frances Mackay reflects on his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer - in which he grapples with how to seek God amidst all of life’s vicissitudes and uncertainties - and how his search for an authentic faith has had a powerful impact on her own faith journey.
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:
With these four lines of poetry Christian Wiman begins and ends My Bright Abyss. In ending the four lines with a colon, he seems to be suggesting that what follows in prose is what he couldn’t say in poetry. In the Preface he writes, ‘I crave, I suppose, the poetry and the prose of knowing ... To experience grace is one thing: to integrate it into your life is quite another.’ (p.4) I am reminded of EM Forster’s words in Howards End: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion ... live in fragments no longer’. Only connect the prose and the passion, the prose and the poetry, the head and the heart of knowing.
Live in fragments no longer. Interestingly, Wiman describes this book as a mosaic, a bringing together fragments written over a period of years while he struggled with his cancer diagnosis and treatment. Not that he focusses on his illness, but he does admit that without it he probably would not have written a book about his search for faith.
I first heard about Christian Wiman when Tim Winton named him and Thomas Merton as two writers who had profoundly influenced him. Shortly after, a directee brought me a copy of My Bright Abyss to see what I thought of it. Was the universe telling me something? From the four opening lines above I was hooked. But more about that later.
Wiman presents himself as a modern believer seeking an authentic faith in a secular age. In this quest he finds inspiration in Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the great German theologian who was killed in a Nazi prison and who said: ‘...The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God.’ (p. 61).
That was not the religion or God he grew up with. Born in 1966 into a small community of Southern Baptist charismatic believers in western Texas, it wasn’t until he went to college that he met his first unbeliever and, after reading Nietzsche, abandoned his childhood faith. He went on to become a poet, translator, essayist and editor of a prestigious poetry journal. He later described these post-college years as a period of ‘bookish atheism’ in which he sought to meet his spiritual needs through literature. What brought him back to faith was falling deeply in love at 37. Then barely 2 years later on his 39th birthday he learns that he has a rare, aggressive, probably fatal cancer. The sequence is important. ‘It was human love that awakened divine love,’ he said. In an interview he added, ‘I was led to God by joy, but led to words, you might say, by grief’.
It is more than 20 years since that diagnosis and, after years of invasive, painful treatment, he is now in remission. He is a lecturer at Yale Divinity School, running again and the author of numerous books, including several volumes of poetry. My Bright Abyss, published in 2013, was written during the three years following his diagnosis and during gruelling treatment.
Wiman has said he writes every day to stop going crazy, but that he could go months, even years without writing poetry. He says you spend years learning the craft but poems are not at your disposal. They are grace. Significantly, after attending church for the first time for almost two decades, and after several years of not being able to write poetry, he came home and quickly wrote ‘Any Riven Thing’. [1]
The poem begins:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sings his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes.
‘sings his being simply by being/the thing it is’. These words may remind us of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘As Kingfishers catch Fire’, but there are differences. I find myself noticing the ‘goes’ with its multiple meanings. And ‘belonging’. Belonging to creation, not the other way round. And of course, ‘every riven thing he’s made’. Riven is a beautiful word but also carries meanings of being cleft, split, usually violently. I remember the words from the Gospel of Thomas that gave me goosebumps when I first heard them: ‘When you raise the stone I am there; when you cleave the wood, I am there.’ Or the old hymn, ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me...’ which also refers to the riven side of Christ.
The poem concludes:
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.
Rivenness – where grief and grace flow together.
My Bright Abyss is more meditation than memoir. Life fragments are interleaved with philosophical and theological reflections, and extracts from writers who have influenced him. To my mind this is not a self-indulgent confession but an attempt to transcend, and at the same time remain true to his experience, always seeking a deeper way of knowing through writing – a way of narrating ‘a life implying, imploring God’. Writing is theology. Writing is prayer.
Writing is also a way of companioning others. In a 2009 interview with Jessica Crispin, Wiman said:
I have no illusions about adding to sophisticated theological thinking. But I think there are a ton of people out there who are what you might call unbelieving believers, people whose consciousness is completely modern and yet who have this strong spiritual hunger in them. I would like to say something helpful to those people.[2]
And in My Bright Abyss he says, ‘Experience means nothing until our hard-won meanings are internalised and catalysed within the lives of others’ (p.162). He never writes just for himself. He also generously acknowledges the other voices who have shaped, or have been catalysts for him.
Doubt has been a significant part of Wiman’s journey, as it surely must be for many modern believers. The recent film Conclave certainly struck a chord in its exploration of uncertainty and doubt as a spiritual pathway to authenticity. Remember Cardinal Lawrence’s homily where he said, ‘Certainty is the sin we should fear most.’
Wiman is not guilty of that sin. It needs to be said, though, that his doubt is not about the existence of God – the subtitle of his book, Meditation of a Modern Believer, makes that clear. It is more about our capacity to respond to God and the form that might take. In other words, faith.
Doubt is an essential dynamic in an evolving faith journey. In words reminiscent of Meister Eckhart, he says, ‘Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms’ (p. 61).
If doubt is pervasive in human experience, the search for something to believe in is also very widespread, as this next poem suggests. Although it isn’t in the book, I have chosen to include it for the glimpse it gives of the author’s humour and generosity of spirit.
All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
elsewhere
my beautiful, credible friends.
He may have gently mocked some of the trendy beliefs embraced by his friends, but he describes those who hold them as ‘beautiful’ and ‘credible’, not credulous. He is one of them in his seeking, but profoundly separated by the cosmic proportions of what is at stake for him:
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
elsewhere...
The poignancy of that ‘elsewhere’.
Authentic faith challenges us to face reality, not to try to escape from it. The inner reality of our wounds and limitations as well as the external slings and arrows of fortune that come our way. Life is contingency – that is, subject to chance. In his words,
‘Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life ... [It] is the mutable and messy process of our lives, rather than any fixed mental product’ (p.17)... To say that one has to live with uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute we begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone (p.72).
And this brings us to another core theme in this book – the provisionality of anything we can say about God. These three interrelated themes – uncertainty, contingency, provisionality – interweave through the narrative.
For Wiman, Christ too is contingency. A sometimes consoling, sometimes disturbing presence in the vicissitudes of life. Always aware of our capacity for self-deception, he says that we can become comfortable with a distant, hazy God and a Christ we have fashioned in our own image, because they ask less of us. Christ, though, can be a disturbing presence, piercing our projections and illusions, compelling us to confront what we would prefer to ignore. He says:
Christ is always being remade in the image of man [sic], which means his reality is being deformed to meet human needs. A deeper truth, though, is that... there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. (p. 11) ... Christ, though, is a shard of glass in the gut. Christ is God crying, I am here, and not only in what exalts or uplifts you, but here in what appals, offends, and degrades you ... To walk through the fog of God to the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how “ungodly” that clarity turns out to be. (p. 121)
It has been a daunting, yet rewarding struggle to try to do justice to the richness and complexity of this book – and to my response to it. I have been torn between trying to suggest some sort of overview, and lingering with some pithy poetic phrase or brief paragraph that could have yielded enough to fill up a book, let alone this reflection.
I ask myself, how it is that a book that stresses the ‘tenuousness and precariousness of faith’ leaves me feeling somehow more grounded in my own faith journey.
Is it his search for authenticity – seeking God in the lived reality of his life with all its uncertainties as well as its consolations, and at the same time not taking himself too seriously?
Is it his scrupulous honesty in confronting his own illusions, limitations and doubts – and seeking to integrate them into a faith narrative?
Is it his perseverance in seeking meaning in the roller coaster experience of living with a painful and potentially fatal illness – where it is never a matter of why this is happening, but how it might bear fruit in a life available to others?
Is it his use of reading and writing as a spiritual practice to help him be present to his own life and to offer companionship to others? Is it his capacity to connect the prose and the passion – to find the poetic in the prosaic and to share that in – what is for me such graced language?
Is it his interweaving of cataphatic and apophatic approaches to the life of faith? His path might reflect the via negativa and apophatic way of unknowing, and yet he has stressed in interviews that emptiness or nothingness is not the goal. God might speak in silence and absence, but he feels drawn to find the poetry of presence in his own life and to share it with others. He remarks, ‘... God’s absence is always a call to presence. Abundance and destitution are two facets of the face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other’. (p.112).
I find myself returning to those lines with which he begins and ends the book:
My God my bright abyss
Into which all my longing will not go
I have asked myself why these words have had such a powerful impact on me. Why a seemingly impersonal image, ‘my bright abyss’, called forth such a profound visceral response of recognition, love and surrender. And ten years or so after first reading them, those two lines can still gather me to a place of prayer when I am feeling scattered. Somehow these paradoxical words offer both infinite spaciousness and containment, bringing together polarities of light and darkness, joy and grief, presence and absence, abundance and destitution, healing and wounding.
Two spiritual directors have now asked me about the line, ‘into which all my longing will not go’. In both cases, I didn’t get very far beyond wondering if they were suspecting resistance. I now believe it is far less about resistance and far more about continuing to respond to an intense longing that is beyond any words and images he (and I) could use to contain it.
Once more I come to the edge of all I know
And believing nothing believe in this.
Like Christian Wiman, I must find a way of placing a full stop for now – albeit provisionally.
This is a slightly edited version of a talk Dr Mackay gave at The Well on 12 October. The Well provides an online opportunity to drink deeply from the Living Water offered by the mystics and poets. These sessions consist of a reading, a 20-minute meditation, and a talk in which the speaker reflects on how a mystic or poet has been a source of Living Water in their lives. See the talk here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FqQpT5Be5dQwZZSfS-Uozn8F8qwE7_3f?usp=sharing
The next meeting of The Well will be on Sunday 9 November 7.30pm-8.30pm (AEDT), via zoom, when Philip Carter will be reflecting on how 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich has nourished his faith. For more details and the zoom link see: Events — Living Water
References
[1] onbeing.com, downloaded 4 June 2025.
[2] poetryfoundation.org, downloaded 4 June, 2025