Christian Wiman
I made a new acquaintance this past week. We were introduced via a No Small Endeavor podcast. I expect we will become good friends. Consider these citations from the interview. You might decide to become his friend also.
- …when you’re facing death, there’s not much left to lose, and that opens up possibilities for intimacy, letting go of our masks or letting go of our pretense or whatever it might be.
- Richard Wilbur has a poem where he looks at a stream, describes it through seven stanzas beautifully, and then he says,
‘joy’s trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy.’ - I’ve been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there’s a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.
And so, I’m often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I’m not bored, I’m often I just disagree so profoundly with what’s being said. And I also feel that most churches don’t allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews. - I’m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry.
- ‘Reading Pascal in Quarantine’
I love only those who seek with lamentation.
I love only those whose lives events some timeless entire.
To weep is to see.
To be is to bow.
I love only those who know a whole new naivete. - His book “My Bright Abyss“” is on my reading list.
David Brooks
I also had a conversation with my friend David Brooks this week. Well, actually I read his latest NYT article “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be” . I really did feel like we had a conversation. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Maybe David could be your friend also.
- When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.
- When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.
- At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.
In his book “My Bright Abyss,” the poet Christian Wiman writes, “Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.” - It hit me with the force of joy. Happiness is what we experience as we celebrate the achievements of the self — winning a prize. Joy is what we feel when we are encompassed by a presence that transcends the self. We create happiness but are seized by joy — in my case by the sensation that I had just been overwhelmed by a set of values of intoxicating spiritual beauty. Psychologists have a name for my state on that mountaintop: moral elevation. I wanted to laugh, run about, hug somebody. I was too inhibited to do any of that, of course, but I did find some happy music to listen to during my smiling walk down the mountain.
- I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life. The best moments are giddily romantic — when you are astounded at the great blessing of God’s love and overcome by the desire to do the things that will delight him. It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves.
- When religion is seen as belief, the believer lives on a continuum between belief and doubt. But when religion is seen as a longing, the believer lives on the continuum between intensity and apathy. That’s the continuum I live on these days. I’ve gone whole months when God may or may not have been walking beside me, but I can’t bring myself to care. Other desires, chiefly the desire for achievement and prowess, crowd out the higher desire for contact with the divine.
OK I admit there are more than a few thoughts today, but it is important to share conversations you’ve had with good friends.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY