Christian Wiman is both a magnificent poet and one of the foremost poets of the Christian faith. For 10 years he edited Poetry magazine. Now at Yale Divinity School, he is the author, editor or translator of more than 15 books, including “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” a modern classic of religious reflection.
I spoke to Mr. Wiman about his journey from faith to atheism and back; about living with an incurable cancer and being on the verge of death more than once; and about why, after the “animal terror” he felt when he was first told of his diagnosis more than 20 years ago, he no longer fears death. He talked about how, in the midst of great suffering, he experienced the presence of God. In his words, “the world was lit up.”
Mr. Wiman talked about why poetry is an integral part of his life, about the relationship between his poetry and his faith and why art is better at theology than theology is. He spoke about awe and joy, why certitude can cause God to flee and why the crucifixion of Jesus has so much meaning in his own life. He admitted to me that he’s never heard a convincing explanation for why a good God allows the innocent to suffer. And while he acknowledged being tired and longing for a sense of rest, he talked openly about his intense hunger for God.
My editor, Aaron Retica, joined me for the interview. The conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is the seventh in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of Christian faith.
1. Fundamentals
Peter Wehner: Can you summarize your faith journey, from growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist home in West Texas to leaving your faith when you described yourself as an “ambivalent atheist” to finding a very different faith after you married in 2004 and received your cancer diagnosis in 2005?
Christian Wiman: I grew up in a world that was completely saturated with religion. Everybody I knew was Christian. They might have been in different factions, they might have believed that they were the only ones going to heaven, but everybody was still a Christian. And I was so immersed within it. It was the water that I was swimming in. My family was conventionally Southern Baptist. But my mother was and is charismatic, and I was surrounded by charismatic elements, and they existed in the church. So it was intense at times. And then I went off to college at Washington and Lee, where I had my first experience of meeting people who had quite different beliefs. And it was a shock.
A bigger shock was reading Nietzsche. Somebody recommended his writing to me, and it blew my mind. I still find Nietzsche quite a large presence in my life — a different kind of presence, and a helpful presence, actually. And then religion just fell away from me for 20 years. I had no thought of going to church. But if I look back at the things that I wrote during that time, I don’t see a big break between my work. It seems to me that it’s very evident that I was still pursuing God and God was pursuing me during that time.
I was moved to come back to religion because of love. I was 37, and I had not experienced that level of love before, of wanting such good for the other person that your own self isn’t as paramount as it was. We found ourselves saying little prayers at night before dinner even before we were married. They started as jokes, but then they became more serious. We got married very quickly, and then I got diagnosed with cancer very quickly. The doctors told me I had five years to live. So there was love and then there was suffering, hard on the heels of the love. The love led me to turn to God; the suffering led me to find a form for it.
Wehner: A lot of people fall in love and don’t find faith. What was it about falling in love that led you to faith?
Wiman: I had been in love before. But I had never experienced a love that wanted to be other, that wanted to be more. And that was the experience I had. It didn’t stop at the other person. It went through Danielle Chapman, my wife, and needed to be more. And it just baffled me for the longest time. I had no idea what it meant. But I did know enough, or she knew enough, to know it meant prayer. That seemed to be the only gesture that we could make that was beyond us. We hardly even knew what we were praying to.
Wehner: In an interview several years ago, you said, “There is something in Christianity that makes suffering sacred. It does give a meaning to suffering, even when we can’t understand it.” You cited Simone Weil, who believed the greatness of Christianity is not that it gives us a remedy for suffering, but it gives a use for it. In your words, “It puts suffering in a place. It gives a pattern — ‘the complete consort dancing together,’ as Eliot put it. It makes suffering part of the meaning of your life.” Can you elaborate on how Christianity gives meaning to suffering? In what ways does faith make suffering more tolerable or even sacred?
Wiman: Well, first of all, I would say it can give meaning to suffering, but it doesn’t necessarily. I hope in that interview I was talking about my own suffering, because the minute you move away from your own suffering and talk about other people’s, you’re likely to be speaking rot. You can’t tell someone who’s in the midst of suffering that there’s great meaning if they can just see it. It doesn’t do a bit of good. And some suffering is meaningless.
My own experience was that in the midst of great suffering I experienced the presence of Christ, and the world was lit up and my relationships with other people were lit up. It’s happened more than once in subsequent years. I take that to be a function of the fact that God is with us in suffering and that there can be a supernatural solidarity to suffering.
Years ago my daughter was going through a difficult time. I said something to her like what I just told you, and she said, “Well, I don’t want God with me. I want help.” And I thought: Well, that’s a fair response. But sometimes you don’t get help. You pray and you don’t get help, your friends don’t get help, and it’s baffling.
My own experience has been that that sense of supernatural solidarity is an enormous help. It makes you not alone in suffering. It’s not simply the sense that you have divine accompaniment, but the kind of love that suffering enables between other people. My cancer has returned more than a dozen times. On three of those occasions, it looked like I was going to die.
Three years ago was one of them. I had a clinical trial, and I had to go to Boston for a number of weeks. Because we still had our life in New Haven, my wife couldn’t come because she had to take care of the kids and do her job. So I had two longtime friends, who both came for weeks at a time. It was an extraordinary experience. Neither is Christian, but I felt the presence of Christ in our relationships like a flame. It seemed to me so real, and so full of meaning at such a desperate time. I felt grateful for it. I have no need for them to see that as Christ. I did not see a need to name that. But it was present for me.
2. Poetry and Faith
Wehner: That’s very moving. I now want to shift to the connection between faith and poetry. You’ve said, “Without the experience of poetry in my life, I doubt I’d have religious faith at all.” Does poetry allow you to access faith in a way that other things don’t?
Wiman: They’re intimately related. For years I lived only for poetry. I only wanted to write a great poem. That was my entire ambition. I organized my entire life around that and lived on nothing for years. And I had the sense that I would write this thing and it would complete something. I had this hunger, and poetry was going to answer that hunger.
It seems to me astonishing now that I didn’t know that that was an illusory ambition, but I didn’t. It seemed to me quite real. After some years, when I began finding a voice that was genuinely my own, I began having the experience of — well, Seamus Heaney describes letting a bucket down into a well and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing, and then, finally, something really deep comes up and you’re like, Whoa, where did that come from?
I started having the experience of poems showing me things that I didn’t know, and also me being not eradicated by them, but definitely suppressed. On the other side of the poem I didn’t really feel proud. I felt relieved that the poem had happened, but the poem felt in some way the most me and not me at the same time. So for years I would try to figure out what that was.
I wrote a lot of prose. All the prose that I have written comes out of poetry. Poetry shows me something, and then I’ll write prose for years, trying to figure out what it is that the poem has shown me. I would go through periods of long droughts. When I met Danielle, I was in the midst of a three-year drought when I hadn’t been able to write poems. And so I was sort of going nuts. An artist’s art becomes the way that they are in the world, the way that they endure the world and process their experience. If you take it away, it’s a problem.
For me, there’s a great analogy with faith in that faith is not something you have, usually; it’s something that has you. It comes unbidden. It’s not an accomplishment. So there’s been a big connection between writing poetry and having faith for me. And at times I have wished both would just leave me alone so that I can just live.
But after Danielle and I went to church one day, the first day we went back, I came home from that service having not written a poem in three years. I wrote “Every Riven Thing” in about an hour, and it’s a complicated formal poem. It was just there. And after that, I wrote almost a whole book of poems in basically no time at all. So it was like the floodgates had opened for me.
Aaron Retica: How do you think about the relationship between poetry and theology and language?
Wiman: I do believe that the “word,” lowercase, can express the “Word,” uppercase, that the two are bound together, that the lowercase word can be sacred because the uppercase Word exists. So I do take the act of poetic creation quite seriously. And I do think that when I’ve written the poems that are most mine, I’m getting a communication from God. Now, it may not do you any good, but it was genuine for me. I think it can be genuine for an awful lot of people with their own poems or reading poems. And it’s not necessarily a claim that one is a prophet or something. That is, I think that capacity exists in a lot of people.
Retica: Is it easy to stick up for God in the contemporary intellectual climate and in intellectual circles?
Wiman: Of course there’s a social tension between being a Christian and being an artist in intellectual culture. It’s easing somewhat because so many young people are returning to faith and so many serious people are also taking faith more seriously. It’s changed from 20 years ago when I first came out as a Christian, so to speak, when some of the reaction was pretty vitriolic and contemptuous.
I take great strength from people like Marilynne Robinson who are straightforward about their faith and are great artists. She’s somebody I respect enormously. The poet Fanny Howe, who died recently, was another one. She was incredibly important in my life. It meant a lot to me how fervently she believed and how much she could one day call herself an atheist. She used to tell me, “I wake up in the morning an atheist and go to bed a Christian, and then the next day it’s the same thing all over again.” So I think that’s part of it. But both of them stood up and said something.
On the other hand, Geoffrey Hill, a writer I very much admire, would never quite take the step. He was always ambivalent about where he stood, even though it’s an agony in his work. You can feel it. And I wish he could have.
When I was writing poems like “Every Riven Thing” that seemed to me these gifts and expressions of God, hard on the heels of those came some poems that seemed to me expressions of atheism: denial of any afterlife, denial of heaven. They were just as ruthless and hard as the poems that I had written in my second book, “Hard Night.” But they had a different tinge to them. The weird thing for me was they had the same feeling as “Every Riven Thing,” and I felt the same when I was writing them.
It was years later when I would really study the Book of Job and see the same thing enacted there, where the bet is that Job won’t curse God. My reading of that book is that he does curse God because he curses creation, he curses existence. It seems to me that if you curse your own existence and curse creation itself, you’re cursing God.
Job has spoken, and God gives him this mystical vision. In some way God not just allowed but approved of those curses. And somehow that’s part of faith, too, that kind of friction. Simone Weil says, “There are two atheisms, of which one is a purification of the notion of God,” which can be helpful. Years ago I said that sometimes God calls a person to unbelief so that faith can take new forms. I think faith is always trying to take new forms. A lot of people have to go through unbelief to get there.
Retica: You’ve said, “Art is so often better at theology than theology is.” What are you thinking about there?
Wiman: I think theology is always ex post facto. Some theologians turn to theology, presumably, because they have had some event in their lives which they need to explain. That may be far down the road. They may be writing about a specialized area of theology. But at some point in their lives, one hopes there was an event which led them to turn all their attention that way. But it’s after the fact. Art is not.
Art is the event itself. And even if it has its roots in a preceding event, the event of the art itself is itself a new event, a new occasion. And that original one gets transformed or transfigured or disclosed perhaps later. So I find that God is able to move through a work of art without getting stuck in the way that God does in theology. And art frees up the mind to feel the divine, to feel that instant of it, whereas theology, you’re always thinking, you’re always arguing with it, you’re always pausing to say, “What about this? What about that?” It’s not an experience itself. Now I love theology, as it happens. I’ve read a ton of it, and I’ve been greatly helped by theologians. But my deepest experience of God has been through art.
Wehner: What I think art offers to you, what I’ve learned in reading you, is that theology can systematize faith and reduce it to dogma and try to resolve paradoxes — to sort of nail God down. Art is a very different register. It expresses partial truths; it can hold contradictions. It leaves certain things unsaid. That combination of things strikes me as important for you. Does that ring true to you?
Wiman: Yeah, I think that’s true. I teach a course at Yale called Poetry and Faith. It’s a very successful course. I determine success by the fact that a lot of the students continue to read poetry afterward and a lot of students find themselves talking about faith in ways that they weren’t able to beforehand. It remains a presence in their lives. So that’s what I mean by success.
I didn’t plan this, but it’s certainly grown out of my own experience of poetry. What that course enables is for people to talk about these issues of extreme urgency, but also extreme inarticulacy. They have no language for it. Put it through the poem and suddenly you’re using the poem, talking about it philosophically, theologically, in all kinds of ways. Whereas if you just engaged at that level, it’d be bone on bone very quickly. You’d have disagreements and people asserting themselves. But having the work of art there makes all of that much more fluent. That’s certainly one way that it can act theologically without doing theology per se.
3. Certainty and Uncertainty
Wehner: You’ve said, “The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone.” What are your concerns about certitude, and what is it about certitude that you believe might cause God to flee?
Wiman: I think the biggest problem with certainty is that there is no such thing. Uncertainty is just what we’ve got to deal with. Augustine said: If you think that you have found God, it is not God. Maybe a better translation is: If you comprehend God, it is not God. And I think that’s a good way of thinking of it. The minute you are convinced that you have grasped something true about God, it dissolves in you. I think it’s what Fanny Howe was getting at.
We live in an uncertain world. I’ve been asked to speak at a gathering of physicists and people talking about uncertainty and the virtues of uncertainty. I remember getting the invitation and thinking, Well, it’s not a virtue, it just is. Uncertainty is just what we have to deal with.
It’s fascinating the uncertainty that has entered the physical world, the level of uncertainty in physics, where things exist only in probabilities. One of the people I’m going to be with at this conference is the physicist Marcelo Gleiser, whom I’ve followed for years. I love his work. He says the word “exist” is too strong a description for an electron because no one’s ever seen an electron. We only measure their trace and predict where they’re likely to be. I remember thinking when I first read that: Well, if the word “exist” can be too strong for a particle, then probably the word “exist” can be too weak for other elements of reality that we don’t know everything about — God, for instance.
The existence of God has a kind of uncertainty. When we say “God exists,” what in the world are we saying? That cannot be a certain phrase because we don’t know exactly what existence means. I realize you can hide your faith in these kind of word games. But there is a deep truth in the fact that uncertainty is all we have.
“From the place where we are right,” as the poet Yehuda Amichai says, “flowers will never grow / in the spring.” It becomes “hard and trampled / like a yard. / But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mole, a plow. / And a whisper will be heard in the place / where the ruined / house once stood.” I think that’s true.
You can see in the culture right now the kind of certitude that is hardened in American religion. It’s so rigid. And I think in some way, a life of faith entails a life of great flexibility and humility. I also meet a lot of people who are so open-minded and uncertain and have a kind of mystical unknowingness, but they’re aggressive with it. And so that becomes its own certainty. That’s the paradox.
There’s a great poem by Marianne Moore, “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers and the Like.” The poem ends, “The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. / Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best.” The passion for setting people right is an affliction.
Wehner: Let me now ask you about something you wrote in “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.” You said, “The only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute — and perhaps even annihilating — awe.” Annihilating awe is an evocative phrase. What did you mean by it?
Wiman: I think awe and joy are linked. I did an anthology of poems about joy. I was trying to figure out experiences of joy in my own life. Why did they go away? Why were they so few? So I do think that awe and joy are linked together. Rainer Maria Rilke, in one of the first lines of one of his “Duino Elegies,” says, “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”
If you look at the experiences in the Bible, whenever people experience the presence of God, it’s not some pacific, purely joyful experience. It is accompanied by terror. I think there’s a similarity with joy. I think our moments of joy can leave us befuddled and bereft, paradoxically.
There’s a wonderful end to a poem by Richard Wilbur called “Hamlen Brook.” He describes this beautiful scene, looking at Hamlen Brook, 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.” It’s a moment of complete fulfillment, but then on the other side of it, there’s an ache which suddenly nothing can satisfy.
C.S. Lewis said that a moment of joy makes us homesick for a home we didn’t know that we had. It’s a beautiful formulation. I think the sense is also an ache that for a moment our selves were annihilated and we felt our souls, these selves with which we go through our days and busy ourselves and trouble ourselves and seem always somehow peripheral to something in us that’s greater. Suddenly, all that gets burned away. And that’s a beautiful, saving experience. But it is also a terrifying experience. Because on the other side of it, you have to ask: Well, what is this life? Why am I living so muffled? What am I supposed to do now that I’ve had that moment of joy?
The theologian Jürgen Moltmann said, “Compassion is the other side of the living joy.” One of the questions you might ask is, “OK, I’m given this experience — why aren’t other people? I look out there and these people are suffering like hell. Why don’t they have the experience?” So it leads you to act in the world. But there should be something on the other side. Otherwise, joy can actually become corrosive, I think. It can actually become a kind of canker in you. It’s a moment that you don’t know how to integrate in your life and you don’t know how to live up to.
4. Wrestling With God
Wehner: You said that there’s no poet more companionable to you than the 17th-century Welsh poet George Herbert. His poems are full of arguments with God. Faith didn’t come easily to him; it doesn’t come easily to you. Yet it sustained him, and it seems to sustain you. As he was approaching death, Herbert wrote in “Joseph’s Coat,” “I live to shew his power” — his being God — “who once did bring / My joyes to weep, and now my griefs to sing.” Can you talk about why Herbert resonates with you and the meaning of Herbert’s line about joy and grief?
Wiman: The really sad thing about that is he wrote that poem when he was not yet 40. He died at 39. He felt himself growing old, and he was sick. I responded to Herbert when I first read him when I was probably 20 years old. I’ve read him all my life. But I really changed my reading of Herbert because my life seemed in some ways to echo his.
I got diagnosed with cancer at 39, and I had just fallen in love. Herbert had just fallen in love. He had just changed his life, moved from a failed political career to becoming a priest. And then he had tuberculosis. It all happened just like that. And so that radically changed the way that I read his poems. Those lines are exactly what I went through: my joys to weep and then my griefs to sing.
He has another beautiful poem called “Bitter-sweet,” which I love, because it expresses partly what we’ve been talking about, the sort of conflicted relationship that one has with faith and with God. The poem is very short. It goes:
Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.
I will lament and love at the same time. I think that’s a beautiful statement of what a life in faith means. I find him a very moving example.
Wehner: We’ll move from George Herbert to Jesus. You wrote in “My Bright Abyss”: “I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” You added, “I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life.” What is that meaning in your life, and who is Jesus to Chris Wiman?
Wiman: Well, I do have to say I am a Christian because of where I grew up. That’s inevitable. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia I’d probably be a Muslim. I think there is an element of chance in anybody’s religious life. I really like Paul Ricoeur’s definition of faith as “an accident transformed into a destiny through an ongoing choice.” I think that’s a good way of thinking about it.
The scandal of particularity is a phrase theologians use — the scandal being that if God is universal, how could Christ come into this one place at this one time, be born to this one woman, and what sense does that make?
I take that in very much the same way that I take that Ricoeur quote: There is an element of having grown up with Christianity, of it being the language that I know. The theologian George Lindbeck said that you’ve got a mother tongue, and you could learn a lot by learning other languages, but this is what you’ve got. If you’re going to get to any depth, this is where you’ve got to go. That’s a helpful way of thinking of how we end up in the religions we’re in.
I take that moment on the cross to be consistent with what I was saying before, that there is a supernatural solidarity in suffering. Theodicy — a defense of God’s goodness in view of the existence of evil — is the rock upon which Christianity founders. How can there be innocent suffering if God is all good? I’ve never read a convincing explanation. I do not think theodicy exists. I don’t think there can be an explanation. There can be works of art, like the Book of Job. And the Book of Job is probably the best thing I know that you could put in place of a theodicy. Reading it as a theodicy is completely wrong, but to put it in place of theodicy works very well.
I take the fact that God suffered — just as we suffer — in the form of Jesus to be not just a consolation but a great key to understanding what existence is. Pain is woven throughout creation. And it’s not just human creation; it’s woven throughout all of creation. So suffering seems to be a part of existence. And God entered that suffering. I take the God that Jesus cried out to on the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — to be exactly the same God that we cry out to. I don’t see them split. God is Jesus, and so Jesus is crying out to the same unknowingness, with the same unknowingness, the same passion, the same pain, that we do. And I do find that not just comforting, I find it true, that it accords with the truth. When I feel the world, when I feel my experience in the world, it feels true.
There’s a wonderful novel by Jon Fosse called “Septology.” The protagonist is an artist, and a Catholic, who’s lost his beloved wife. At one point he’s listed some theological things, just like I’ve just done, and then he stops himself and he says: That’s not it at all. I don’t think it’s true. I know it’s true. I think it is untrue, but I know it’s true.
That happens to me all the time. My thoughts tell me it’s not true. But my gut, which is how I’ve lived my life, how I have written my poems, how I’ve fallen in love, how I’ve done every single thing that’s mattered, tells me this is true.
Wehner: When I think about you, Chris, I think of Jacob, a figure in the Hebrew Bible who was known to have wrestled with God. Faith doesn’t come easily to you. It’s often elusive. It seems hidden in mist and shadows. Many times it feels beyond your reach. Yet at the same time, you can’t let go of faith or your pursuit of God. There’s a deep desire for God and a sense of his elusiveness that characterizes your journey. Your friend Miroslav Volf said you have an “intense hunger for God” that animates your entire life, and you’ve referred to your “obsession with God.” Can you speak to both the hunger for God and that sense of elusiveness?
Wiman: Miroslav Volf is a theologian I very much admire because he puts life so much at the center of his work. The theology always exists in the service of: how does God help us to live, how does faith help us to live these lives, how to understand our lives in light of faith. He and I did a book together, “Glimmerings,” and it wasn’t until after we had done the book, a book of letters, that we realized that we were each envying the other. He said that he really envied the hunger that I have for God because he’s never had that kind of hunger. I was like, Are you kidding me? I would give anything just to be calm. Just to be at peace.
But yes, I have always felt that. And now, in retrospect, I can see the time I was supposedly away from God that I was being pursued more avidly than ever. Or if you don’t want to see it that way, I was pursuing God more avidly than ever. I had a greater hunger than ever. The hunger is for — it’s not certitude, but it is for meaning. It’s not salvation for me, and it’s not an afterlife. I don’t think about an afterlife. It’s truth. I have a hunger for the truth of the world. I wish I could relax, honestly. But it’s just a fever; it’s been in me forever.
Poetry is the way that I’ve come closest to appeasing it. I find poetry and faith very bound up with each other, for all poets, not just Christian poets. Wallace Stevens said, “If you do not believe in poetry, you cannot write it.” And what does that mean, to believe in poetry? What exactly are you believing in if you’re believing in something called poetry? I would say you believe in something beyond poetry. So yes, they’re bound up in me, and I value the hunger because it has led me to everything that I’ve done. And it has certainly made life not boring. I’ve had a very interesting life. But I’m tired. I would like to have a little peace.
Wehner: I can understand why you say you’d like a little peace. I would say from people who’ve read you and learned from you, we’re fortunate you didn’t relax because it opened up a lot of things for you and then through you that we wouldn’t have seen. But I take your point that at some point you’ve done enough and you would like to find that peace. I do wonder whether the nature of your journey somehow brings some kind of peace. It’s not quite the way of peace that a lot of people experience it, but there’s something sacred in that journey.
Wiman: Yeah, I have a book of essays coming out, and none of them is longer than five pages. Most of them are one page. In one of those entries I talk about how I do feel I have a very healthy relationship with poetry right now. I love it, and I’m able to read all kinds of things. And I’ve gone through periods of despising poetry, of just being sick of it and thinking that it’s not — what is it the novelist John Berger says? We writers are “Death’s Secretaries.”
But I have to say I love poetry in a similar way to when I was first starting out. I love doing these anthologies, and I love discovering new poets, especially ones I’ve never read before. In that essay I wonder if maybe this is the reward for having gone into the art completely.
At one point it seemed that the life I had chosen was going to destroy me. It was not going well. I got through that — and part of getting through that was poetry. Poetry has been there the whole time. And I think any serious poet wonders whether the life has just been a mistake. Because there are so few readers, and so few poems last. Your work’s probably not going to last. And you just wonder: What in the world was this? What was I doing? That comes over me at times, to be sure. But I feel some reprieve from that. The poet Seamus Heaney asks a question: “How perilous is it to choose / not to love the life we’re shown?” And I think I have lived the one that was shown to me.
Wehner: I want to return to “Every Riven Thing.” There’s a refrain that recurs five times in that poem, “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.” One of the things you seem to be saying in the poem is that God is located not in the unbroken places but in the riven places. Can you expand on what you were conveying in the poem and why “Every Riven Thing” is meaningful to you?
Wiman: Well, it’s meaningful for the reason that I gave earlier. It was the first poem I’d written in many years, and it was such a gift out of such a difficult time. The poem means a lot to me because it expressed a belief that I didn’t have. I wasn’t thinking about God belonging to broken things. The poem exploded, and there was the thought. And then I had to think, OK, what have I said? What does that mean? It’s just like a moment of joy. But on the other side of it I’ve got to figure out: What does that mean now? How did I do that? So I wasn’t trying to say anything. I could hear the poem before it existed. I could hear what it was. I was just trying to find the words to make the music. That’s all I was doing. That it ended up making sense was a great benefit. Sometimes they don’t end up making sense.
I think it goes back to the idea that we were discussing earlier about God being in the pain of creation, the pain of creation somehow being in God. That God is in these places where the break is, where the rift is, the riven thing. That’s what I was experiencing at the time. It looked like I was going to die, after this great rapture of love. And yet I was experiencing an awful lot of joy in the midst of that. The poem was autobiographical without saying a word about me.
Wehner: You mentioned that several times over the course of your life you were told you were going to die. So you’ve looked at death in a way that most of the rest of us haven’t. We often wonder what it will be like as we approach death. We don’t know how we’ll react. Having gone through that the number of times that you have, I wonder if you could share what it’s like. I imagine it’s different now than when it first happened, though perhaps not. What is it in those moments when you’re getting this diagnosis, you’re having these conversations — what is that feeling like as you go through what you did?
Wiman: It has changed a lot over the years. The first time it was just sheer animal terror. I remember hanging up the phone and it was this animal terror. Unpleasant. You feel like you need to run, but there’s nowhere to run. That goes away. The first time that I came very close to death was when I had a bone marrow transplant. I was really, really sick and about ready to throw in the towel. But on the other side of that, it really changed.
That bone marrow transplant didn’t work very long. But my response to it changed. It has happened so much now. This last time I was really reconciled to death. I was like, OK, I’m going to die. There’s a terrible grief with my family, but there’s no fear. I didn’t have a scrap of fear in that sense. So that was a very different experience.
I used to get so alarmed when things would happen. There’ve been a million incidents, rushing to the hospital, one thing after another, shocking things happening. And now something happens and I’ll just literally go out — in 2022 I had a hard time getting on a clinical trial. I got kicked off twice, and I was out of time. I got the news that I wasn’t going to get on it. And I remember thinking, Oh, well. Then I went outside and played with the dog. I just played with the dog for a while and came back in the house, and it was all right. It just doesn’t have the same effect anymore. Now it’s all for my family. I did feel terrible grief over that.
[Editor’s note: After getting bumped off the clinical trial twice, Mr. Wiman was finally accepted in 2023 and received CAR T-cell therapy in Boston that saved his life.]
Wehner: The grief people will of course understand. But why not fear? Because you said you don’t really think much about the afterlife.
Wiman: Fanny Howe had a great line in an interview where she described faith for her as just the feeling that maybe we are finally, no matter what, we are finally safe. And I remember reading that years ago and thinking, Gosh, it doesn’t make sense to me. But over the years it has made sense. I take it as one thing that God has given me, taking away that fear. I feel safe. There is some unity of existence that I feel that I’ve come to understand and participate in. I do not know what happens after death. I do not presume to have any idea. And like I said, I don’t think about it. But I feel weirdly safe. Like it’s going to be OK.
Wehner: I find that deeply moving. My last question: When a hundred years from now people are having a conversation about the 21st-century poet and pilgrim Chris Wiman, what do you hope they’ll say about your poetry and your faith and the connection between your poetry and your faith?
Wiman: I’m doing an anthology right now. As I’m going through these poets and poems, I am realizing just how much gets lost. Good poets, maybe even great poets, get lost. And there’s no way to predict what the future will need. No way to tell how your own language might be bound up with conventions that the future will find grotesque or maybe even comical. You just can’t tell. So I don’t worry about it. I did worry about it when I was young. I wrote a whole book about that worry. But I don’t worry about it at all now. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I don’t seem to care.
If I were remembered, I hope I would have readers who respond to my poems in the way that I respond to certain poems by William Wordsworth, George Herbert and Emily Dickinson, or contemporaries like Kay Ryan, Alice Oswald and Anne Carson. Those are poets I love.
To tell you the truth, I’d like to be remembered as a simple Christian. I guess that means that I would be forgotten, because if I were remembered as a simple Christian, it would only be by the people who are around me, my friends and family. But I would like for them to have an awareness that at some point, I stopped thrashing around. At some point, I was just a simple Christian. That’s it. That I was able to live with the simplicity of the Christians whose lives I have admired, people I’ve known. Not famous people, just people. That is my highest aspiration at this moment.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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