Posts tagged "Christian Wiman"
And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman
Art / Death / Literature / Poetry / Religion / Suffering / Theology

And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on May 21, 2013 • 1 Comment

What a rare and inspiring privilege it was to be with poet and author Christian Wiman last week. I for one am still reeling–don’t know how it could have possibly been any richer. Thankfully, like his poetry in Every Riven Thing and his prose in My Bright Abyss, the talks he gave here in Charlottesville defy distillation. They require real attention–and while one might expect as much from an artist of his caliber and quality, still, the anticipation of poetic brilliance doesn’t make it any less arresting when you actually experience it.

Which is not to imply that a portion of…

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Poetry

From a Window – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on May 13, 2013 • 2 Comments

In honor of the beginning of “Wiman Week” here in Charlottesville, here is a doozie from Every Riven Thing, originally published in The Atlantic:

the-tree-of-life_3Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

To listen to Christian doing an astounding reading of an astounding poem, go here.

Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology
America / Books / Film / Humor / Identity / Interviews / Poetry / Psychology / Suffering / Theology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology

by WB on May 3, 2013 • 2 Comments

1. How confident are you? Over at The New York Times, David Brooks surveyed his readers to get a sense for self-confidence, lack thereof, and the ways males and females experience confidence differently. While the word itself is a bit vague and murky, and Brooks found few trends in the survey data, the individual responses are definitely worth a look:

But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points…

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Another Week Ends: Fairness, The Life of Wiman, Motherly Love, Malick Sacraments, Karr Talks Saunders, Anderson Shoots Prada, and the Ke$ha Trump Card
Art / Books / Children / Death / Everyday / Film / Forgiveness / Music / Relationships / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Fairness, The Life of Wiman, Motherly Love, Malick Sacraments, Karr Talks Saunders, Anderson Shoots Prada, and the Ke$ha Trump Card

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 26, 2013 • 1 Comment

1) The Chronicle released a preview last month to Wiman’s newest piece of work, My Bright Abyss, which we’ve already pulled from a couple of times, here and here, and the life and the illness that spurred it. Jay Parini writes that poetry criticism and commentary began by pulling the fabric of a piece of work as closely as possible upon the tables of lived experience, but Parini also notes that contemporary criticism has become so po-mo-phobic of plainspeak that it winds up saying nothing at all. But Wiman, on the other hand, with sickness, has been voided of this…

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Can You Recover an Irrecoverable Faith?
Books / Identity / Religion / Testimony

Can You Recover an Irrecoverable Faith?

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 17, 2013 • 2 Comments

Here, in the title essay for Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, he talks about the perennial nostalgia “seasoned” Christians tend to feel about the faith of younger years. Often selectively remembered (and often unhelpfully untrue), selves of the past are conjured up as a judgment upon the faith that is lacking here and now. We think about the devotion we used to have, the fervor. We used to journal, we say, we used to pray, really pray, as we walked to work–bible studies used to feel like something. Now it doesn’t so much–so what does that say about where the…

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Another Week Ends: Schismogenesis, Megachurch Funerals, Accidental Theology, Smartphone Shrinks, Mean Professors, Nocebos, Zooropa and Elysium
Books / Church / Death / Humor / Identity / Law / Music / Psychology / Religion / Social Science / Technology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Schismogenesis, Megachurch Funerals, Accidental Theology, Smartphone Shrinks, Mean Professors, Nocebos, Zooropa and Elysium

by David Zahl on Apr 12, 2013 • 2 Comments

1. The NY Times published a wise op-ed from sociologist Tanya Luhrmann this past week on the the subject of “How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect”. She begins the column by recounting a disconcerting experience she had promoting her terrific book, When God Talks Back, on a Christian radio station. Luhrmann does not self-identify as a Christian, which the host of the show apparently took as a cue to berate her into converting on air (rather than dig into a book that has quite a bit of sympathetic material to relate). Now, God only knows what exactly the motivation/justification at…

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Christian Wiman on the Anxiety of Interpretation and the Sanity of a Strange, Ancient Thing
Art / Books / Literature / Religion / Theology

Christian Wiman on the Anxiety of Interpretation and the Sanity of a Strange, Ancient Thing

by David Zahl on Apr 4, 2013 • 5 Comments

Earlier this week, Christian Wiman’s much-anticipated My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer shipped, and although I’m only half way through the essays contained therein, I can’t get them out of my mind. I can already tell it’s going to be a volume I return to over and over again, if for no other reason than that, when it comes to people writing about such things in our context, his gift for words is simply unparalleled–or at least limited to the small cadre of folks who provided blurbs on the back cover (Marilynne Robinson and–you guessed it–Mary Karr). It…

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The Day of All Days: Reflections on Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On The Cross”
Art / Bible / Forgiveness / Music / Religion / Suffering / Theology

The Day of All Days: Reflections on Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On The Cross”

by Mockingbird on Mar 29, 2013 • 1 Comment

This morning, we are honored to bring you original commentary on the meaning of Good Friday by the inestimable Paul Walker, written as part of a special broadcast of Joseph Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On the Cross”on WTJU-Charlottesville, 91.1 FM. For those unfamiliar with the piece, it was commissioned by the Canon of Cadiz in 1786 for the Good Friday service at the Church of Santa Cueva in Cadiz, Spain, and the performance below was recorded in the very same place.

Good Friday is the day of all days for Christians. Yes, there is Christmas and…

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The Language of Love: On Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival
Art / Literature / Philosophy / Poetry / Relationships / Religion / Suffering

The Language of Love: On Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival

by Mockingbird on Mar 1, 2013 • 1 Comment

Update: On May 15th in Charlottesville, VA, Mockingbird is honored to be co-hosting an evening with poet and author Christian Wiman. Details can be found on the Christ Church website. Our good friend and Fall conference speaker (and literary editor of The Dish!) Matthew Sitman has been kind enough to offer some thoughts on what makes Wiman such a rare and wonderful beast:

 

Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Faith in language and faith God, then, seem to go together for the German philosopher,…

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Poetry

2047 Grace Street – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Feb 12, 2013 • 1 Comment

7940354But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God’s being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.

 

The above can be found in the collection, Every Riven Thing. Again, we are so excited to be hosting Christian here in Charlottesville on Weds evening March 6th. The updated title of his talk is, “And I Was Alive: Faith in a Faithless Time.” We hope you can join us!

Christian Wiman on Wounds We Won’t Get Over (and the Reprieve Therein)
Suffering

Christian Wiman on Wounds We Won’t Get Over (and the Reprieve Therein)

by David Zahl on Feb 5, 2013 • 1 Comment

A stunning excerpt from the great poet’s essay “The Limit,” which can be found in his collection Ambition and Survival:

“There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

And yet I’ve come to believe, and in rare moments can almost feel, that like…

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Poetry / Prayer / Suffering

This Mind of Dying – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Jan 23, 2013 • No Comments

God let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud:

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

 

From the collection Every Riven Thing. Mbird is sponsoring an evening with Christian on Weds, March 6th in Charlottesville, VA. More details coming soon.

Another Week Ends: Wiman’s Abyss, Opinionless Boyfriends, Compassionology, Lehrergate, Antinomianism, Revolution, Taylor Swift, and Wreck-It Ralph
Film / Grace in Practice / Humor / Music / Poetry / Reformation / Relationships / Religion / Social Science / Suffering / Theology / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Wiman’s Abyss, Opinionless Boyfriends, Compassionology, Lehrergate, Antinomianism, Revolution, Taylor Swift, and Wreck-It Ralph

by David Zahl on Nov 2, 2012 • 2 Comments

1. Every once and a while something comes across your screen that is so beautiful and honest and profound and enlivening that you want to force others to watch it. If commands of this kind worked, that’s what I’d do here. I’m referring to the interview that Bill Moyers conducted with poet (and Poetry Magazine editor) Christian Wiman this past February. Much like the essay of Wiman’s we featured last week, this is gut level stuff; he touches on pretty much everything that’s important. Or I should day, nothing that he touches on isn’t important: love, marriage, cancer, beauty, poetry,…

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Language as Empathy: Compassion and the Grace of Expression
Poetry / Psychology / Suffering / Theology

Language as Empathy: Compassion and the Grace of Expression

by WB on Oct 24, 2012 • 1 Comment

Over at The American Scholar, acclaimed poet Christian Wiman wrote an essay, entitled “Mortify Our Wolves“, on his sickness with cancer and the dynamics of loss more generally – from the perspective of a preternaturally articulate Christian and sufferer. For those interested in language, empathy, pastoral care, or just about anything else in the world, it’s more than worth reading (unless you have an aversion to the occasional swear-word). We’ll hit a few high points here but again, reading it in entirety is highly recommended, ht MS:

There comes a moan to the cancer clinic. There comes a sound so low…

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Poetry / Suffering

Lord Is Not A Word – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Apr 21, 2010 • 1 Comment

From the May issue of The Atlantic (ht JR – for more on Wiman, go here):

Lord is not a word.
Song is not a salve.
Suffer the child, who lived
on sunlight and solitude.
Savor the man, craving
earth like an aftertaste.
To discover in one’s hand
two local stones the size
of a dead man’s eyes
saves no one, but to fling them
with a grace you did not know
you knew, to bring them
skimming homing
over blue, is to discover
the river from which they came.
Mild merciful amnesia
through which I’ve moved
as through a blue atmosphere
of almost and was,
how is it now,
like ruins unearthed by ruin,
my childhood should rise?
Lord, suffer me to…

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