Monday, March 26, 2012

Christian Wiman

A kind friend has just pointed me in the direction of this author, whose writing has left me without words. Here are some links:

http://theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/
http://theamericanscholar.org/my-bright-abyss/
http://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/harvard-divinity-bulletin/articles/by-love-we-are-led-to-god

http://billmoyers.com/segment/poet-christian-wiman-on-love-faith-and-cancer/

5 Comments:

Anonymous Jim said...

Thank you for posting these links...they are wonderful.

11:17 pm, March 27, 2012  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And let us not forget that Christian Wiman is a poet!!
Here are links to two of his poems, one a translation from Osip Mandelstam and the other from Wiman'

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15427

Well, I can't find the second link, so here is one of his poems:

2. 2047 Grace Street

But 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 emerges,

into 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.

Christian Wiman in Every Riven Thing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
2010. ISBN 9780374150365. pp. 29-30

3:54 am, March 28, 2012  
Anonymous dFish said...

I led a retreat for law students last weekend. I incorporated your framework on the rhythm of the human body. They liked it. The feedback was very satisfactory. Praise God for the gifts you bring to the altar of the world...

2:01 am, March 30, 2012  
Anonymous dFish said...

Those articles are soul-piercing! I cried with the last one. The word "sorrow" simply hit me. Too many contradictions to live by...

3:16 am, March 30, 2012  
Blogger prayer request said...

Thank you for introducing me to Christiam Wiman! How refreshing and real. Thank you, thank God, for your being a part of my life and prayer and thoughts and memories all these years. Wish we could just sit and "talk," or what Margaret and I would call, "sing together." god keep you in Christ's peace and True Joy. Come see us.

7:14 am, April 28, 2012  

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