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/
Thank you for posting these links...they are wonderful.
ReplyDeleteAnd let us not forget that Christian Wiman is a poet!!
ReplyDeleteHere 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
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...
ReplyDeleteThose articles are soul-piercing! I cried with the last one. The word "sorrow" simply hit me. Too many contradictions to live by...
ReplyDeleteThank 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.
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