CHRISTIAN WIMAN
HOW DOES ONE REMEMBER GOD?
https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/#.XhBCfJCIY1L
Christian Wiman is more aware of his mortality than most of us, and he’s bearing a kind of poetic witness to something new happening in himself and in the world.
God that might call me to sing of God at one time might call me, at another, to sing of godlessness
it may be the case
that God calls some
people to unbelief
in order that faith
can take new forms.
people in this country who are
casting about for some new way of believing have some kind of religious language that they’re just unhappy with.
It doesn’t accord with their
feelings of the
sacred or their
feelings of
what spirituality
means
I had that sort of masculine inclination and imperative in me and around me, all the time. But when I look back at my life,
it’s my mother/
my grandmother
who really shaped
me/feminine consciousnesses
that I responded to.
my grandmother had a kind of consciousness that took me a long time to understand, because I think many people would simply say it was
She knew her world down to the least flower, the least creature that was in her yard, and every person that was in her life.
“passive-
(ness)” without any pejorative meaning,
(ness)” without any pejorative meaning,
“passive,”
what I also
think of is
-physical,
-incarnational,
-embodied consciousness
almost, you could say;
in consciousness, it all manifests itself in physical reality/is in touch with that.
brittle whisper whispers / O, Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.”
“RELIGIONLESS CHRISTIANITY”
from the French philosopher/social activist Simone Weil to the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pondered what he called “religionless Christianity”
from the Nazi prison in which he died.
from the Nazi prison in which he died.
Simone Weil: “It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through
joy in order to find reality
through suffering.”
we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world, taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. And I have to say, when I was faced with the actual ineffable I wanted some way
of apprehending the world that was right in
front of me that
was slipping away/
making the amount of reality that one has in one's life better able to apprehend more of it.
Meister Eckhart said“We pray to God to be free of God.”
Art take us to those places
where reality slips a bit;
we’re perceiving
something differently
than before.
it’s not all airy-fairy mysticism either. It’s quite angular and hard, hard-edged,
love as something that puts us in touch with transcendence and with mystery
All I know is that the more he loved me, the more I loved the world.”
-Spencer Reece
I had incredible experiences in my life — of suffering or joy, or both. They've demanded some action of me/ demanded some continuity of me. The only way that I know to do this is to try to find some form in it and to try to share it with other people.
Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself. I will look up in a couple of months, and I find I’m in despair. And so I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.
— I really feel that a whole new language is being created, and there’s too many people who are struggling with this.
a whole new thing is being created, and it’s going to involve other
religions.
I don’t think you can simply resist it and say, “I’m going to just have my little corner and keep it safe and secure.”
as the language/the ideas might cease to be relevant the truths behind them persists. That new language and new forms would continually be recreated to express those.
(Bonhoeffer)
felt like if he didn’t share in the destruction of Germany, then he couldn’t credibly participate
in its restoration.
You’ve got to obey, follow that impulse, even as hazy as it is, and then your faith will come.
You don’t get it first. He lost his life in that. He also said, at one point, “God has called us to be in a world without God.”
“BEFORE GOD AND W/OUT GOD
WE STAND WITH GOD.”
WE STAND WITH GOD.”
openness to reality, let’s say — I feel like that’s what we’re grasping for now.
There is some combination of austerity and clarity that I think we, as a whole culture,
are grasping toward
And the main
movement of the culture is against it,
all the political
language; all
that is just rot.
cultural grasping toward something that is open enough to engage those parts of us that we don’t understand
Christian Wiman
asked this: “How
does one remember
God realize God reach
for God in the midst
of one’s life, if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?”
OUR ESSENTIAL ANXIETY THAT'S AT THE HEART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION
how we have to create downtime/
how we don’t have space in our lives for what
matters.It’s just the trappings
of this existential
anxiety are very different
WE'VE DEFLECTED THE SOUL INTO QUESTIONS OF THE SELF.
“the self has replaced the soul with the fist of survival” -Fanny Howe
created a kind of climate in which, to survive, we all need to hone ourselves. We develop and hone ourselves,
and we project
those selves in
all kinds of
various ways,
We think of our
lives as being successful to the extent that those selves are ratified by other people, and we’ve gotten away from the notion of the soul.
It can be a real
shock to find
somebody who
is suddenly
talking about
those things
quite openly.
I’m trying to take care of things
/the structures on top instead of the ground of my being.
/the structures on top instead of the ground of my being.
And I find often,
all you need is
some kind of
conversation w/
someone, even
if it’s just expressing
pure anxiety which just names that, even if it doesn’t tie it up/
just names it/shares it/ that it can stabilize you in the world.
faith — is about the animating aspect of doubt in that, even in your prayers; even in the act of going to church. It’s not something separate. It’s not a problem. It’s just part of it.
"peace came to the hinterlands of our minds, / too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.”
-Every Riven Thing
when I was faced with the actual ineffable, I didn’t want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was
slipping away
the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete: sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality,
R.P. Blackmur. He’s talking about John Berryman;
his work “adds to the stock of available reality.”
-a good way to think about what a real poem can do.
It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You’re able to apprehend more of it.
there are truths you simply can’t convey in a factual sentence.
There is some kind of reality that’s being revealed that we can only reach through oblique ways.
apophasis,
where you state something, but the statement sort of un-states itself
Meister Eckhart said, “We pray to God to be free of God.” We ask God to be free of God.
I don’t think he wanted to give up his religion. The idea wouldn’t have occurred to him. But he wanted to give up that idea of God as being this thing outside of our consciousness.
poetry can do is take us to those places where reality slips a bit;
suddenly we’re perceiving something differently than before. quite angular and hard, hard-edged,
"All I know is that the more he loved me, the more I loved the world.”
-Spencer Reece
love demanded to be something else. It demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. It kept demanding more.
And that excess energy, I think, is God. And I think it’s God in us, trying to return to its source
Being religious, or taking on some sort of religious elements in your life, you are not necessarily saying, “I agree with everything that this religion says.” What you are saying is that I’ve had these incredible experiences in my life — of suffering or joy, or both, and they have demanded some action of me and demanded some continuity of me.
the only way that I know to do this is to try to find some form in it and to try to share it with other people.
I think of belief as having objects. Faith doesn’t have objects. Faith is an orientation of your life, or it’s an energy of your life..
I think it is objectless.
that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat, and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life.
I need specifically religious elements in my life.
if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary...
Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing.
🦋
It turns in on itself, and I will look up in a couple of months, and I find that I’m in despair.
one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.
-this phenomenon of our time;
...we choose these things,
we create our spiritual lives, which is really new.
-You were given this religious world as a center of gravity in your childhood, which a lot of people were until just a decade or two ago.
it’s a perilous difficult situation for people — for everyone — to be left on their own, trying to choose their spiritual lives...
To have charge of this.
I really feel that a whole new language is being created/
too many people who are struggling with this.
/
Traditional religious language is part of it
/
it’s going to involve other religions/
other practices
/
I don’t think you can simply resist it and say, “I’m going to just have my little corner and keep it safe and secure.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer/
in an extreme situation of having seen the church, in orthodoxy and religious language, be completely co-opted by evil/
starting to talk about “What would religionless Christianity look like?”
/
even as the language and the ideas might cease to be relevant, that the truths behind them would persist
/
new language and new forms would continually be recreated to express those.
(Bonhoeffer)
He had felt more fellow-feeling with atheists than he did with his fellow believers, and he was trying to understand that in himself.
/
he felt like if he didn’t share in the destruction of Germany, then he couldn’t credibly participate in its restoration.
/
he also simply felt that he had a call.
/
"...follow that impulse, even as hazy as it is, and then your faith will come. You don’t get it first. You don’t get it first.”
/
“God has called us to be in a world without God.”
/
“Before God and without God, we stand with God.”
/
openness to reality, let’s say — I feel like that’s what we’re grasping for now.
/
in somebody like Bonhoeffer, those things were not in contradiction.
/
spiritual clarity, orthodox clarity...
There is some combination of austerity and clarity that I think we, as a whole culture, are grasping toward
/
the main movement of the culture is against it
political language/rot...
cultural grasping...
that won’t...
slip out of our grasp and just make us think it’s ridiculous
...open enough to engage those parts of us that we don’t understand.
talking about the hunger for faith and the challenges of faith for people now.
“Hive of Nerves,” which he published in The American Scholar in 2010, Christian Wiman asked this: “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life, if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?”
✔✔✔✔🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋
Hive of Nerves
To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life
By Christian Wiman | June 1, 2010
https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/#.Xg-BIJCIY1I
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
That unrest formed a heart.
—Paul Celan
anxiety: how it is consuming everyone;
-how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety -have only degraded the quality of the former (time)
-exacerbated the latter (anxiety)
/
how we all need to “give ourselves a break” before we implode.
/
some means of relief—
X
the very way in which those activities are framed as separate from regular life suggests the extent to which that relief is temporary
I am left with the uneasy feeling that my own private anxieties have actually increased by becoming momentarily collective—or no, not that, increased by not becoming collective, increased by the reinforcement of my loneliness within a collective context, like that penetrating but enervating stab of self one feels sometimes in an anonymous crowd
not once, not in any form, not even with the ghost of a suggestion, did any of us mention God.
James Joyce’s Ulysses;
/
reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, a
X
Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know.
X
some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet.
X
the din is too great for us to realize exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name.
X
an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick
X
a whole country can be organized toward some collective insanity because there is no space in individuals to think.
How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?
(“Be present with your want of a Deity, and you shall be present with the Deity,” as the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne puts it),
the reality of contemporary American life—which often seems like a kind of collective ADHD—is that any consciousness requires a great deal of resistance, and how does one relax and resist at the same time?
either the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque, and the explanations only compound their opacity. (Or could it be—and I confess to relishing this possibility—that the explanations illustrate Christ’s wry sense of humor, which is nowhere else evident?) In any case, the notable point is just how little the explanations amount to, how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence.
all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience)
X
gives us an aperture through which to see our moments of mystery, crisis, and revelation more clearly—to give them “meanings,” to integrate them into our lives.
The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself.
as we plant the flag of faith on a mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over, and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.
in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.
Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved but a narrative to be inherited, and undergone, and transformed person by person.
the nature of reality—its mercurial solidity,
mathematical mystery and sacred plainness—
X
He speaks the language of reality—speaks in terms of the physical world—because he is reality’s culmination and code,
their eyes might see, their ears hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn to me, and I would heal them.”(except ...)
Christ is not an answer to existence but a means of existing
there is no permutation of man or mind in which he is not, in some form, present
Sara Grant,
"...that by which one knows...
When he is known through all cognitions, he is rightly known.’” But it seems to me you could quote Christ himself in support of this idea: “To believe in me, is not to believe in me but in him who sent me; to see me, is to see him who sent me.”)
(Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death.
anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be🦋
It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult indeed to learn to hear it as music.
Who is it that clasps and kneads my naked feet, till they unfold,
till all is well, till all is utterly well? the lotus-lilies of the feet!
I tell you it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone.
And I fall asleep with the gods, the gods
that are not, or that are
faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical incrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart.
“the self replaced the soul with the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe).
Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.
“Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of,” writes the Irish poet Seamus Heaney
the soul is not simply the agent that does the seeing (the entity to which metaphorical glimmerings are given), it is in some way the things that are seen (the world that glimmers); or, perhaps more accurately, it is the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality, or the self and other selves, possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.
the call itself is always comprised of life.
it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond; it is life calling to life.
God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is comprised of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment. “I think there is no light in the world / but the world,” writes George Oppen. “And I think there is light.”
the anxiety of daily existence,
...fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures.
the anxiety of existence
if attended to, discloses—our souls.
to be truly alive means to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence
to feel one’s trivial, frittering anxieties acquiring a lightness, a rightness, a meaning.✔
So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.✔
instance—the transformation might seem to begin with a mental decision and a definite application of the will
X
some rift of meaning and feeling has already opened inside of us
X
we are clutching, consciously or unconsciously, at the rock face and rubble above this sudden abyss.
if we are to integrate our anxieties into our lives—and thereby alleviate them—any merely intellectual understanding of them is inadequate.
we become conscious by taking hold of, or apprehending, our selves and reality, by standing apart from them
we grow apprehensive as we do so (for where, exactly, are we standing?).
(Meister Eckhart: “It is not that we should abandon, neglect or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to acting without any compulsion.”)
She who in her last days loved too well to lose
A single weed to namelessness, in creosote,
Blue gramma, goatsbeard that is not thriving, is,
Amid the cattails’ brittle whisper whispers
O Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.
as if despite our problems with anxiety, inner rest required outer restlessness, as if peace with ourselves and our times were found only within frenzy. ✔
what we seek is meaning for our ceaseless, anxious, and always-anticipatory actions/
death is part of that meaning
Any life that does not take account of death, that does not, in one way or another, hear the annihilating silence inside every sound,
the nullifying stillness within every action, is a life that can neither harness nor redress that dark energy—which is to say, a life of which death already has possession.✔
For if I should (said He)
Bestow this jewel also on My creature,
He would adore My gifts instead of Me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.✔
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.✔
restlessness is a gift, as it reminds us, even when we are most content, what we most need and why we are on this earth at all.
why this rat’s maze of a world for a known result?
We are driven ceaselessly onward in this life and are certain of our desires only until we realize them, at which point they seem to dissolve and shimmer further off, like a heat mirage on a road down which we can’t stop racing.
Unlike Yeats, though, for whom that road ends at a massive wall into which we finally, fatally slam,
forGeorge Herbert
permanence of our longing is proof of longing’s eventual fruition.
(Something shifts the burden ightens/is eaier to carry)
this fruition is forever forestalled. It isn’t “heaven,” exactly, except insofar as we learn to see, as he says in another poem, “Heaven in Ordinarie.”
Any attention turned toward the truth of the spirit is attention turned away from all we have come to think of as “life.”
we parcel out our moments of devotion—a church service here and there, a walk in the woods, a couple of hours of meditation a week—all the while maintaining the frenzy of our usual existence outside of those moments.✔
This is inevitable, for the initial demands of the spirit are intense, but it is not sustainable, for the soul is not piecemeal. We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the furthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life,✔
only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls;
“the music of what happens.”
(In sync with it all the time in time)
IT IS A STRANGE THING how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits.
You thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God.
The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context.
You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure.
The first step in the life of the spirit
is learning to let yourself experience those moments when life and time seem at once suspended and concentrated,
(Hyper-focus / awareness of the numinous)
paradox of attentive oblivion
X
out of which any sustaining faith grows.
These moments may not be—and at first almost certainly will not be—“meditative.” They are more likely to break into your awareness, or into what you thought was awareness
“inbreaking”/
Christ’s appearance in the world and in our lives—
-there is no coaxing it,
-no way to earn it,
-no way to prepare except to hone your capacity to respond, which is, finally, your capacity to experience life, and death).
there is a seed of peace in the most savage clamor.
a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being✔
wherein you may burrow into the very chaos that buries you, and even the most binding ties can become a means of release.✔
coming down the aisle
a beam of light
whose end he is,
and what he thinks are chains
becoming keys . . .
Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it; it is never neutral; either it impels one back toward life or is merely one more means of keeping life at arm’s length.
nothing palls the soul like a forced epiphany, and one can be elated and energized by a freshly articulate despair
the revelation either becomes part of his life or is altogether lost to it.
Either his actions acquire a deeper purpose, and begin to echo and counterpoint each other, or the moment and the man slip back into unfeeling frenzy, and the screech and heat and hate of his days lock metallically around him again.
paradoxically, transcendence is possible only when we cease being conscious of our own death.
I don’t mean that we are unconscious of our own death, but that we pass through what we think of as consciousness—that “apprehensiveness” I mentioned, that standing-apart-from and taking-hold-of—into something more profound.
An artist, on the other hand, makes you feel just how much missing life is contained within a given image;
it is as if the image is surrounded with, enlivened and even created by, the invisible, the unknowable, the absent.
It’s not accurate to say that someone who has learned to see like this has forgotten that there is a lens between himself and life. It’s more that the lens has become so intuitive and fluent that it’s just another, clearer eye.
I have lifted the lens to my eye—there is a sense in which it must be voluntarily lifted, even if, perhaps especially if, it has been roughly thrust there by circumstance—and am learning.
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