I share the following quotes that struck me as I was reading Christian Wiman’s book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. They come from the chapter entitled “O Thou Mastering Light”:

mybrightabyss“Life is always a question of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus. Contemporary despair is to feel the multiplicity of existence with no possibility for expression or release of one’s particular being” (p. 48).

“You can certainly enjoy life . . . you can have a hell of a time. But I would argue that [if] life remains merely something to be enjoyed, [then] not only its true nature but also something within your true nature remains inert, unavailable, [and] mute” (p. 59).

“Spiritual innocence is not naivete. Quite the opposite. Spiritual incense is a state of mind – or, if you prefer, a state of heart – in which the life of God, and a life in God, are not simply viable but the sine qua non of all knowledge and experience, not simply durable but everlasting” (p. 64).

“The void of God and the love of God come together in the mystery of the cross” (p. 68).

“The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane. Innocence returns us to the first call of God, to any moment in our lives when we were rendered mute with awe, fear, wonder. Absent this, there is no sense in arguing for God in order to convince others, for we ourselves are not convinced” (p. 71).

“The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, [but] strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs [the strength that is required for] flexibility” (p. 71).

“Perhaps the relation of theology to belief is roughly the same as that between the mastery of craft and the making of original art: one must at the same time utterly possess and utterly forget one’s knowledge in order to go beyond it” (p. 72).

“This is how you ascertain the truth of spiritual experience: it propels you back toward the world and other people, and not simply more deeply within yourself” (p. 75).