Christian Wiman’s book, He Held Radical Light (HHRL), dialogues toward the fulfillment of poetry. The essay collection subtitles to, “The art of faith, the faith of art.” In this 2018 book, Wiman explores the micro-measure between “Poetry and/as faith.” This thematic phrase which he used as the title of a lecture, is the concluding claim of the book. He was asked by an audience member when he gave the speech, “Why can’t you just take out the ‘and’?’”. Here is Wiman’s written response, “…It seemed so obvious that’s where my real faith was.” The real, squirming life of Wiman’s person lives in a “/”.
The question asked of Wiman and the tension between “Poetry ‘and/as’ faith” characterizes the book and much of the Poet’s work. He dances in the non-binary nuance, without being undisciplined. In this way, he keeps company with the ancient wisdom writers of the Hebrew Bible like Soloman and the historical mystics like Simone Weil. Wiman often cites poets struggling at the same. The epigraph of HHRL proves that spirit.
“The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?), and that is why the poet exists.” — Juan Ramon Jiménez
That sorta set’s the table for the book’s conversation. The teleology of poetry and poet…What is it? Poetry and/as Faith.
At times, Wiman speaks so near the great poets he has known, admired, and by whom he seems to be haunted that the reader almost overhears their conversations. The cloud of witnesses includes A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, and Wiman’s close friend, Donald Hall. The form of his extended essay suggests a communion-of-saints style Socratic discussion. The conversation reaches out toward and through death in order to seek and feel for that one voice, one word for which all human poetry longs. That is our Soul’s thirst. One key question Wiman returns to through the whole book encapsulates the “/” between faith and poetry. The question seems nearer to prayer than anything else:
“What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting?”
For Wiman, The big question of poetry’s teleos and at once the instinctive desire to want is personal and vocational. Work follows desire, desire is satisfied in work. We cannot stop wanting. Desire is the existential polygraph test whose proof of its living inside of us is in our consumptive pudding. Food, sex, money, fame, love — we want, we want, we cannot but want. I consume, therefore I am. From whence doth come our sated end? Is the longed-for package floating down the conveyor belt of the ever-flowing river of Amazon? And what will it be when it gets here?
Is it a genuine encounter with the real, raw core of our own being? Couldn’t the end of human longing be the unbridled, self-actualizing Self? Can’t I just be left to express my unhindered, non-phony truth? At the end of the day, don’t we just have our authentic perspective?
Wiman knows the malaise of unmet longing. The Wisdom of Soloman says it this way, “A desire fulfilled is the very tree of life. Desires that go unmet make the heart sick (Prov 13:12).” Wiman shares a story of his sick heart. He tells of the angst he felt studying at Washinton and Lee before he was ever editor for Poetry Magazine or “Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature” at Yale Divinity School (I first came across the story here):
I remember sitting in an empty classroom at Washington and Lee late into the night, working on a poem instead of studying for an exam on international trade. I had spent three years as an economics major: endless afternoons in dead-aired classrooms from which I can’t remember a thing in the world except that I wanted, wanted, wanted something so vague it might as well be money. By the time of my last class in the “C-School” I was so hungry for meaning that everything was instantly allegorical — the blind professor who taught international trade, the desk he clung to like a life raft, the random dog that sauntered into that third-floor classroom one afternoon as if he owned the place. He stopped right in front of my desk, turned around twice before taking a disconcertingly deliberate shit, then trotted lightly out like an ironic angel.
Not that the true path was by any means clear. I still had twenty years to writhe on the high hook I knew only as Ambition. It’s almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it. The resistance is not practical — how will I make money, can I live with the straitened circumstances, etc. — but existential: Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself within it? Reluctant writers, reluctant ministers, reluctant teachers — these are the ones whose lives and works can be examples. Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it. “The impeded stream is the one that sings.” (Wendell Berry)
Reluctant yet singing. Remaining and losing. Unity within diversity — the life of God. Jammed into paradox, “What are people for?” Wendell Berry would ask (Berry’s “Impeded steam” requires more thought). Why are we? At another point, Wiman describes the bewilderment of personhood as reality spilling its boundaries. The incarnation of Ancient Israel’s God proves the truest reality of the transcendent person of God born as a human person in history.
Wiman reckoned with this God in his own personal history as he suffered through a painful battle with cancer which he wrote about in his book My Bright Abyss (FSG 2013). He shares the spirit of that book in this article. Here’s a quote from that interview that describes “Instants of apprehension,” characteristic of faith and poetry in and thru pain:
There are moments in every life when one is overwhelmed . . . by reality; or, more accurately, overwhelmed by reality spilling its boundaries. . . . At such moments it is not only as if we were suddenly perceiving something in reality we had not perceived before, but as if we ourselves were being perceived.”
Authenticity only goes so far as we are able to apprehend reality (sufficient but limited). But the wanting doesn’t stop! Our souls are thirsty says, St Augustine. So what to do when “Reality spill[s] its boundaries”? The cup indeed runneth over. Reality is the overabundance of grace. This is the grace by which the impeded stream sings when it otherwise should grumble or make no noise in pouty protest. Creation cannot help but spillover. An authentic puddle is just a puddle.
While impeeded, the stream cannot help but sing. While on the cross, Jesus sings his prayers. A glass can only spill what it contains. We see only as we are seen. Our moments of paying attention are honored by being surprised by joy. When we move one observant millimeter beyond naked consumption, when we look at the world closely enough to be surprised, we learn that much more about ourselves. More than that we might sing with the Psalmist, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” And with the Poet WH Auden:
“…Be glad that your being is unnecessary, then, turn your toes out as you walk, dear, and remember who you are, a Spender.” — From “Epistle to a Godson” by WH Auden
Wiman’s book-length essay about the relationship between art and faith plants the reader into the poetics of discovery where one beholds the tree of life only to find themselves at the beginning of a story beheld by a God whose own being remains a self while giving himself. The wonder found, at present, in art and in the future telos of poetry both begin now and always in the being of God who is three in one. I’ll leave the last words to Wiman (p112):
Everything in you must bow down. If not to God, then to the god-dammed fact of existing at all, “the million-petaled flower of being here,” as some gracious angel, through the pen of Phillip Larken, once put it. The stage has enlarged, but the old tensions obtain, and the rescue we need is not from oblivion but from ourselves, “the torment of self-serving demands” that keep creation in an unimaginable past, or keep consciousness in an imprisoning present.
But after all this, what I know is that poetry [vocation] is not enouigh, and to make it an end rather than a means is not simply a hopeless enterprise but a very dangerous one. “Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.” Yet it’s not that simple. For the paradox…is that with art…you must act as if the act itself were enough…You must spend everything on nothing so to speak, if nothing is ever to stir for and in you…And for all those revelations, a certain “sacred weakness,” as Maritain calls it, is key.
