I once described Christian Wiman’s work as a reach for the ineffable. I sometimes wonder if he’d be annoyed by that description, but if there’s one thing that works about it, it is that ineffable implies that the object in question can’t be described and also that if one were to attempt, language, and more specifically written words, would be the best medium with which one were to make such an attempt. There is something dialectical about this work. The pervasive theme of the book is both that God is and is not. Zero at the bone, we finally learn in entry 50, is Dickinson’s contribution (#1096), which Wiman interprets, in this instance, through the prophet Isaiah “Is there a God beside me … Yea, there is no God.” And then he reveals one of the hundreds of ways in which he is a magician, in the best sense of the word, with language … “Hard not to hear the hyphen implied, no-God.”
Here I’ll be confessional, which implies I mean to say something both vulnerable and incomplete in what I understand and feel. Without intending to, I read this book as a companion to a moment in my life when I have taken the notion of God’s non-existence more seriously than I ever have before. That is, I find myself settling epistemically somewhere the 18th C. and living vicariously through the brave souls like Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Hobbs, Kant, Newton (the list goes on…) who made this pivotal decision to ask how to navigate their respective questions with one simple presupposition, “What if not God?” That seems so simple and yet I doubt that I’ve actually asked the question completely free of my worldview. I may not be capable of it, and that inability lurks within me as comfort. I’ve also revisited Nietzsche recently. “God is dead … and we’ve killed him.” I think I finally understand what he meant. And then Paul Tillich, “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” There it is again, Wiman’s pattern, not God and God.
It is hard to summarize this book which is really collection of deliberations on the human condition with a particular orientation to suffering. Let me disclose that I admire Wiman’s work with a particular fervency. I’m not sure that I’m capable of judging his work with any kind of objectivity. Chrisitan Wiman is one who has been thrust into the depths of the human condition in unfortunate ways, but fortunately for the rest of us, is also one who can speak meaningfully about those depths. These dispatches bear a kind of truth that one can sometimes only feel or infer, but whose truthfulness resonates deeply in the mechanism within me that houses inference. In my recent review of Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song, I stated that Doyle writes with, to quote E.B. White, the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity. Wiman writes with the complexity that exists on the other side of complexity; a tagline I’d normally reserve for the pejorative, but here complexity abides appropriately so. These are hard won truths he’s disclosing, and they don’t lend themselves to the trite or rote regardless of how good the metaphor may seem.
As for the book’s theme, being and not being (a summation I’m not sure Wiman would assent to), I offer analysis through one entry, 32 “Writing In The Sand,” which also happens to be my favorite. Wiman explains that as he prepares to give the convocation at Yale Divinity School, he’s reading George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards, a biography that includes the moment when Edwards would give the convocation at the same Yale Divinity School. Wiman explores Edwards 18th C. theme of divine grace which historically lived in tension with human reason, (and here we are now appropriately in the place of my own self-disclosure). Through Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We are Right” Wiman asks the question about the function of “productive doubt” before crafting probably my favorite sentences in the whole book, “You can become so comfortable with God’s absence and distance that eventually your own unknowingness give you a big fat apophatic hug. One could argue that when doubt becomes that path of least resistance it becomes the very thing that a faithful person must most resist.” All of this is in service to Wiman’s discussion of the dramatic episode from John 8 in which Jesus defends the woman caught in adultery by writing in the sand. The interesting question that emerges from his reflection is, what did Jesus write? A question that has elicited a history of flimsy if not imaginative solutions. Wiman becomes explicitly hermeneutical in his proposal. He advocates for the law against its closure. Answering is the problem. “God is the poetry caught in any religion,” or how about Whitman who suggested that the very pride of understanding becomes another form of ignorance. But we have already conceded that doubt can be the problem too (a rarer admission among theological progressives). Poetry, I surmise, can deliver us of this idolatry of certitude and doubt. A hermeneutical commitment one needs, I think, to read and digest Wiman on his terms.
I was a pastor for fifteen years. I’m not sure I could preach Wiman’s approach to John 8 in many orthodox settings and yet I don’t think I can find a more honest approach. This reality testifies about the larger problem within the church. It’s increasingly becoming a place where it is difficult to be honest. Wiman also teaches at Yale Divinity School. A divinity school whose mission “welcomes persons of all faiths and those of no faith.” One might conclude that Wiman’s work is particularly calibrated for such an environment, that is, a divinity school presumably graduating students of no faith, but that conclusion seems like a glass half full to me. When speaking of about the ease of productive doubt Wiman writes, “I do hear the skeletal chuckle of Jonathon Edwards in my own mind, whose ambition, after all, was to be ‘God’s trumpet’.” This is a remarkable disclosure for someone who is offering pedagogy to the theological agnostic. I think Wiman’s book is cheery. Loud even. Full of hope. If one can grow accustomed to the location from which these subtle and yet robust confessions are made, a sober suffering, one can detect their joy. A relationship, joy and suffering, that is explicitly identified in his courageous entry 49 “The Cancer Chair.”
I will rate this book with five stars on Goodreads because it is at least that. Books are about timing and personhood. Books that navigate the human condition with this kind of candor and beauty are present to a potential audience of narrower scope. But for those who find this and need it, it is life, after death.