New York Times Op-Ed:  ‘There Was Love, and Then There Was Suffering’: by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum):

A Q&A With Christian Wiman (Yale):

Christian Wiman is both a magnificent poet and one of the foremost poets of the Christian faith. For 10 years he edited Poetry magazine. Now at Yale Divinity School, he is the author, editor or translator of more than 15 books, including “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” a modern classic of religious reflection.

I spoke to Mr. Wiman about his journey from faith to atheism and back; about living with an incurable cancer and being on the verge of death more than once; and about why, after the “animal terror” he felt when he was first told of his diagnosis more than 20 years ago, he no longer fears death. He talked about how, in the midst of great suffering, he experienced the presence of God. In his words, “the world was lit up.”

Mr. Wiman talked about why poetry is an integral part of his life, about the relationship between his poetry and his faith and why art is better at theology than theology is. He spoke about awe and joy, why certitude can cause God to flee and why the crucifixion of Jesus has so much meaning in his own life. He admitted to me that he’s never heard a convincing explanation for why a good God allows the innocent to suffer. And while he acknowledged being tired and longing for a sense of rest, he talked openly about his intense hunger for God. …

Fundamentals …

Wehner: In an interview several years ago, you said, “There is something in Christianity that makes suffering sacred. It does give a meaning to suffering, even when we can’t understand it.”

You cited Simone Weil, who believed the greatness of Christianity is not that it gives us a remedy for suffering, but it gives a use for it. In your words, “It puts suffering in a place. It gives a pattern — ‘the complete consort dancing together,’ as Eliot put it. It makes suffering part of the meaning of your life.” Can you elaborate on how Christianity gives meaning to suffering? In what ways does faith make suffering more tolerable or even sacred?

Wiman: Well, first of all, I would say it can give meaning to suffering, but it doesn’t necessarily. I hope in that interview I was talking about my own suffering, because the minute you move away from your own suffering and talk about other people’s, you’re likely to be speaking rot. You can’t tell someone who’s in the midst of suffering that there’s great meaning if they can just see it. It doesn’t do a bit of good. And some suffering is meaningless.

My own experience was that in the midst of great suffering I experienced the presence of Christ, and the world was lit up and my relationships with other people were lit up. It’s happened more than once in subsequent years. I take that to be a function of the fact that God is with us in suffering and that there can be a supernatural solidarity to suffering.

Years ago my daughter was going through a difficult time. I said something to her like what I just told you, and she said, “Well, I don’t want God with me. I want help.” And I thought: Well, that’s a fair response. But sometimes you don’t get help. You pray and you don’t get help, your friends don’t get help, and it’s baffling.

My own experience has been that that sense of supernatural solidarity is an enormous help. It makes you not alone in suffering. It’s not simply the sense that you have divine accompaniment but the kind of love that suffering enables between other people. My cancer has returned more than a dozen times. On three of those occasions, it looked like I was going to die.

Three years ago was one of them. I had a clinical trial, and I had to go to Boston for a number of weeks. Because we still had our life in New Haven, my wife couldn’t come because she had to take care of the kids and do her job. So I had two longtime friends, who both came for weeks at a time. It was an extraordinary experience. Neither is Christian, but I felt the presence of Christ in our relationships like a flame. It seemed to me so real, and so full of meaning at such a desperate time. I felt grateful for it. I have no need for them to see that as Christ. I did not see a need to name that. But it was present for me. …

Certainty & Uncertainty …

Wehner: Let me now ask you about something you wrote in “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.” You said, “The only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute — and perhaps even annihilating — awe.” Annihilating awe is an evocative phrase. What did you mean by it?

Wiman: I think awe and joy are linked. I did an anthology of poems about joy. I was trying to figure out experiences of joy in my own life. Why did they go away? Why were they so few? So I do think that awe and joy are linked together. Rainer Maria Rilke, in one of the first lines of one of his “Duino Elegies,” says, “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”

If you look at the experiences in the Bible, whenever people experience the presence of God, it’s not some pacific, purely joyful experience. It is accompanied by terror. I think there’s a similarity with joy. I think our moments of joy can leave us befuddled and bereft, paradoxically.

There’s a wonderful end to a poem by Richard Wilbur called “Hamlen Brook.” He describes this beautiful scene, looking at Hamlen Brook, and then he says, “Joy’s trick is to supply / Dry lips with what can cool and slake, / Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache / Nothing can satisfy.” It’s a moment of complete fulfillment, but then on the other side of it, there’s an ache which suddenly nothing can satisfy.

C.S. Lewis said that a moment of joy makes us homesick for a home we didn’t know that we had. It’s a beautiful formulation. I think the sense is also an ache that for a moment our selves were annihilated and we felt our souls, these selves with which we go through our days and busy ourselves and trouble ourselves and seem always somehow peripheral to something in us that’s greater. Suddenly, all that gets burned away. And that’s a beautiful, saving experience. But it is also a terrifying experience. Because on the other side of it, you have to ask: Well, what is this life? Why am I living so muffled? What am I supposed to do now that I’ve had that moment of joy?

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann said, “Compassion is the other side of the living joy.” One of the questions you might ask is, “OK, I’m given this experience — why aren’t other people? I look out there, and these people are suffering like hell. Why don’t they have the experience?” So it leads you to act in the world. But there should be something on the other side. Otherwise, joy can actually become corrosive, I think. It can actually become a kind of canker in you. It’s a moment that you don’t know how to integrate in your life and you don’t know how to live up to.

Wrestling With God …

Wehner: … You wrote in “My Bright Abyss”: “I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” You added, “I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life.” What is that meaning in your life, and who is Jesus to Chris Wiman?

Wiman: Well, I do have to say I am a Christian because of where I grew up. That’s inevitable. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia I’d probably be a Muslim. I think there is an element of chance in anybody’s religious life. I really like Paul Ricoeur’s definition of faith as “an accident transformed into a destiny through an ongoing choice.” I think that’s a good way of thinking about it.

The scandal of particularity is a phrase theologians use — the scandal being that if God is universal, how could Christ come into this one place at this one time, be born to this one woman, and what sense does that make?

I take that in very much the same way that I take that Ricoeur quote: There is an element of having grown up with Christianity, of it being the language that I know. The theologian George Lindbeck said that you’ve got a mother tongue, and you could learn a lot by learning other languages, but this is what you’ve got. If you’re going to get to any depth, this is where you’ve got to go. That’s a helpful way of thinking of how we end up in the religions we’re in.

I take that moment on the cross to be consistent with what I was saying before, that there is a supernatural solidarity in suffering. Theodicy — a defense of God’s goodness in view of the existence of evil — is the rock upon which Christianity founders. How can there be innocent suffering if God is all good? I’ve never read a convincing explanation. I do not think theodicy exists. I don’t think there can be an explanation. There can be works of art, like the Book of Job. And the Book of Job is probably the best thing I know that you could put in place of a theodicy. Reading it as a theodicy is completely wrong, but to put it in place of theodicy works very well.

I take the fact that God suffered — just as we suffer — in the form of Jesus to be not just a consolation but a great key to understanding what existence is. Pain is woven throughout creation. And it’s not just human creation; it’s woven throughout all of creation. So suffering seems to be a part of existence. And God entered that suffering. I take the God that Jesus cried out to on the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — to be exactly the same God that we cry out to. I don’t see them split. God is Jesus, and so Jesus is crying out to the same unknowingness, with the same unknowingness, the same passion, the same pain, that we do. And I do find that not just comforting, I find it true, that it accords with the truth. When I feel the world, when I feel my experience in the world, it feels true. …

Wehner: You mentioned that several times over the course of your life you were told you were going to die. So you’ve looked at death in a way that most of the rest of us haven’t. We often wonder what it will be like as we approach death. We don’t know how we’ll react. Having gone through that the number of times that you have, I wonder if you could share what it’s like. I imagine it’s different now than when it first happened, though perhaps not. What is it in those moments when you’re getting this diagnosis, you’re having these conversations — what is that feeling like as you go through what you did?

Wiman: It has changed a lot over the years. The first time it was just sheer animal terror. I remember hanging up the phone and it was this animal terror. Unpleasant. You feel like you need to run, but there’s nowhere to run. That goes away. The first time that I came very close to death was when I had a bone marrow transplant. I was really, really sick and about ready to throw in the towel. But on the other side of that, it really changed.

That bone marrow transplant didn’t work very long. But my response to it changed. It has happened so much now. This last time I was really reconciled to death. I was like, OK, I’m going to die. There’s a terrible grief with my family, but there’s no fear. I didn’t have a scrap of fear in that sense. So that was a very different experience.

I used to get so alarmed when things would happen. There’ve been a million incidents, rushing to the hospital, one thing after another, shocking things happening. And now something happens and I’ll just literally go out — in 2022 I had a hard time getting on a clinical trial. I got kicked off twice, and I was out of time. I got the news that I wasn’t going to get on it. And I remember thinking, Oh, well. Then I went outside and played with the dog. I just played with the dog for a while and came back in the house, and it was all right. It just doesn’t have the same effect anymore. Now it’s all for my family. I did feel terrible grief over that.

[Editor’s note: After getting bumped off the clinical trial twice, Mr. Wiman was finally accepted in 2023 and received CAR T-cell therapy in Boston that saved his life.] …

Wehner: My last question: When a hundred years from now people are having a conversation about the 21st-century poet and pilgrim Chris Wiman, what do you hope they’ll say about your poetry and your faith and the connection between your poetry and your faith?

Wiman: I’m doing an anthology right now. As I’m going through these poets and poems, I am realizing just how much gets lost. Good poets, maybe even great poets, get lost. And there’s no way to predict what the future will need. No way to tell how your own language might be bound up with conventions that the future will find grotesque or maybe even comical. You just can’t tell. So I don’t worry about it. I did worry about it when I was young. I wrote a whole book about that worry. But I don’t worry about it at all now. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I don’t seem to care.

If I were remembered, I hope I would have readers who respond to my poems in the way that I respond to certain poems by William Wordsworth, George Herbert and Emily Dickinson, or contemporaries like Kay Ryan, Alice Oswald and Anne Carson. Those are poets I love.

To tell you the truth, I’d like to be remembered as a simple Christian. I guess that means that I would be forgotten, because if I were remembered as a simple Christian, it would only be by the people who are around me, my friends and family. But I would like for them to have an awareness that at some point, I stopped thrashing around. At some point, I was just a simple Christian. That’s it. That I was able to live with the simplicity of the Christians whose lives I have admired, people I’ve known. Not famous people, just people. That is my highest aspiration at this moment.

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