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About
Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith-responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition-might look like.
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but, to anyone whose experience of life and art, seems at times to over brim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives-and for our deaths, if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that, some of us call God?
Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but, to anyone whose experience of life and art, seems at times to over brim its boundaries. How do we answer this "burn of being"? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives-and for our deaths, if we acknowledge the "insistent, persistent ghost" that, some of us call God?
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Reviews
"[Christian Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."
Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gilead
"Every generation needs someone to write about faith as lucidly as Christian Wiman does in this 'meditation of a modern believer.'"
The Wall Street Journal
"Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss creates in the reader the keen, poetic attention of a man with a cancer diagnosis trying to remain fully present in his life. His spiritual ancestors are C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton. Like Lewis, he's surprised by the joy of falling in love. Like Merton, he captures the smugness that can poison some atheists as it does some believers. This masterwork of doubt an
Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Liar's Club