Christian Wiman - A Poet's Sojourn in the Divine
God is a Verb
“In my experience, the worst despair is meaninglessness. It's not necessarily thinking that you're going to die. It's the feeling that life has been leeched of meaning. That's the worst.” - Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home in west Texas and became a prolific poet of great renown. After suffering for 18 years with a rare and very painful cancer that is now in remission, Wiman has come upon a God who is not an object but a verb. In his interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air,” Wiman talks about his book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.
When I heard Terry Gross’s interview with Christian Wiman I thought about the recent and ancient wars about the existence or non-existence of God. I thought about the standard argument of atheists that God cannot exist because a good God would not allow such suffering and evil to exist in the world. I also thought about my years of study and reflection in philosophy and theology. As a Catholic, I come from a very long lineage of thought and belief about God. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is ineffable, which really means that our thoughts and words cannot describe or contain anything that can define God in God’s totality. In the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, there was nothing representing or depicting a god or gods. At the burning bush in the desert, God wouldn’t give his name to Moses – perhaps because there can be none. All Moses heard was, “I am that I am.” There could be no graven images of the Holy One because no image was ever given, and none is possible
In the world of Catholic philosophy and theology, in our attempt to make sense of our religious experience and intellectual heritage, we approach God by analogy. We are like blind men with the proverbial elephant. God is like a tree trunk. God is like a rope. God is like a snake. As postmodern people, we just create God by the instrument of human confusion – projection. We have Daddy issues. God is a powerful man. God is like Zeus up in the clouds yielding great power. God has abs. God is an old guy with a homeless man’s beard. Now, before I say anything else that will cause even the most pacificist thinkers of ancient and modern times, and my professors, to come after me with torches, pitchforks, and Latin conjugations, I should say that our efforts and drive to understand God come from our divine (or evolved?) gift of intellect. As the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan says, human knowing is not one thing. Knowledge is a dynamic, an integral whole made up of sensory experience, understanding, and judging. This is called the cataphatic way or path of affirmation, in which we use positive terms to describe or refer to God.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that in the cataphatic approach, the knowledge dynamic in philosophy, and particularly in theology, is a reflection on human and religious experience. We intuit things. We have gut feelings. We experience transcendent moments. We have peak experiences of clarity and peace. So, we begin looking for ways to process these experiences through language, logic, and art. At the same time, these concepts that we create in language, logic, and art in our need to process these peak experiences shape these experiences themselves in the creativity of our memory. Consequently, we make statements, teachings, and doctrine. Christians believe that this effort and dynamic are the province of the Holy Spirit.
As post-modern people, we look at all this effort, all this projection and psychological transference, in our search for meaning. We try to make sense of this affirmative language to wrestle with the perennial human questions. Why are we here? What do our lives mean?
When things are going well or if we are secular, we see these fundamental questions as academic questions or something we neither have the time, talent, or interest to pursue. There isn’t an app for that. However, they become very real in the face of pain and the unspeakable horror of war, or post-traumatic stress. Christian Wiman follows the path of many mystics who focus on the encounter with the divine following the apophatic path. This approach defines God in negative terms – what God is not. The religious experience can be grasped in poetry. Wiman notes that one third of the Hebrew Bible is poetry. The apophatic or negative is captured in the Book of Job – possibly the oldest book of the Bible - and in the “Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross.
Theology, based on human reflection of the divine, blends both affirmative and negative language to describe God. For Christians, the undefinable Divine becomes human in Jesus of Nazareth. Despite His presence in history as documented by non-Christian sources and the writings of those who believed in Him and wrote for other believers, we see God manifest but can only grasp or encounter Him in faith. The Gospels are replete with people who never recognized Jesus or who rejected Him. We can envision the restoration of the primal union of the Creator and the human in mysticism and express it in language. For centuries, the early Greco-Roman church struggled to formulate the religious experience of Jesus as God in Greek neo-platonic philosophical constructs. There were notions of Jesus as a subordinate god, a demi-god, or as a good man adopted by God. Many thought that he was an angel or a superior spiritual being masquerading in a human body. Gnostics felt that Christ in this masquerade offered a secret knowledge or gnosis for the enlightened that was available to a few and that was beyond his teachings.
The orthodox Trinitarian belief of one God in Three Persons ultimately prevailed, in part I believe, because of the core of the Christian Good News (Gospel) that Christ, the Divine Word or logos suffered, died, and was buried and rose from the dead. Jesus is truly human and truly divine. This apparent contradiction reveals a God which is ‘being’ itself, as St Thomas Aquinas teaches.
Wiman’s language tends to be apophatic. We discover God in the darkness, in negation. Wiman points out, Christ’s last words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are not scandalous. They are profoundly relatable. We are not alone in our suffering and death. We are with Jesus on the cross. God in Jesus is one of us and one with us in the darkest moments of despair. Our lives have meaning because the God who suffered and died is with us. Wiman quotes Simone Weil (1909 – 1943), a French intellectual who had a short life of very poor health and died at age 34. She was Jewish and grew up in a more acculturated and well-to-do home, with a broad education. Weil was also a student of world religions. According to Wiman, Weil said that for her the crucifixion and death of Christ was enough, because she knew that she was not alone in her suffering.
Wiman came to a new and deeper faith after many years of semi-atheism because of his search for meaning beyond his pain. As a poet, like many others, he experienced something undefinable in the beauty and wonder of nature. His wife and children were also revelations. Still, Wiman has a multifaced, multi-nuanced notion of God that can take the form of doctrines. Yet that is not his goal, because God is not an object. According to Wiman God is a verb. God does not so much exist or not exist as much as God holds all things in being, which is a core of the profession of the Nicene Creed that defines Christianity.
Religious people can get lost in approaching God as a set of teachings, as a set of prohibitions, or as something defined. This provides a sense of purpose and social definition, but it doesn’t always work when a child dies, cancer strikes, or divorce happens. There must be something beyond the boundaries of our safe categories, and that is another philosophical description of God – the One with no category. For secular people, ethical behavior becomes paramount in living a worthy life. It also provides structure and social definition, but like all philosophical systems without God, secular ethical human behavior, while good and desirable, has no transcendence. Existentialists can assert that nothing makes sense or has ultimate meaning like Sartre, or they can decide to create meaning like Camus, but it is a courageous human act that stops at death.
Poetry, which is often derided as self-indulgent or non-utilitarian, is a way to unite the experience of the human entering the divine. It gives the expressions that reveal the interior of the heart and its meaning. It is the exit from an absurdist world in which we die and suffer for nothing. Poetry shapes us, disposes us, and strengthens our souls to be attuned to the God that is not beyond our reach but is within our very being.
When people are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, they are said to live in the life of the Trinity. It is an environment of pure relationship in the God that is love. It is a non-place in non-time where we sojourn – a mystical cloud without category. Whether they are secular or religious, people often despair. They lose hope because of suffering or unbearable loss. They lose hope when they have everything but wonder if it means anything. A Catholic priest who ministers in an intensive care unit told me that his ministry is to help people come to hope, which gives their life and death meaning. The ongoing battle about whether God exists or not is really a conflict about the meaning of our lives. To the unbeliever, God is a poetic myth. To the believer, the poetic myth is only a starting point for faith, for hope. Wiman, the poet, shows us a path from despair to life.
What do you think about this? Do you have an experience to share?
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