To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn\u2019t begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Almost two decades ago, just after his 39th<\/sup> birthday and shortly before the birth of his twin daughters, Wiman was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of blood cancer. His struggles with despair and hope intertwined in the midst of a life painful both physically and spiritually lead him to insights that are uncommon, to say the least. Of his illness, he writes that,<\/p>\n I had\u2014have\u2014cancer. I have been living with it\u2014dying with it\u2014for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me, or drives me into the furthest crannies of literature and theology in search of something that will both speak to and spare my own pain. <\/strong><\/p>\n A recent edition of The New Yorker<\/em> magazine includes a lengthy article about Wiman called \u201cClose to the Bone.\u201d When I read that Wiman\u2019s new book of poetry\/memoir\/essay called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair<\/em> was published at the begi In her review of Zero at the Bone<\/em> in The New York Times<\/em> a week ago, Alexandra Jacobs begins by quoting Wiman (who, as you may be gathering, is eminently quotable):<\/p>\n One grows so tired, in American public life of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge.<\/strong><\/p>\n Amen. Jacobs closes her review by describing the book as \u201ca profane, irreverent, freewheeling and necessary book. Readers of whatever creed will be jolted to lift their heads from their screens and turn them to the unfathomable heavens.\u201d<\/p>\n Wiman\u2019s new book came at just the right time. I\u2019ve known for some time that I need to introduce some sort of regular spiritual practice into my daily routine; New Year\u2019s Day seemed like a good time to start and Zero to the Bone<\/em>, with its fifty chapters ranging from two to five pages long that wander through every imaginable genre of writing, struck me as a good framework for daily reading, marking, and inward digestion. If only I can discipline myself to reading no more than two entries per day.<\/p>\n I found this on the first page of the first entry. Wiman remembers a question from an atheist several decades ago who, after watching a news report on television about the connections between religion and depression, wondered aloud in Wiman\u2019s company \u201cWhy do they believe in something that doesn\u2019t make them happy?\u201d At the time, Wiman writes, he \u201cwas an ambivalent atheist\u201d in his twenties, a place I recognize as a space I also occupied in my twenties as I sought to rid myself of some of the toxic aspects of the religion I was raised in. Reflecting on this thirty years later, Wiman observes that,<\/p>\n One doesn\u2019t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses\u2014miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels\u2014a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant . . . The only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute\u2014and perhaps even annihilating\u2014awe.<\/strong><\/p>\n Just a few pages later, as Wiman reflects on the dynamic of prayer, he wonders about those faithful people who pray for a good parking spot and, when they get one, take it as a sign of the divine\u2019s favor. Rather than ridiculing such folks, as I often do, Wiman suggests this:<\/p>\n Maybe, just maybe, we pray for a parking spot in the faith that there is no permutation of reality too minute or trivial for God to be entirely absent from it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Why, Wiman then wonders, did Jesus choose \u201ca cheap party trick\u201d of turning water into wine to be his first miracle (the gospel reading a couple of Sundays from now)?<\/p>\n Maybe the lesson we are to learn from this is that we have to turn everything<\/em> over to God, including those niggling feelings and hesitations we have that the whole rigmarole of sifting scripture like bird\u2019s entrails, and bowing one\u2019s suddenly brainless head, and \u201cbelieving\u201d in something more than matter\u2014this is all just a little ridiculous, isn\u2019t it?<\/strong><\/p>\n In her New York Times<\/em> review, Alexandra Jacobs calls Zero at the Bone<\/em> \u201cone of those fancy juice cleanses of recent yore, intellectual edition: full of salubrious and often quite tough poetry, philosophy and theology broken down into digestible bits.\u201d The above is a perfect example of what she\u2019s describing.<\/p>\n The new year is a perfect time for such a cleanse, along the lines of what Simone Weil meant when she wrote that \u201catheism is a purification.\u201d It is worthwhile to occasionally step back and take a new look at what may have become ordinary and stale\u2014faith is no exception. The story Christians tell beginning during the recently concluded Christmas season takes on new meaning when challenged \u201cat the bone.\u201d For as Teresa of Avila wrote, \u201cGod is on the journey too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, memoirist, editor, and critic whose work has simultaneously challenged and attracted me over the last decade. I frequently return to my notes on his 2014 memoir My Bright Abyss at times when my own faith seems dull or stale\u2014he comes from roughly the same religious tradition as I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":31289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,21,35,40,61,87],"tags":[130,169,211,221,242,888],"class_list":["post-35757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism-2","category-belief","category-christianity","category-faith","category-god","category-literature","category-simone-weil","tag-atheism","tag-christianity","tag-emily-dickinson","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-wiman"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2023\/12\/Zero-to-the-bone-196x300.jpg\")
nning of the month, I immediately ordered it from Amazon.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2023\/12\/the-tooth-that-nibbles-at-the-soul-300x169.jpg\")
This is what Emily Dickinson called \u201cthe tooth that nibbles at the soul,\u201d the strong suspicion that there is something going on much greater and more important than happiness or comfort. There\u2019s more packed into this passage from the first page of the first entry than I have found in many full books on faith and the real world.<\/p>\n