Book Review: Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 182 pages. $16.39
My favorite prophet of the Old Testament is Habakkuk. He’s authentic–honestly expressing to God the frustration and disappointment of a people experiencing suffering and injustice on all sides, all in the view of the covenant God who has promised to abide and abound toward them but who seems to be asleep on the wheel. Habakkuk is Job minus the three friends; what takes 42 chapters for Job to come to terms with God, Habakkuk takes three. Christian Wiman is a modern-day prophet in the genre of Habakkuk, a poet in the genre of Henri Nouwen. Brutally honest. Prophetic. Poetic. He and this volume are gifts of God for the people of God.
In his battle with a bone disease that renders him in agonizing pain and preparing for a bone marrow transplant, Wiman recounted his wrestling and grappling with the God whom he knows, the God who has revealed love and grace, but the God who seems helplessly stand-offish in the face of Wiman’s illness and Wiman’s pondering the future of his wife and child. Wiman’s account and reflection take prior attempts at the subject of theodicy and affirms that doubt is an element of healthy faith, that indicates we are on the edge of a precipice peering down into a “bright abyss”–the mystery of God, the invisible hand of God’s grace, where what faith does is bring us into the heart of the Abyss. He observed that “honest doubt” is marked by the ordered chaos of humility (“which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate”), insufficiency (“which makes it impossible to rest”), and mystery (“which continues to tug you upward—or at least outward”). Then he asserts, “Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.” (p. 76)
What Wiman does so beautifully and deftly is take theology, experience, reason, and tradition seriously, weaving a tapestry of the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral, and finding in each and all not a hierarchy of truths, but treasure troves of pleadings and promptings of voices past and present which each and all prod him closer and deeper to the heart and life of God.
The widespread and profound human suffering in our 21st century world of 7 billion people calls for an articulation of the Gospel in pulpits and from pews, at park benches and around parlors–that takes the faith, doubt, life, joys, and struggles of real human beings, who seek to understand as to be understood.
This is how Wiman framed his Christian faith:
I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this), and not because I think Christianity contains more truth than other religions (I think God reveals himself, or herself, in many forms, some not religious), and not simply because it was the religion in which I was raised (this has been a high barrier). 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?… I’m suggesting that Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around human suffering, that Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—even to the point of death, possible. Human love can reach right into death, then, but not if it is merely human love. (p.155, emphasis not mine)
For us preachers and teachers, and, frankly, for all of us as, basically, daughters and sons of God, Wiman’s volume teaches us what it means to embrace weakness and strength, hope and despair, pain and peace, joy and struggle, Good Fridays and Easters – not as a linear sequencing, but as continual, constant, and concurrent ways of living faithfully and fully in the sight of God.
