Searching for Faith and Answers
What can we take from Christian Wiman's "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair"
This week I’m happy to welcome William Glidden to the newsletter again.
I’m excited because Glidden is not only a great writer, but also a deep thinker and special reader who spends a lot of time analyzing writing and meaning. I asked (or prodded) him to write about Christian Wiman’s newest collection, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, and he sent in a wonderful review of the book. Glidden examines Wiman’s larger body of work while also contextualizing the book’s observations about faith.
Enjoy.
Searching for Faith and Answers
By Billy Glidden
“I don’t understand when people present God as an answer to the predicament of existence,” Christian Wiman writes in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, his latest book. Because Wiman is a Christian, this statement might surprise those modern critics of religious belief who think it’s nothing more than a form of projected wish fulfillment, a delusion. Isn’t religion an insistence on false certainty, a way we console ourselves about the fact that we live lives we scarcely understand and will someday die? Isn’t it an answer?
Wiman doesn’t think so.
In Zero at the Bone, as in his earlier work, he doesn’t offer answers. He doesn’t inform readers that God has a plan that will someday make all of our suffering comprehensible. Instead, he presents fifty “entries'' comprising a multiplicity of voices, a commonplace book that he feels is “true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be.” The entries consist of lines of poetry (Wiman’s and favorites of Wiman’s), essays, theological reflections, and passages from literature to which Wiman returns for solace. He presents all of this language from all of these voices, forming a congregation of sorts—because, as the book’s epigraph suggests, sometimes we “have need/Of my best prayers to bring me back again.”
When I saw Wiman in person this past December, at a reading and discussion sponsored by Commonweal magazine, he drew attention to this epigraph, drawn from a William Wordsworth poem. It’s a line about wandering and returning, and about prayer as the means of return. Fifty Entries Against Despair, then, can be understood as a prayer, and also a return, in the face of despair in its myriad forms, to the deepest truths about who we are.
For the religious person, one of those truths is that our lives together, fleeting as they are, are meaningful—and that’s true even when those lives include deep suffering, even when those lives, like Wiman’s, include a fight with cancer that’s lasted almost two decades. Indeed, my first encounter with Wiman was in the pages of My Bright Abyss, a book in which Wiman sought to “speak more clearly what it is I believe” and used his cancer diagnosis as the launching point.
For the Christian, one of those truths is that an ordinary man walked the earth at a certain time, in a certain place, and he ate like us, and danced like us, and wept like us, and suffered like us, and died like us—and that that man turned out to be God himself. Implied in this story is that God is to be found in the ordinary lives of all the ordinary people you encounter in the course of your life. God is with us and for us. Also implied in this story is the certainty that God is present even at the absolute limit of human suffering. From the Cross, Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God is present, then, even in the experience of godforsakenness.
These are some of the truths that animate this book. And, in this culture that so often seems to conspire to make human beings less than we are, carving us up into interest groups, reducing our deepest longings to pop-psychological pathologies, defining us by excluding that which is most distinguishing about us as a species, such a work is subversive, radical, and restorative.
Having said that, this book, for all its merits, is deeply frustrating. My frustration began in the book’s introduction. In My Bright Abyss, Wiman sought a new clarity to his expression of belief; in Zero at the Bone, he sometimes opts for vagueness to the point of inscrutability.
“To write an introduction,” he writes, “implies something to introduce, and I have no idea what this book will be. This is salvo, self-challenge, zero at the bone.” That is the point at which a non-religious friend told me he stopped reading. “Didn’t feel very inviting,” he said. Fair enough. But if Wiman refuses to define what this book will be—beyond calling it a collection of the “storms of forms” that capture life as it is lived—then surely he will define the “despair” he invokes in the title? Despair, Wiman writes, has “an alluring quality” to young, artistic types. “You affect it, deploy it, and stroke it gently like a sedated leopard. Eventually the drug wears off. The drug of youth, I mean. There never was a leopard.”
Later, Wiman reflects on the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, with a focus not on a leopard, but a lion. A lion attacks Samson. Samson kills the lion. Later, Samson finds the carcass of the slain lion filled with honey—bees have made their home there. Samson scoops the honey out of the lion, and things go badly. “Samson’s mistake,” Wiman writes, “was thinking he could kill the leopard—lion, I mean—once and for all. There never was a lion. Lion is all there ever was.”
Zero at the Bone has many such moments, these flights into lyricism that obscure more than they reveal and leave even me, a Wiman admirer, lost. I won’t belabor this much further. The last example I’ll offer occurs on page 57, in which he attempts another definition of terms, and of the intention of this book.
By “against” in the subtitle of this book I don’t mean to imply a “position.” I’m not against despair in the way that I’m against, say, Donald Trump. In fact I’m sometimes very much in favor of despair when it’s a realistic appraisal of odious circumstance—like Donald Trump. But despair, like most human qualities, can be both sinful and salvific…Fifty entries against despair? I think suddenly of the coffee I had with the poet whose fifth (and, as it turned out, final) book of poetry had just come out. I mentioned how different it seemed to me from her earlier work. “Yes,” she said, “I wanted to destroy all that.”
“Against” does imply a position; if Wiman didn’t mean to imply a position, he should’ve given the book another title. And what does it mean to say one favors despair? Despair may well be a fact of our existence, inescapable as a tide. But to favor it? I don’t think Christian Wiman means this. And yet, it is what he said.
Reading these passages, among others scattered throughout the book, it can feel as though Wiman is leaving me behind. This may be merely a matter of taste. Or maybe, in my own spiritual striving, I hunger for clear professions of belief, and maybe this bias informs my reaction to a book that offers anything but. Wiman is a poet. “W.H. Auden once defined poetry as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” he writes. If Wiman’s feelings are mixed, and the book captures his mixed-upness, that is by design. But I can’t shake the sense that this work, more than his earlier work, suffers from an excess of self-consciousness. Wrestling with God boasts a long and formidable tradition within Christianity, and Wiman assumes this mantle admirably—but, at times, he seems to wrestle for the sake of wrestling, his musings turning ever inward and finding nothing solid upon which to land.
That’s all for my frustrations, though. You’d better be careful about criticizing a writer of Wiman’s caliber, especially if that writer has played a singular role in your own coming to faith. That this writer produced this work while facing the very real possibility of his own demise—his cancer recurred and nearly killed him again last spring, before a miraculous experimental trial saved him—should also give you some pause before quibbling with some metaphorical language. Perhaps Fifty Entries should be understood in the tradition of Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation or Henri Nouwen’s Inner Voice of Love, works not known for front-to-back coherence but for those moments of illumination that erupt out of the writer’s scattered musings. Such moments do abound in Fifty Entries. Looking at my underlined passages now, I see why the word “erupt” just occurred to me. “As for myself,” Wiman writes, “I have found faith to be not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound.” This is quintessential Wiman, a perfect summary of the homesickness common to all human souls—and a rejoinder to those who consider religion nothing more than a peddler of happy horseshit.
That line is from “I Will Love You in the Summertime,” an essay about Wiman’s daughters that finds divinity in the ordinary unknowable.
In another essay, “The White Buffalo,” Wiman returns to his roots, examining his family’s history of mental illness and addiction—and finds God in the midst of all that, too. “Why must I learn the same lessons over and over again?” he writes. “That both life and art atrophy if they are not communing with each other. That it means nothing to make a space for the miraculous in one’s work if one can’t recognize some intrusion in one’s life.” The miraculous event to which he refers is his sister’s achieving sobriety, a feat he had entirely discounted—an entry against despair. His father dies in a dirty motel room, and even there, the miraculous intrudes, as he and his sister, now a devoted aunt to Wiman’s daughters and a shining example of recovery, laugh together.
I return to the idea of faith and answers, and Wiman’s approach to both. Christianity isn’t so much an answer to the human predicament as it is a narrative shape for that predicament. The only answer it gives is through narrative, a narrative that locates divinity in the ordinary, a narrative that includes death and suffering, and ends, of course, with resurrection. But there’s no resurrection without the cross, and, to borrow from Robert Frost, there’s no way out but through. In these essays and others, Wiman is at his least self-conscious, allowing grace to erupt organically through the telling of a story. In the book’s eleventh entry, Wiman remarks upon poetry’s ability to “send a charge through reality that makes it real again,” and that, in their finest moments, is what these essays do. They remind you that you don’t need to look for God in lofty, exalted places. You can look at a child asking her father how to pray. You can look at siblings sharing a laugh in the moments after they’ve lost their father. You can look at a poet, sitting in his “cancer chair,” patiently enduring whatever must be endured. And you can look to the writer putting words to the page, refusing despair through the act of writing, defying meaninglessness in his insistence that his story—and, by extension, the story of every human being we encounter—is imbued with a significance beyond anything we could possibly name.
As it happens, I finished reading this book while on a retreat at an Anglican Benedictine monastery. I had journeyed there with my friend, Sean, who, like me, was interested in developing some inner quiet, and who, like me, had some acquaintance with despair. We were, each in our own ways, looking for answers. After attending a lecture about Thomas Merton, we walked at dusk to the snowy bank of the Hudson River, about a hundred yards from the monastery. As for the lecture, we had some misgivings; we had hoped that the monk leading it would offer some concrete ideas about how to balance our pursuit of the divine with the demands of living in a fallen world. We talked and commiserated.
I was midway through a sentence about some nasty thought I was having, when Sean cut me off, and pointed upward. A skein of Canadian geese was flying overhead, cutting through the misty darkening sky, and honking loudly. A charge was sent through reality that made it real again, a miraculous intrusion that returned us to ourselves.
I can’t always see life this way, but when I do, I know that such moments are the substance of faith. It’s not an answer to anything, but it’s an entry against despair.
Billy Glidden is a writer from Holyoke, Massachusetts. His work has been published in Cutleaf and Ekstasis.