When I was in seminary, I stumbled on poetry. I had read poetry in school, of course, when I was forced to dissect poems in my English classes like an embalmed frog, certain that there was a meaning hidden somewhere between the words.
I really met poetry, or fell into poetry, when my life fell apart. I was following the call of God to ordained ministry in seminary when the pilings that kept me afloat started to wobble. In quick succession, I recognized my powerlessness over alcohol, got sober in a twelve-step group, and my father was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer that killed him within a year. Suddenly I had no place in my life (or soul) for prose – for long-winded theories of theology or well-meaning but empty platitudes stitched onto greeting cards or pillows.
In the rubble, I met Christian Wiman. I didn’t start with his poetry, but his poetic memoir called My Bright Abyss. In beautiful prose he recounts growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family in West Texas, becoming an “ambivalent atheist” at Washington and Lee University, and deciding to become a poet. His story turned when he met his wife (great love) and was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer (great suffering). Suddenly, the waves of his life thrust him upon the rocks of his Christian faith. A different faith than he was raised with, to be sure, but a durable faith that held him while his world fell apart.
Wiman has survived his incurable cancer for almost twenty-years. He has found himself in his death bed three times and yet now is in remission. He has written many books of poetry that I have come to love, and a new book about hope in the face of despair called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.
His is not a platitude-filled faith. He lives with gritty hope and faith amid despair and the shadow of death. He writes this, “Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions.”
