The Mute Turnip

I was talking to a dear friend the other day of my reservations with the church and of religion. At times, I have felt very strongly the absence of God because in turn, I have truly felt God. All to easily, I find myself falling into the habitual pattern of focusing on my separation from God rather than the reunion that I have here with fellow believers and the promise of being made whole. Christian Wiman, a brilliant poet, writes and speaks in a way that is raw and telling. He reminds me that it is a choice everyday to focus on moving forward in my faith where I am.

"So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any “existential anxiety” I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am." -Christian Wiman