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Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
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by
You know, some books take a while to percolate down to your subconscious. This delightfully unassuming book - in itself a literary sleeper, a supernatural depth charge - has, over time, changed my LIFE. This is my personal nomination for My Favourite Non-Fiction Book of 2022.
***
Christian Wiman was at first at loggerheads with my deepest intuitions.
And I have let intuition guide my life, whereas Wiman relies on discursive thought and meditation to produce his sensitively intelligent life and poetry. His life has at its centre a sensitive, mystical void. In my life I possess in all its fullness the mystic banal. For me that's enough.
***
My plenitude is dull; his abyss is bright. I'm afraid to change places with him. For if he's right, the Truth is Terror.
And it's funny - I started reading this one in the days before the full horror of COVID was even anticipated. Well, COVID then forced me into a further retreat from the intricate head games of the world, thankfully, into the dull plenitude of a dutiful househusband's daily routine.
That for me was always enough. Alone with my whittled integrity, the presence of God was within. He certainly can't be in the nebulous nothingness Wiman discerns in his tentative forays through time and space!
Those bear a remarkable resemblance to the strange bursts of opaque white light that dominate the late canvasses of the abstract expressionist painter Jean-Paul Riopelle - as if they had appeared to him in a vision.
They almost scare me.
And as I - along with the world - have perforce spent long periods of time with myself, my wife, and our pet in isolation, with the virus I initially felt the chill fingers of dread crawling into my heart, as Wiman did when suddenly sidelined, disabled by a serious illness.
***
My heart responded to the challenge with love. Wiman sought clarity while I cannot help but dwell on in aporetic endurance.
You know, your heart is either alive or seriously muted. Perhaps mine was dead. Wiman's is always muted by intellectual poetic objectivity. Is that emptiness? Mine underwent a radical reboot in the aloneness of social distancing, but then sputtered.
When, after suffering from a broken psyche 52 years ago I recovered and started to emotionally flourish, I just left it at that, and tried to think without thinking. I threw objectivity out the window. That was the start.
The Absurd then cut clean through all my discursive red tape. And started to cut to the core of my heart.
But is Wiman perhaps further along the right track?
Perhaps the Bright Abyss is that absurdity - resolved and dissipated into emptiness.
Maybe Wiman is right. Maybe I should get off the sidelines!
Thus I mused. So I applied his thoughts to my life. And guess what?
I can now say am finally able to let go of a LOT of my awful past.
So maybe it's time to throw away ALL my diffidence, my ego -
ALL My doubts, all my words, and everything about my plain discursive thought -
Into My Bright Abyss...
And into the Sunlight of Being!
***
Christian Wiman was at first at loggerheads with my deepest intuitions.
And I have let intuition guide my life, whereas Wiman relies on discursive thought and meditation to produce his sensitively intelligent life and poetry. His life has at its centre a sensitive, mystical void. In my life I possess in all its fullness the mystic banal. For me that's enough.
***
My plenitude is dull; his abyss is bright. I'm afraid to change places with him. For if he's right, the Truth is Terror.
And it's funny - I started reading this one in the days before the full horror of COVID was even anticipated. Well, COVID then forced me into a further retreat from the intricate head games of the world, thankfully, into the dull plenitude of a dutiful househusband's daily routine.
That for me was always enough. Alone with my whittled integrity, the presence of God was within. He certainly can't be in the nebulous nothingness Wiman discerns in his tentative forays through time and space!
Those bear a remarkable resemblance to the strange bursts of opaque white light that dominate the late canvasses of the abstract expressionist painter Jean-Paul Riopelle - as if they had appeared to him in a vision.
They almost scare me.
And as I - along with the world - have perforce spent long periods of time with myself, my wife, and our pet in isolation, with the virus I initially felt the chill fingers of dread crawling into my heart, as Wiman did when suddenly sidelined, disabled by a serious illness.
***
My heart responded to the challenge with love. Wiman sought clarity while I cannot help but dwell on in aporetic endurance.
You know, your heart is either alive or seriously muted. Perhaps mine was dead. Wiman's is always muted by intellectual poetic objectivity. Is that emptiness? Mine underwent a radical reboot in the aloneness of social distancing, but then sputtered.
When, after suffering from a broken psyche 52 years ago I recovered and started to emotionally flourish, I just left it at that, and tried to think without thinking. I threw objectivity out the window. That was the start.
The Absurd then cut clean through all my discursive red tape. And started to cut to the core of my heart.
But is Wiman perhaps further along the right track?
Perhaps the Bright Abyss is that absurdity - resolved and dissipated into emptiness.
Maybe Wiman is right. Maybe I should get off the sidelines!
Thus I mused. So I applied his thoughts to my life. And guess what?
I can now say am finally able to let go of a LOT of my awful past.
So maybe it's time to throw away ALL my diffidence, my ego -
ALL My doubts, all my words, and everything about my plain discursive thought -
Into My Bright Abyss...
And into the Sunlight of Being!
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Quotes Fergus, Quondam Happy Face Liked
“We talk of poetry as prayer, artistic discipline as a species of religious devotion, doubt as the purest form of faith. These ideas are not inherently false. Indeed, there may be a deep truth in them. But the truth is, you might say, on the other side of innocence—permanently. That is, you don’t once pass through religious innocence into the truths of philosophy or theology or literature, any more than you pass through the wonder of childhood into the wisdom of age. Innocence, for the believer, remains the only condition in which intellectual truths can occur, and wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“To be innocent is to retain that space in your heart that once heard a still, small voice saying not your name so much as your nature, and the wherewithal to say again and forever your wordless but lucid, your untriumphant but absolute, yes. You must protect this space so that it can protect you.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Something in you must remain in you, voiceless even as you voice your deepest faith, doubt, fear, dreams …”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“How awkward and self-conscious we were at first, searching for some form in which to put, mostly, our praise, some sense of a being—or Being itself—to receive it. I think often of these early, furtive, innocent efforts at prayer. The beacon and bulwark they were when the devastation came.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“I remember when we parted there was an awkward moment when the severity of my situation and our unfamiliarity with each other left us with no words, and in a gesture that I’m sure was completely unconscious, he placed his hand over his heart for just a second as a flicker of empathetic anguish crossed his face. It sliced right through me. It cut through the cloud I was living in and let the plain day pour its balm upon me. It was, I am sure, one of those moments when we enact and reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are, when the void of God and the love of God, incomprehensible pain and the peace that passeth understanding, come together in a simple human act. We stood for a minute in the aftermath, not talking, and then went our suddenly less separate ways.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“I am so glad To come accidentally upon My self at the end of a tortuous road And have learned with surprise that God Unworshipped withers to the Futile One. —PATRICK KAVANAGH, FROM “AUDITORS IN”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: 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—even in your lowest moments. Such doubt is painful—more painful, in fact, than any of the other forms—but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you—not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe).”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Faith is not faith in some state beyond change. Faith is faith in change. That this welter of cells entails for us great sorrow and difficulty is true. That uppercase Life requires our lowercase ones is beyond question. But there is great joy in this ongoing apocalypse as well (“apocalypse,” meaning to uncover, to reveal), joy in reality’s abundance and prodigality, in its atomic detail and essential indestructibility, and in the deep, implicit peace whose surest promise of reality is the miraculous capacity we have—in a work of art, a gesture of love, or any of the other ways in which we acknowledge the God who is this ever-perfecting process—to imagine it.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“I think for most of us—for me, certainly—God comes as an annihilating silence, a silence we must endure as well as enjoy.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience. It is among the most difficult spiritual ailments to heal, because it is usually wholly illusory. There are definitely times when we must suffer God’s absence, when we are called to enter the dark night of the soul in order to pass into some new understanding of God, some deeper communion with him and with all creation. But this is very rare, and for the most part our dark nights of the soul are, in a way that is more pathetic than tragic, wishful thinking.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“Of course I say all this as someone who gets so bored in church that I often recite poems to myself in my head, someone an interviewer once called (approvingly, I think) an “atheist Christian,” someone who all too often forgets that it is much more important to assert and lay claim to the God that you believe in rather than forever drawing the line at the doctrine you don’t.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“The purpose of theology—the purpose of any thinking about God—is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning—by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings—more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
“it was, as for Celan, a hard new beginning: Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.”
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
― My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
January 18, 2021
– Shelved
(Hardcover Edition)
January 18, 2021
– Shelved as:
to-read
(Hardcover Edition)
January 19, 2021
–
Started Reading
(Hardcover Edition)
March 28, 2022
– Shelved
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Mar 30, 2022 07:19AM
I enjoyed his poetry. Enjoy your alternate take, i understand Wiman.
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Wiman is an excellent writer. But his work searches - and my own resolution has committed me to dwelling in certitude. That hurts like hades, but I can find no other valid path. There have been times when I've lost everything, but the Cross has always restored it!
Searching can hurt as well, until one accepts the journey. Articulation provides a respite, eg sublime poetry
So true! My own search was excruciating, as it moved at agonized crosscurrents to the prevailing Pleasure Dome the witless world seems to foist upon us all. But that pleasure dome is of course a lie. That is apparent all around us now. Consequently, my search became unnecessary. And as Sir Hugh Walpole says, all that remained was Fortitude.
Let's hear it for the Sunlight of Being! Like Ned, I know Wiman more as a poet than an essayist, but I like it when poets wade into nonfiction, so I'll put this on my awfully-sensitive reading radar!
It was for me a very good book, Ken. He showed me a great deal on how the emptiness within us is wonderfully workable. And certainly not adopting nihilism into the bargain, for his is a reverent, Zen-like empty-heartedness! Highly recommended.
And thanks for your nice words, Chris, which I musta missed! :-)
Thanks, Jayson! The idea of any abyss is admittedly scary. With a leap of faith, though, we’re there!
