Against Despair (w/ Christian Wiman)
Added 2024-04-27 21:42:28 +0000 UTCThis conversation is a little different. We wanted to take a break from the election-year political jousting to talk to the poet Christian Wiman about Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, one of the most singular books published in recent memory—part memoir, part commonplace book, part poetry collection. As with his previous My Bright Abyss, Wiman, more than any other contemporary Christian writer, manages to shake off our culture's desiccated religious tropes to write and talk about matters of ultimate concern in ways that are bracing, even exhilarating. How does poetry tap into reality, or, even better, what does poetry reveal about it? How does he think about the relationship between "life and art"? Why does he resist "Saul on the Road to Damascus"-style accounts of religious conversion? Why did he almost not write about his cancer diagnosis in My Bright Abyss? Why might postmodernism be good for religion, actually? How does the love of another person connect to the love of God? And how does any of this matter for how we live? We take up these questions and more.
Sources:
Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (2023)
— My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013)
— Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004)
— Every Riven Thing: Poems (2014)
— "The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians" in Once in the West (2014)
Matthew Sitman, "Finding the Words for Faith: Meet America's Most Important Christian Writer," The Dish, Sept 3, 2014
Casey Cep, "How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith," New Yorker, Dec 4, 2023
Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story," in Selected Stories of Andre Dubus (1996)
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)
Robert Bringhurst, "These Poems, She Said," from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copper Canyon Press (1982)
Comments
Read Zero At The Bone a few weeks back and couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd heard about it. Was scrolling through the feed here and just found this episode again - should have known!
Christopher Scott
2025-01-06 02:09:18 +0000 UTCThanks for this episode, and I'm loving the book. It was the perfect episode to try to KYE-pill a friend of mine. Pretty sure it worked. Also came across this today and it made me smile https://www.instagram.com/p/C65ekact579/?igsh=YW0xdWw1dW53bG8y
Peter Jenkins
2024-05-28 17:48:14 +0000 UTC😭😭 that description of the mass yall went to in italy was so powerful....really beautiful episode! Thanks you!
Kevin Spicer
2024-05-27 21:13:10 +0000 UTCRiver runs through it reference, hell yeah!!
Kevin Spicer
2024-05-27 20:54:47 +0000 UTCI’m a Catholic revert. Left the Church for six years in my mid-20s, in part because of the sex abuse crisis then unfolding and in part because I needed a get out of jail free card for living with my girlfriend at the time out of wedlock. I erected all these cognitive structures that allowed me to justify myself, but most if not all of it came down after I was divorced from a different woman less than two weeks after my 36th birthday. Haggard, beaten down by being left by my ex-wife for another man and lied to for months about it, I found new life when I got jumped by a young woman in a night club a few weeks later who was 15 years my junior. I felt attractive again — and liked that feeling. I spent most of the next year chasing after it. My moment of conversion came at last call in a dive bar near my house, realizing that I was one of a number of people still looking for a hookup for the night. All of a sudden, it felt sad and hollow. I thought to myself, “This is supposed to make me happy? Fine, Lord. I’ll do it your way.” I walked out of the bar alone and never went back to that search for someone to validate me externally. I haven’t been perfect since then, but I was remarried four years ago to a wonderful woman and we waited to have sex until our wedding night. It was the best sex I have ever had, and not just because it was physically good.
Chad Bailey
2024-05-20 01:46:34 +0000 UTC> Chris thinks the sounds of poetry create another world > Chris thinks this is something Christian and not Hindu shruti smh
Mark K
2024-05-17 01:11:27 +0000 UTCYou have encapsulated my thoughts perfectly
Peter Carlen
2024-05-11 13:59:52 +0000 UTCI absolutely loved this episode! I typically find your religiously themed episodes quite powerful. I found the point on the epistemological landscape quite true. I grew up in the Middle East and my world was oversaturated with the divine. My Coptic church growing up had weekly exorcisms, and a church right next to it claimed to have the miraculous icon of Mary holding baby Jesus written by St. Luke. My world was suffused with the "supernatural," to use the contemporary idiom. Miracles were no miracles; they were just commonplace events precipitated by prayer. Years of Western theological training managed to tame me a bit. But I still carry this world with me on the soul-crushing Texas highways.
Mourad Takawi
2024-05-09 12:43:52 +0000 UTCYeah, couldn't get 10 minutes in tbh.
Jeremy Williamson
2024-05-09 02:41:13 +0000 UTCI love KYE's religion episodes! Random suggestion -- please ignore if this is too niche -- as someone who's recently started delving into my Eastern Orthodox roots, I am fascinated (and aggravated) by the political context of Orthodox Christianity in America. It's a bit of a shitshow, to be honest. (One word for y'all: Orthobros.) I think it could be worth exploring this on the pod sometime. You could have someone like Prof. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, who researches the resonances of Orthodoxy with the far-right (*and* is an Orthodox Christian herself), on, for instance. Thank you, guys!
Ekaterina
2024-05-08 20:30:52 +0000 UTCI gotta say Wiman’s thinking felt a little close minded in one significant respect. Where he feels wonder and awe, he seems to sees god and faith. Which is fine for him, but when people don’t see god and faith, he appears to assume people don’t feel wonder and awe. I’m thinking especially of that quote early-ish in the episode along the lines of “How can you say you’ve never had any religious feelings? Have you never felt the wonder of the unknowable?” (Total paraphrase but that was the gist). But the concept recurs, such as when they’re reading a work by a nonreligious poet and Wiman says it feels distinctly religious. In answer, yes I feel the wonder of the unknowable but I don’t fill it with god. That seems to me a potentially learned, or at least nonuniversal, response. For me I feel wonder and awe in many contexts and structure my life in certain ways to explore those feelings, but I don’t see god or faith in those experiences.
Jeff
2024-05-06 12:42:27 +0000 UTCThank you.
Gregory Thompson
2024-05-04 23:19:07 +0000 UTCGlad to see others enjoyed this episode but this was not for me. At all.
WandererM101
2024-05-01 18:37:30 +0000 UTCI enjoyed this frank discussion of god. I agree god may only be what you grow up with, in or out of. Be they Abrahamic, a multitude of others, or none at all. For me then I suppose god has always been everywhere. And all at once also nowhere. I did not capitalize the word because autocorrect kept doing it for me. The word cannot possibly say what it is.
mark o'hare
2024-05-01 00:52:16 +0000 UTCI loved your discussion of religious particularity and its relation to capital-T Truth or its absence. If you'll indulge a bit of a long comment: I've been attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation for a little over a year now, and I keep finding myself struck by the importance of particularity even in a religion grasping at universality. It is always present even in a ritual as simple as our chalice lighting, and whether you have some Emersonian theology of the Divine Spark or developed your own bespoke understanding of God(s) or the Universe (bespoke spirituality being quite ubiquitous among UU's, although it's far more common across the religious spectrum than some would admit), you can't escape the particular. There's a tangent here about how the same is true of poetry bound in language, but Christian and yourselves said it better. I've also encountered and variously pursued and resisted a more sociological perspective on religious particularity and pluralism, both in secular and now UU spaces, but that didn't show itself to be quite as...self-defeating I guess, until I rejoined a religious community after a long gap from leaving my conservative upbringing.
Daniel Martin
2024-04-30 22:45:43 +0000 UTCI think there's something profound there even with a precise understanding of "observation" in this case or even if you hold an eliminativist view of consciousness, although I'm not prepared to argue the point exactly. Call it poetic woo if you wish ;)
Daniel Martin
2024-04-30 22:34:14 +0000 UTCMatt made me cry talking about that kid and his dad. Of course, dads actually being nurturing always makes me cry so… Great episode and so relevant to me right now as I try to better define my relationship to reality and the divine. I love Chris’ reluctance to perform faith. It tugs at something that feels true to me. I understand the notion that the performance can be the way to engage with something we are incapable of holding fully within our minds. But it also feels so flimsy. Like a distraction.
DJM
2024-04-30 16:51:57 +0000 UTCSuch a beautiful episode. The latest of many to have made me tear up on my mail route. Made me think of one of my favorite Tom Waits lyrics: “You say that it’s gospel, but I know that it’s only church…”
Matt Eriole
2024-04-30 14:36:24 +0000 UTCMore that the point can stand despite the mischaracterization of quantum theory. I am not Christian and don't speak from any place of authority--or indeed feel the need to weigh in--on how Christians ought to be. I have a lot more to say on how they ought not to be.
genrepunk
2024-04-29 22:27:36 +0000 UTCAbsolutely lovely episode. Really loved the point about how faith requires a deeper engagement and appreciation with the world rather than a retreat from it, sounds a lot like Merton. It felt like Walker Percy could have been stalking in the background of this episode…. When is the Percy Pod?
Luke LeBar
2024-04-29 17:46:24 +0000 UTCAre you saying that the point is negated by the fact that it’s more commonplace and applicable than they alluded to here?
Ryan Erickson
2024-04-29 12:42:10 +0000 UTCI once did the stations of the cross with a room full of Alzheimer’s patients. We pushed them in their chairs.
bill gardner
2024-04-29 12:41:00 +0000 UTCThank you so much for this.
bill gardner
2024-04-29 12:38:48 +0000 UTCReally enjoyed this episode. The recounting of that particularly humane church in Rome reminded me of the ending of Zadie Smith’s story “For the King,” the last story in her book Grand Union. She does a beautiful reading of it on a podcast I can’t remember.
KA
2024-04-28 23:25:15 +0000 UTCThe line about forgetting god is almost a direct quote from Meister Eckhart. I can’t remember which sermon, but it’s one of the ones included in Reiner Schürmann’s collection of translations with interpretive essays (Wandering Joy, if I’m remembering correctly)
Benjamón Bellota
2024-04-28 18:34:42 +0000 UTCThank you for this galvanizing episode—may the podcast’s turn to poetry endure!
Aaron Deveson
2024-04-28 17:17:38 +0000 UTCThe phenomenal world on the other hand is certainly altered by how we attend to it. The special sauce in Buddhism, Stoicism, and many other religious and philosophical teachings as I understand them lies in changing our relationship toward what we're experiencing, which has the strange capacity to alter our experience.
genrepunk
2024-04-28 05:54:41 +0000 UTCAw man, the quantum woo at the end was hard to listen to. Not to be a pedantic fun-ruiner but "observation" in the context of quantum theory has nothing to do with consciousness. Just think about what happens for eyesight to be possible: photons are bouncing off things in the world and hitting our eyes. Similarly, in order to measure a property of a particle we have to bounce something off it. Thing is, at that very small scale we can't bounce something off it without changing some of its properties. (Not sure if properties is technically the right word here but you get the idea.) The notion of consciousness controlling matter at a fundamental level is one of those misconceptions that won't die because it's too compelling a story.
genrepunk
2024-04-28 05:46:54 +0000 UTCThis might be my favorite episode to date. Profoundly moving. Thank you 🙏
Benjamin Pletcher
2024-04-28 04:34:28 +0000 UTCMoving, powerful, and very beautiful conversation. Thanks, KYE❤️
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2024-04-28 01:25:03 +0000 UTC
