---
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title: "My Bright Abyss"
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# My Bright Abyss

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My Bright Abyss [WIMAN, CHRISTIAN] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. My Bright Abyss

Review: On Religion: To Its Cultured Inquirers - Some books are so incredibly good that they simply elude review. This is such a book. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, is so ripe with meaning, so full of insight, that it is impossible to summarize or adequately comment. It's the kind of book that, on every page, you simply write down the name(s) of the people you want to buy a copy for. Lots of books offer great theological reflections, but often the prose is wooden. Other books, though beautiful essayistically, lack the rigor of a work of theology. Wiman somehow manages to accomplish both, consistently, repeatedly. This is prose as poetry, and it is theology as essay and confession. Wiman suffers from an incurable cancer. This becomes a topic at times in the book, but ultimately, the book is not just a living with cancer book--as helpful as those are--but something that encompasses his suffering and then transcends it, even as it descends into and is swallowed by it. The only thing I can compare it to in terms of quality and concision is Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Wiman's book is not written with quite the same intent. But it can function in a similar way. It is now the book I will repeatedly give away as a gift, or suggest to friends, who are considering faith, considering God, struggling with suffering, seeking to make meaning out of the intimations of faith that keep creeping into their lives in spite of their doubts. I offer a few quotes, as teasers. But I can't say it enough, or more clearly than this, "You need to read this book. You want to read this book. It will be your companion and friend." "Christ comes alive in the communion between people. When we are alone, even joy is, in a way, sorrow's flower: lovely, necessary, sustaining, but blooming in loneliness, rooted in grief. I'm not sure you can have communion with other people without these moments in which sorrow has opened in you, and for you; and I am pretty certain that without shared social devotion one's solitary experiences of God wither into a form of withholding, spiritual stinginess, the light of Christ growing ever fainter in the glooms of the self." "Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moment of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn." "One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that Scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man tho whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the Scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see." "The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Even here, in some of the entries above, I see that I have fallen prey to it. In truth, experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing--I am just beginning to realize--may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go." No list of quotes would be enough. I want to quote the whole book here. It's that good.
Review: Wide ranging array of topics.... - Wiman, C. (2013). My bright abyss: Meditation of a modern believer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Christian Wiman is Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts, Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. He wrote this book after learning he had a rare, incurable and unpredictable cancer, his writing explores life in the face of death. Wiman frames his exploration: "There is an enormous contingent of thoughtful people....frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God." This book is his reflections upon God, belief, and meaning associated with each. It's not a book about a man living with cancer, but instead poetry and prose about critically questioning source of art, inspiration, consciousness, death, and faith. Some quotes: Artistic inspiration is sometimes an act of grace, though by no means always. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man. For as long as we can live in this sacred space of receiving and releasing, and can learn to speak and be love's fluency, then the greater love that is God brings a continuous and enlarging air into our existence. If our inner lives are always in transition, then our goal should be to acquire and refine a consciousness that is capable of registering the most minute changes in sensation, feeling, faith, self. No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. Still there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one's being, one's material, and Being itself. Inspiration is when these three things collide - or collude. Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable. This is as true in life as it is in art. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist's relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God, but of being subjected to God - our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us. Existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. . . .. I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit's need to be. There is a kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it. It is passive rather than active; it involves allowing the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #81,869 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #39 in Christian Poetry (Books) #1,428 in Memoirs (Books) #2,478 in Christian Spiritual Growth (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 578 Reviews |

## Images

![My Bright Abyss - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/818jh7AJ36L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ On Religion: To Its Cultured Inquirers
*by C***H on July 23, 2013*

Some books are so incredibly good that they simply elude review. This is such a book. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, is so ripe with meaning, so full of insight, that it is impossible to summarize or adequately comment. It's the kind of book that, on every page, you simply write down the name(s) of the people you want to buy a copy for. Lots of books offer great theological reflections, but often the prose is wooden. Other books, though beautiful essayistically, lack the rigor of a work of theology. Wiman somehow manages to accomplish both, consistently, repeatedly. This is prose as poetry, and it is theology as essay and confession. Wiman suffers from an incurable cancer. This becomes a topic at times in the book, but ultimately, the book is not just a living with cancer book--as helpful as those are--but something that encompasses his suffering and then transcends it, even as it descends into and is swallowed by it. The only thing I can compare it to in terms of quality and concision is Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Wiman's book is not written with quite the same intent. But it can function in a similar way. It is now the book I will repeatedly give away as a gift, or suggest to friends, who are considering faith, considering God, struggling with suffering, seeking to make meaning out of the intimations of faith that keep creeping into their lives in spite of their doubts. I offer a few quotes, as teasers. But I can't say it enough, or more clearly than this, "You need to read this book. You want to read this book. It will be your companion and friend." "Christ comes alive in the communion between people. When we are alone, even joy is, in a way, sorrow's flower: lovely, necessary, sustaining, but blooming in loneliness, rooted in grief. I'm not sure you can have communion with other people without these moments in which sorrow has opened in you, and for you; and I am pretty certain that without shared social devotion one's solitary experiences of God wither into a form of withholding, spiritual stinginess, the light of Christ growing ever fainter in the glooms of the self." "Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moment of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn." "One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that Scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man tho whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the Scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see." "The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Even here, in some of the entries above, I see that I have fallen prey to it. In truth, experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing--I am just beginning to realize--may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go." No list of quotes would be enough. I want to quote the whole book here. It's that good.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Wide ranging array of topics....
*by A***N on February 3, 2023*

Wiman, C. (2013). My bright abyss: Meditation of a modern believer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Christian Wiman is Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts, Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. He wrote this book after learning he had a rare, incurable and unpredictable cancer, his writing explores life in the face of death. Wiman frames his exploration: "There is an enormous contingent of thoughtful people....frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God." This book is his reflections upon God, belief, and meaning associated with each. It's not a book about a man living with cancer, but instead poetry and prose about critically questioning source of art, inspiration, consciousness, death, and faith. Some quotes: Artistic inspiration is sometimes an act of grace, though by no means always. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man. For as long as we can live in this sacred space of receiving and releasing, and can learn to speak and be love's fluency, then the greater love that is God brings a continuous and enlarging air into our existence. If our inner lives are always in transition, then our goal should be to acquire and refine a consciousness that is capable of registering the most minute changes in sensation, feeling, faith, self. No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. Still there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one's being, one's material, and Being itself. Inspiration is when these three things collide - or collude. Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable. This is as true in life as it is in art. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist's relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God, but of being subjected to God - our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us. Existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. . . .. I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized action: that is, our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit's need to be. There is a kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it. It is passive rather than active; it involves allowing the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ And it's a good idea to have had a personal battle or two ...
*by W***S on April 9, 2016*

A humbling tour de force. A lot of wisdom packed into this thin volume. But readers beware: it's not for the faint of heart or the faithless. And it's a good idea to have had a personal battle or two with the Christian faith somewhere in your background. Wiman is a master of the word, and he manages to draw together so much history, theology and literature into a single book, so as to have defined a prototype reference guide to Faith and the Human Condition. I'm grateful to know a fellow traveler like Wiman can even exist in our contemporary world of mindless, comfortably numb religiosity.... We need more Wiman in our diet, but only when he's ready to deliver. No need to rush a good thing, and compromise the message......thank you, sir.

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