On the day that the poet Christian Wiman turned thirty-nine, he missed a phone call from his doctor. For months, he’d been playing with a bump above his collarbone, one so small he sometimes literally couldn’t put his finger on it. He had recently got married, and his wife had persuaded him to get it looked at. The voice mail, when he played it, informed him that he had lymphoma.
This was on a Thursday, and the doctor was out for the weekend. The following Monday, Wiman learned that his was a rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, and then, from a graph sketched sloppily on a napkin, that he likely had five years left to live. Somewhere between a thousand and three thousand Americans receive a diagnosis of Waldenström’s each year, most of them men in their sixties and seventies. For a while, Wiman felt fine. A few years passed. He and his wife, Danielle Chapman, who is also a poet, had children, twin girls named Eliza and Fiona. Then, when the girls were eight months old, Wiman got very sick very fast, and went into the hospital.
By all accounts, that should have been the beginning of the end, but it was not. Chapman told me, “Chris’s doctors said this thing a long time ago that we still say all the time: We’ve moved beyond the edge of knowledge.” Whenever Wiman’s cancer threatened to kill him, a new intervention saved his life. After years of chemotherapy and cancer drugs like rituximab, he got an autologous bone-marrow transplant, which seemed to cure him, shrinking his tumors until they disappeared. Then, when the twins were four, he got sick again. A new drug, ibrutinib, came along, which gave him a few more years. Another, venetoclax, gave him a few more months after that.
Last spring, when his daughters were teen-agers, Wiman became so sick that he could barely get out of bed. He was accepted into an experimental trial and became one of the first people with Waldenström’s to undergo chimeric-antigen-receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T. The treatment involves intravenous drips of the patient’s own T cells, reëngineered in a laboratory to bind with specific antigens on the surface of the patient’s cancer cells. “I don’t think anyone thought it would work,” Wiman’s friend the novelist Naeem Murr told me. The drip, Murr said, “looks like nothing, a thimble of clear nothing. But it worked, he went into a complete remission. It was miraculous.”
Although Wiman is among the most distinguished Christian writers of his generation, he is uncomfortable with the word “miracle.” But he doesn’t have an alternative description for what happened last Easter or after any of the other treatments that have kept him alive for the past nineteen years. In his new book, “Zero at the Bone,” he writes, “I had—have—cancer. I have been living with it—dying with it—for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me, or drives me into the furthest crannies of literature and theology in search of something that will both speak and spare my own pain. Were it not for my daughters I think by this point I would be at peace with any outcome, which is, I have come to believe, one reason—the least reason, but still—why they are here.”
“Zero at the Bone” takes its title from Emily Dickinson, but its subtitle is a surprising salvo for a poet: “Fifty Entries Against Despair.” The book has fifty short chapters, plus two naughts—one at the start and another at the end, each labelled “Zero”—for a total of fifty-two, like the weeks in a year or the playing cards in a deck. The entries come in varying shapes and sizes. One begins with autobiography and ends with one of Wiman’s poems, another starts with a meditation on Wallace Stevens and closes with Teresa of Ávila. Some are single poems; others, commonplace collections of excerpts from the likes of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s “The Word of God and the Word of Man” and the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész’s “Kaddish for an Unborn Child.”
Like nearly everything Wiman has written, the entries in “Zero at the Bone” circle or depart from or come back to his faith. Raised a charismatic evangelical, he went to church three times a week in his childhood, abandoned Christianity in his twenties, then returned to religion around the time of his diagnosis—although it was his marriage, he says, not cancer, that brought him back to God. Still, like the writings of so many of the suffering saints Wiman admires, his work seems inextricable from the death he has so far escaped. He is fifty-seven now, and he worried that he might die before “Zero at the Bone” was published, until the latest experimental treatment saved his life once again. Now he hopes that his experimental book—part poetry anthology, part memoir, part theological treatise—can help others live.
Wiman was born and raised in West Texas, in a place known initially as Hide Town and then as Robber’s Roost and eventually as Snyder, and these days he looks a little like the way he makes his home town sound—hardscrabble, sandblasted, windblown. Sitting at a café in New Haven, he is layered in chamois cloth shirts for the cold and wearing a knitted wool hat for the damp. His gauntness persists despite his best efforts: for the second day in a row, I watch as he devours a chocolate croissant, then follows it up with an açai bowl the size of a steering wheel, both treats evidence of a sweet tooth that he acquired after undergoing chemotherapy.
Some of Wiman’s earliest memories are of what his family called “the sulls,” fits of anger and depression that run deep on both sides and registered like atmospheric pressure not only in his home but in that part of the country. He’s written that he grew up in a town “so flat a grave’s a hill,” and in every other sense, too, death loomed large in his early life. Even as a child, he knew that his aunt had died by suicide and his grandfather had murdered his grandmother while she was cooking dinner, before turning the stove off and turning the gun on himself. Wiman learned years later that, when he was a baby, his own father, who was supporting the family by selling Bibles and vacuum cleaners, had locked himself in a bedroom and refused to leave for nearly a year. The elder Wiman eventually found a sense of purpose, moving his wife and their three children to Fort Worth so he could attend medical school, then returning to Snyder to open a family practice. Later, he divorced Wiman’s mother, went back to school to become a psychiatrist, and began working at a state hospital for the criminally insane.
Wiman’s older brother and younger sister still live with their mother, in Texas, but Wiman spent his youth focussed on becoming rich enough to get away. He was a gifted athlete, and his wildest dream was for the leather-skinned, tobacco-spitting men at the Snyder seed-and-feed store to say, “He’s shittin’ in tall cotton now,” preferably because he’d won Wimbledon or been drafted into the N.B.A.
In the meantime, his own sulls came and went. For reasons he can no longer remember, he once wrecked his childhood bedroom, turning over furniture and pulling everything off the shelves and out of the drawers, then sitting down to see if he could reach the trigger of his shotgun with his chin resting on top of the barrel; another time, at school, he refused to give up on a fistfight even after he’d broken bones in his hand. After he saw “Rocky,” he tried channelling his rage into an extreme exercise routine that included long, gruelling runs every morning, and would have included tall glasses of raw eggs if the first attempt hadn’t made him gag. A decade later, he brought that same focus to literature, after learning from Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” that a young man could improve his lot in life by reading for five hours a day. Desperate for direction, he took up the regimen, “practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled.”
It seems to have worked: it’s difficult to square Wiman’s history of aggression and dysfunction with the man he is today. Still, he retains some of the intensity of his youth, especially in his sky-blue eyes, which he sometimes closes to think. His childhood wasn’t all violence, he feels the need to say—there was beauty, too. The beauty of language; dialects he pocketed like coins, then spent in poems about home like “Five Houses Down,” with a neighborhood junk collector whose “barklike earthquake curses / were not curses, for he could goddam / a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch.” And the beauty of mesquite trees, tumbleweeds, and dust devils, the last of which he re-creates in a narrow wisp of a poem:
Wiman wants to know if I’ve ever been to West Texas, and then, to conjure some of its stark wonder, asks if I’ve seen one of his favorite films, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” praising the way that the movie immerses you in the wild landscapes outside Waco. “That’s how I was,” he says. “Doing things with animals, running free, running around so close to nature.”
Yet he never stopped wanting a world beyond Scurry County, and after finishing high school he drove his screaming-eagled, T-top Trans Am across the country to Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. There, Wiman became an All-American tennis player; he also met his first atheist, and decided to give up on God. This was the mid-nineteen-eighties, and Wiman was obsessed with Wall Street-style wealth. He was going to major in economics, but he spent the summer before his junior year on a scholarship at the University of Oxford, where he first read Yeats and Eliot. That fall, he returned to Virginia, and switched to English after an eternal night during which he stayed awake writing a poem instead of studying for his international-trade final.
“I came to consciousness quite late,” he says, pushing aside his empty açai bowl and cradling his fourth coffee of the day, which he takes as strong as possible, sometimes travelling with his own beans. After graduating from Washington and Lee, he began what he considers his real education as a poet, reading for even more hours a day than Samuel Johnson thought necessary, swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes. He moved forty times in the next fifteen years, taking work as a tennis pro, a telemarketer, a groundskeeper, and an oil-field construction hand; he travelled around Europe and Central America for long spells. In his first collection of prose, “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet,” from 2004, he describes heading to Guatemala with a small bag and a single book, “The Complete Poems of John Milton.” “I thought a writer needed a store of EXPERIENCE, and I was reading Milton because I thought that the only way to write GREAT POEMS, which is all I wanted to do, was to come to terms with the GREAT POEMS of the past,” he writes. “I haven’t altogether outgrown those ideas and impulses, though I am less inclined now to go around in my daily life talking in capital letters.”
Part of what Wiman was doing in those days was looking for a form, not only for his art but also for his experiences of existential arrest and excess. Having left the Church, he tried to find meaning in literature, kicking the tires of aesthetic theories like those of Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens, test-driving the possibility that poetry could fill the void left by religion. But his poems, when they were good, seemed to come not from his conscious mind, exactly, but from some perfect sound he felt as if he had overheard, some indeterminably inward or outward voice, which he did everything he could to capture. In another essay, written before his return to Christianity, he explains, “There are even moments, always when writing a poem, always when I am suspended between what feels like real imaginative rapture and being absolutely lost, that I experience something akin to faith, though I have no idea what that faith is for.”
By the time that “Ambition and Survival” was published, Wiman had become reasonably well known, although less as a poet than as an editor. In 1992, he’d won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, at Stanford, which led to a job as a lecturer in poetry there. That was followed by similar positions at Lynchburg College and at Northwestern, which is where he was teaching when, one night over dinner, Joe Parisi, then the editor of Poetry, asked Wiman if he wanted his job. The pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly had recently left the magazine a startling gift of some two hundred million dollars, and Parisi was scrambling to replace himself as editor-in-chief so that he could lead the foundation established to manage the bequest. Wiman had written for Poetry, which is based in Chicago, and received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 1994, but he was shocked when Parisi asked him to take over. After a few months of meetings, the magazine’s board members narrowly voted to approve his appointment.
Lilly’s bequest was big enough to impress the hayseeds at the feed store, but, as the magazine’s editor, Wiman was making only sixty thousand dollars a year. He laughed as he told me that he arrived at Poetry a mostly unknown entity, in 2003, but had managed to annoy almost everyone by the time he left, in 2013. Like family feuds, squabbles among poets are too tedious to recount, but Wiman remembers being accused of commissioning too much prose, of privileging formalism over free verse, and of publishing vicious reviews and vacuous poetry.
Much of the fuss came down to the fact that, of the more than a hundred thousand poems submitted every year, the magazine prints only around three hundred. Wiman riled many of the submitters by seeming to imply, in an editorial, that Poetry should be printing even fewer. “I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs,” he wrote, explaining that, in his view, “institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn’t have to pay for it.”
For help reading all the submissions, Wiman hired Chapman, who came highly recommended by the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she’d done an M.F.A. in poetry. When Chapman took the job, she was dating someone else, but, within a few weeks, the two editors began to realize how regularly and deliberately they were running into each other outside the office. Both of them describe one such accidentally-on-purpose meeting, at a Barnes & Noble, as the day they realized that, in Chapman’s words, they “shared a language no one else could understand.” Wiman hoped she would be there—she was, reading “Macbeth,” as it happened—and he decided that buying her a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” sufficed as an excuse to engineer an encounter. They left the bookstore and went for a walk, and she found herself telling him things about her life that she had never shared with anyone before.
Chapman had spent her childhood moving between her mother’s house, in Woodbridge, Virginia, and her father’s ancestral home, in Fairfield, Tennessee. She was raised partly by her grandfather, a former commandant of the United States Marine Corps, after her father drowned in a scuba-diving accident in Okinawa. Both her parents were in the ocean when the undertow of a distant earthquake caught them; Chapman, then two years old, was sitting with a babysitter on the beach, and watched as only her mother returned to shore. In a new memoir, “Holler: A Poet Among Patriots,” Chapman recounts how her mother’s repeated lament from that tragedy was, in essence, the first poem she ever memorized. “The Baptist hymns from childhood came back to me,” her mother told her, over and over again. “I felt your father’s hand slip out of my grip and knew he was gone; I thought I wanted to die, too. But then the hymns came back to me, filled my limbs with light, and made me tread again. God told me I had to live to take care of you.”
Chapman’s own spiritual awakening came when she was twenty-one, living in Manhattan after finishing an undergraduate degree at New York University. A series of religious images appeared, and something ineffable took hold of her, language and light bursting both around and within her, as if it were the Holy Spirit itself. “My religious consciousness and my poetic consciousness are fused,” she said, “because not only was this an encounter with God but it was the first line of poetry that ever came as an inspiration, instead of having to gin it up.”
Wiman was the first person Chapman told about that experience, which inspired a long poem she titled “A Shape Within.” At the time, he hadn’t been to church in more than two decades, but he had his own intense memories of spiritual ecstasy from his evangelical upbringing—including once when he felt the Holy Spirit enter him, an encounter so frightening that he ran from the service and hid in the church basement—and he surprised Chapman by instantly accepting and embracing her testimony. The two began dating, though they initially tried to conceal their romance from the other half of the office: the entire magazine staff consisted of five people. They also began talking in increasingly devotional terms about art, including their own poetry; then they began experimenting, almost jokingly, with prayer before meals. Within the year, they were married in their tiny apartment on Grace Street, crowding in friends and family for the ceremony, a few of the guests reading poems they had chosen for the couple, including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, with its true minds, unaltering love, and intimations of doom.
Wiman got his diagnosis less than a year later. One day shortly afterward, he and Chapman wandered a few blocks from their apartment into Epiphany United Church of Christ. “That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm,” Wiman recounts in an essay about the conversion he doesn’t like calling a conversion, which he later expanded into the memoir “My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer.” “What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street.”
Wiman had stopped writing poems around the time he became the editor of Poetry—deliberately, at first, because he felt the need for a new approach. But in time it no longer felt like a choice, and he despaired of ever writing again. Then, the Sunday he returned to church, after nearly three years without producing a poem, he came home and immediately, almost effortlessly, wrote what he considers one of his finest, “Every Riven Thing.” A kind of “Pied Beauty” for the postmodern soul, the poem has the arresting syntax, surprising repetitions, and strange rhymes of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but its speaker praises a creation he recognizes as not just dappled but damaged, and finds the faith to praise a creator who “made / the things that bring him near, / made the mind that makes him go.” Wiman told me that when he wrote it it felt like a prayer from someone else, directed to something he did not understand; it seemed to demand a reader who isn’t human.
But the rewards for human readers are immense and renewable. In his poetry and in his prose, Wiman demonstrates a fierce attention to both the first-order experience of reality and the second-order experience of meaning, merging them into something entirely new and sometimes transcendent. Pushpin-specific lists fill his essays; single, stirring images lift from lines of his poems like the pages of a pop-up book. Here’s a flock of birds flying away in “From a Window”:
A kaleidoscope may be only a house of mirrors, and ghostlike leaves may really be birds taking leave. But in Wiman’s poem those illusions are more like possibilities, another world revealed in this one, however glancingly: a sky might well be a heaven, for a tree was once a cross. Word by word, Wiman resuscitates ancient ideas, from being to spirit, leaving our faces pressed hopefully against the here-and-now window of the poem. Its covenantal rhymes can feel as though they are moving us toward an assent of some kind, and that’s how Wiman says he was feeling when he wrote them: led in ways he did not comprehend or control. The poet Ilya Kaminsky, a friend of his, notes that Wiman’s ease in asking theological questions sets him apart from other poets and public intellectuals. He describes Wiman’s work as “a record of spiritual weather, a barometer.”
During his years at Poetry, Wiman came to feel alienated from contemporary poetry and what he regarded as its self-obsessed confessionalism. Before he learned he had cancer, he’d been planning to resign from the magazine—he and Chapman, in thrall to the mythology of another pair of poet partners, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, living and writing in pastoral bliss in New Hampshire, hoped to leave Chicago for Tennessee and make Fairfield into their own Eagle Pond Farm. But Wiman’s cancer treatments can cost more than a million dollars a year; handcuffed by health care, they stayed put. Then, in 2010, Wiman was invited to give a lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, on the campus of the Yale Divinity School. He was so taken by his conversations with the students, the way they talked so straightforwardly about their faith and their fears and what he considers life’s ultimate concerns, that when he got home he wrote a letter to Yale angling for a job.
Wiman became a senior lecturer in religion and literature, and Chapman became a lecturer in English. He is now the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts. One Friday morning this fall, at nine-thirty on the nose, he arrived in a seminar room on the Sterling Quadrangle for his course “Poetry and Faith” holding up a stack of handouts like Perseus holding the head of Medusa. He’d woken that morning full of fever and pain and nausea—something that still happens to him every few weeks, most often from colds and viruses his weakened immune system can’t fight off—and had considered cancelling the class, but he wanted to clear up something he’d said the previous week, about Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” Wiman had told his students that the poem spoke the truth to him as a Christian, which shocked some of them, since it famously describes religion as “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.”
For Wiman, the poem’s theological power comes from its confrontation with “a kind of absolute nothingness.” His handout contained a few quotations clarifying the point. The first was from the German theologian H. J. Iwand: “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!” The second was from a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer not long before he was murdered by the Nazis: “We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur” (as if there were no God). Before Wiman could finish with the handout, a student tried to slip in late. Wiman reminded his class of the punishment for tardiness—memorizing a sonnet—then turned to that week’s readings, which were about love.
Some semesters, Wiman teaches a course on “accidental theologies,” a term he uses for theological writing by non-theologians which appears, often incidentally, in letters, essays, notebooks, and novels. For that course, he assigns work by Marilynne Robinson, Simone Weil, Gillian Rose, and Fanny Howe. Howe, now in her eighties, first got to know Wiman at a conference years ago, and remembers how “instantly and excitedly” they talked about theology—his humor was so biting and self-directed that she thought he was Catholic, as she is. “I felt he made it possible to cross the bridges between religion and philosophy,” she said. “No one literary did much of that, and so he provided a path through that lonely thicket.”
Since coming to Yale, Wiman is not as intellectually lonely as he once was. In “Zero at the Bone,” he recalls that the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov said that loneliness was the last word of philosophy, then argues that it might well be the first word of faith. But the last word of faith, Wiman says, is love—not only familial love but fellowship of the kind he has with his colleagues and community at what he calls “church school.” The same sort of morally serious students who first drew him there have changed his relationship to God. “I have seen them shelter migrants in their churches, minister in prisons and hospitals, and work hard to alleviate poverty,” he said. “They are with people during the crucial moments of their lives. There’s something heroic in it, especially at this particular cultural moment. People who inveigh against Christianity don’t see this side of it. A large part of why I want to call myself a Christian is because of them.”
Growing up, Wiman says, he was taught that earthly love could distract you from God. Later, as an agnostic artist, he arrived at an analogous conclusion: that life was a distraction from art. For much of his career, he adored Robert Bringhurst’s “These Poems, She Said,” which invokes “the poems of a man / who would leave his wife and child because / they made noise in his study.” A convert on this front as well, Wiman tells me delightedly about a moment the other morning when one of his daughters barged into his study, something she hadn’t done, at least in the early hours, for many years.
Wiman works in a studio above the family’s garage, and when we’re out there it is awful, and awfully easy, to think about his house without him: the configuration of chairs at the table, the arrangement of people on the couch watching “Gilmore Girls” or “The Mindy Project,” the pile of shoes by the tangerine-colored front door with its “Alice in Wonderland”-like knocker in the shape of a rabbit. That fear about the future is a reflection of the joy Wiman finds in the present: nomadic for so long, he still marvels at his domestic stability. He and Chapman live in Hamden, not far from New Haven, and their snuggery of a house has bookshelves in almost every room, some designed and built by a neighbor. The sunken sitting room is filled with theology and sociology and history, arrayed around a hearth and a celestial watercolor, painted by a former student, that was the cover art for Wiman’s memoir-manifesto about his tenure at Poetry, “He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art.” In the dining room, there’s a densely packed skyline of poetry, shelves stocked floor to ceiling and wall to window.
When I ask Wiman about the house, and how different it seems from the kinds of places he lived as a kid—including the forty-foot trailer that all five members of his family once shared—he says he doesn’t have any guilt, but feels a lot of grief. “I made a life so far from theirs,” he says. “I left Texas when I was seventeen, I’ve been separated from their lives for so long.” Eight years ago, Wiman visited his father, who was no longer working at the state hospital. After a series of breakdowns, he was living in a residential motel with rotten food and dirty dishes piled everywhere. They managed to laugh, Wiman said, at what a previous tenant had written on the bedcover: “Fuck da money. Trust no one.” A few months later, Wiman’s father died from an overdose.
Wiman never introduced his daughters to his father, and he’s tried to protect them from his cancer, too. This spring, he had to be away from home for rounds of treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital, in what he wryly calls “the cancer chair.” Chapman remained based in Connecticut, so that the girls would not miss any school; Wiman moved into a borrowed apartment in Boston. His family visited, and friends stayed for a week or more at a time to help with his care before and after the CAR-T treatment, since the neurological side effects can be severe, from seizures and tremors to persistent delirium. When Murr, the novelist, arrived for his shift, Wiman was on so many pain pills that Murr told me he “had to wait by the bed with Narcan in case he stopped breathing.” Wiman is used to the things that keep him alive nearly killing him, with each new drug and therapy attacking not only his cancer but also his body, causing blood clots, bladder stones, broken bones, failing bowels, and amyloidosis so severe he sometimes couldn’t walk.
In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own. “Poetry has its uses for despair,” he has written. “It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.”
By everything, he means everything. “There is no consolation in the thought of God,” he confesses in his poem “Hammer Is the Prayer,” blacksmithing his way to a tough-as-nails-on-the-Cross account of how it feels to be believers in this materialist, secular age, living most of our lives in “some lordless random.” There is no solution to the problem of suffering, in other words, or any tidy proof of the existence of God, and Wiman acknowledges his own discontent and disgust with attempts at finding both. Still, his chosen profession, if it is not exactly palliative, does seem to have some claim to being the native language of suffering and also of consolation. As Wiman observes, Job spoke to God in poetry—and, even more notably, God spoke poetry back to Job.
After his “Poetry and Faith” class, Wiman and I went to services in the divinity school’s Marquand Chapel. He admired the choir’s soulful performance of “Don’t Be Weary, Traveler” but ignored the “sensorial stations” scattered around the sanctuary—intended to create additional prompts for prayer after the sermon—opting instead to sit silently as we waited for Communion. Marquand is an exception to how he generally feels about worship. “I find church incredibly boring,” he told me, neither complaining nor apologizing. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s a weakness, I don’t get anything out of church. I wish I did. It just all feels so rote. My mind wanders.” For a while, he and Chapman were part of an evangelical community at a Vineyard church in New Haven, even hosting a home group, but they left because they felt it was not sufficiently open and affirming. Now they sometimes go to a Catholic parish in New Haven.
The following Sunday, despite a night of insomnia and tidal waves of pain, Wiman was determined to hear the preaching of a former student, a painter turned pastor who is the minister at a little Lutheran church in Hamden, the product of two shrinking parishes that came together to form one new worship community. Holy mergers and acquisitions of this kind are never really hostile, but they can be heartbreaking, with one parish generally selling off its sanctuary and both struggling to survive in the face of falling membership and failing budgets—“marvelous old churches that grow older and emptier every year as God blinks out brain by brain,” as Wiman has written.
It was the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, part of what is called Ordinary Time in the liturgical seasons of the Church, the period between when the Easter cycle ends and Advent begins. The lectionary texts for that Sunday were from Jonah, Philippians, and Matthew, and the sermon delighted in the deep weirdness of the Book of Jonah, which includes not just Jonah being swallowed by a whale but also God providing a bush for shade only to send a worm to destroy it, leaving Jonah to suffer in the sun. Chapman reached for her husband’s hand when the pastor repeated the reluctant prophet’s miserable complaint: “It is better for me to die than to live.”
Although Wiman is most moved by apophatic, or negative, theology, which seeks to understand God through all the things we cannot say about God, he believes that the one thing he can say for sure is that faith is inextricable from love. “There is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God,” he writes in his new book. Loving God is not possible, Wiman suspects, unless we love creation; easy when it’s your wife or your daughters, harder when it’s your father’s addiction or your own cancer. But he believes we are called to love it anyway, especially in absence and brokenness, even when it kills those we love, even when it might crucify us.
“It is not easy to love reality,” Wiman wrote to me a few days after I left New Haven. “I’m certain I have never managed it.” But he is still trying. Entry No. 50 in “Zero at the Bone” is a poem called “No Omen but Awe,” which opens beautifully, if bleakly, by invoking “diamond time”—a single human life set against the vast geologic time of gems and jewels, the two scales incommensurable except with awe and wonder. After that poem, there is one last entry, the second of the two labelled “Zero,” which, we learn, can be another name for God, thus transforming nothingness into everything, and becoming the final argument against despair. That entry begins with a question. “You thought it was over?” Wiman writes. “So did I.” ♦
