"I try to live toward it"

When asked why he is a Christian, among all the other religious choices, American poet Christian Wiman starts out with "that's the way I was raised," which is the elusive answer so many give to evade sounding like they're judging other religions. But then he gets into a much more robust answer. From the NYT interview:

Why is it important to you to be a Christian specifically rather than an adherent of another faith, or of various faiths?

It wasn’t important to me until I reached a crisis in my life. I floated along like so many modern people, alert to a sense of otherness in some of my experiences but unwilling to give it a name. I’m a Christian because it’s the language I know. I’m a Christian because the doctrine of the incarnation expresses a truth that I intuit with every cell of my being. I’m a Christian because a god that does not suffer with us, a god that is not suffering with us right now, is either hopelessly remote or mercilessly cruel. I’m a Christian because, as my grandfather used to say, at some point you gotta fish or cut bait.

Mind, Wiman isn't back to his Texas Baptist roots on all points. In his writing, he often seems to be arguing as much against his religious upbringing as arguing against those with no religious faith at all. But there's hope in what he told Tom Barlett for the April Texas Monthly piece: "I try to live toward it."

When asked if he believes that the son of God, the Word made flesh, was actually crucified and placed in a tomb only to rise again after three earthbound days, Wiman glances up at the ceiling of the perfectly quiet conference room in the stylish offices he will soon vacate. His eyes close behind his rectangular glasses. It’s probably unfair to ask a poet and a conflicted Christian, a man who writes carefully and slowly and wonderfully, to opine off the cuff about a topic so weighty. He does believe it, he says, though not in the same way he believes in evolution or in the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. It is a different sort of belief, a deeper kind of truth. Finally, he finds the words: “I try to live toward it.”

By the way, it was the Texas Monthly piece that introduced me to Wiman. I was sitting in a Fredericksberg store while Diane shopped, picked up the April issue of the magazine that was sitting on the end table, and was immediately drawn in to the article.

 

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