‘There Was Love, and Then There Was Suffering’: A Q&A With Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman is both a magnificent poet and one of the foremost poets of the Christian faith. For 10 years he edited Poetry magazine. Now at Yale Divinity School, he is the author, editor or translator of more than 15 books, including “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” a modern classic of religious reflection.

I spoke to Mr. Wiman about his journey from faith to atheism and back; about living with an incurable cancer and being on the verge of death more than once; and about why, after the “animal terror” he felt when he was first told of his diagnosis more than 20 years ago, he no longer fears death. He talked about how, in the midst of great suffering, he experienced the presence of God. In his words, “the world was lit up.”

Mr. Wiman talked about why poetry is an integral part of his life, about the relationship between his poetry and his faith and why art is better at theology than theology is. He spoke about awe and joy, why certitude can cause God to flee and why the crucifixion of Jesus has so much meaning in his own life. He admitted to me that he’s never heard a convincing explanation for why a good God allows the innocent to suffer. And while he acknowledged being tired and longing for a sense of rest, he talked openly about his intense hunger for God.

My editor, Aaron Retica, joined me for the interview. The conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is the seventh in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of Christian faith.

1. Fundamentals

Peter Wehner: Can you summarize your faith journey, from growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist home in West Texas to leaving your faith when you described yourself as an “ambivalent atheist” to finding a very different faith after you married in 2004 and received your cancer diagnosis in 2005?

Christian Wiman: I grew up in a world that was completely saturated with religion. Everybody I knew was Christian. They might have been in different factions, they might have believed that they were the only ones going to heaven, but everybody was still a Christian. And I was so immersed within it. It was the water that I was swimming in. My family was conventionally Southern Baptist. But my mother was and is charismatic, and I was surrounded by charismatic elements, and they existed in the church. So it was intense at times. And then I went off to college at Washington and Lee, where I had my first experience of meeting people who had quite different beliefs. And it was a shock.

A bigger shock was reading Nietzsche. Somebody recommended his writing to me, and it blew my mind. I still find Nietzsche quite a large presence in my life — a different kind of presence, and a helpful presence, actually. And then religion just fell away from me for 20 years. I had no thought of going to church. But if I look back at the things that I wrote during that time, I don’t see a big break between my work. It seems to me that it’s very evident that I was still pursuing God and God was pursuing me during that time.

I was moved to come back to religion because of love. I was 37, and I had not experienced that level of love before, of wanting such good for the other person that your own self isn’t as paramount as it was. We found ourselves saying little prayers at night before dinner even before we were married. They started as jokes, but then they became more serious. We got married very quickly, and then I got diagnosed with cancer very quickly. The doctors told me I had five years to live. So there was love, and then there was suffering, hard on the heels of the love. The love led me to turn to God; the suffering led me to find a form for it.

Wehner: A lot of people fall in love and don’t find faith. What was it about falling in love that led you to faith?

Wiman: I had been in love before. But I had never experienced a love that wanted to be other, that wanted to be more. And that was the experience I had. It didn’t stop at the other person. It went through Danielle Chapman, my wife, and needed to be more. And it just baffled me for the longest time. I had no idea what it meant. But I did know enough, or she knew enough, to know it meant prayer. That seemed to be the only gesture that we could make that was beyond us. We hardly even knew what we were praying to.

Wehner: In an interview several years ago, you said, “There is something in Christianity that makes suffering sacred. It does give a meaning to suffering, even when we can’t understand it.” You cited Simone Weil, who believed the greatness of Christianity is not that it gives us a remedy for suffering, but it gives a use for it. In your words, “It puts suffering in a place. It gives a pattern — ‘the complete consort dancing together,’ as Eliot put it. It makes suffering part of the meaning of your life.” Can you elaborate on how Christianity gives meaning to suffering? In what ways does faith make suffering more tolerable or even sacred?

Wiman: Well, first of all, I would say it can give meaning to suffering, but it doesn’t necessarily. I hope in that interview I was talking about my own suffering, because the minute you move away from your own suffering and talk about other people’s, you’re likely to be speaking rot. You can’t tell someone who’s in the midst of suffering that there’s great meaning if they can just see it. It doesn’t do a bit of good. And some suffering is meaningless.

My own experience was that in the midst of great suffering I experienced the presence of Christ, and the world was lit up and my relationships with other people were lit up. It’s happened more than once in subsequent years. I take that to be a function of the fact that God is with us in suffering and that there can be a supernatural solidarity to suffering.

Years ago my daughter was going through a difficult time. I said something to her like what I just told you, and she said, “Well, I don’t want God with me. I want help.” And I thought: Well, that’s a fair response. But sometimes you don’t get help. You pray and you don’t get help, your friends don’t get help, and it’s baffling.

My own experience has been that that sense of supernatural solidarity is an enormous help. It makes you not alone in suffering. It’s not simply the sense that you have divine accompaniment but the kind of love that suffering enables between other people. My cancer has returned more than a dozen times. On three of those occasions, it looked like I was going to die.

Three years ago was one of them. I had a clinical trial, and I had to go to Boston for a number of weeks. Because we still had our life in New Haven, my wife couldn’t come because she had to take care of the kids and do her job. So I had two longtime friends, who both came for weeks at a time. It was an extraordinary experience. Neither is Christian, but I felt the presence of Christ in our relationships like a flame. It seemed to me so real, and so full of meaning at such a desperate time. I felt grateful for it. I have no need for them to see that as Christ. I did not see a need to name that. But it was present for me.

- Author: Peter Wehner, The New York Times