“Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.” 

Christian Wiman,
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

Christian Wiman

Eight years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death.

My Bright Abyss, composed in the challenging years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith―responsive to modern thought and science and religious tradition―might look like.

Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, applicable not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries.

How do we answer this “burn of being?” Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives and deaths if we acknowledge the “insistent, persistent ghost” that some call God?

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Common Believer is available on Amazon and through other retailers.