Reading Recommendation: Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

One of the best books I've read this summer is Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), an extraordinary meditation on the possibility of religious belief in the modern world (Kathleen Norris's review in the New York Times is here). Wiman is a poet who rediscovered his Christian faith amid a diagnosis of cancer, and almost every page in this short and beautiful book is brimming with insight and theological sophistication. A bit:

Just as some of Jesus' first-century followers could not credit the presence of the risen Christ, so our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of constant fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday lives. We may think that it would be a great deal easier to believe if the world erupted around us, if some savior came down and offered as evidence the bloody scars in his side, but what the Gospels suggest is that this is not only wishful thinking but willful blindness, for in fact the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side. What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves. (p. 74)