“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives… — Christian Wiman Poetry Copy Share Image
“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him. We are facets of a work whose finished… — Christian Wiman Creating Copy Share Image
At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason,… — Christian Wiman Faith Copy Share Image
“Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to… — Christian Wiman Consciousness Copy Share Image
“God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible… — Christian Wiman Life Copy Share Image
“The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves.… — Christian Wiman Compassion Copy Share Image
One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that… — Christian Wiman Absence Copy Share Image
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out,… — Christian Wiman Absolutes Copy Share Image
“It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings… — Christian Wiman Christianity Copy Share Image
“Memory is the basis of individual personality,” Miguel de Unamuno writes, “just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of… — Christian Wiman Individual personality Copy Share Image
“Intellectuals and artists concerned with faith tend to underestimate the radical, inviolable innocence it requires. We read and read, write long, elaborate… — Christian Wiman Art Copy Share Image
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that… — Christian Wiman Ambition Copy Share Image
The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to… — Christian Wiman Alive Copy Share Image
I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“Herein lies the great difference between divine weakness and human weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent… — Christian Wiman Absence Copy Share Image
“part of my enjoyment of life had always been an unconscious assumption of its continuity. Not necessarily a continuity of reality itself—the… — Christian Wiman Life Copy Share Image
“whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but… — Christian Wiman Change Copy Share Image
“The spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play. If two people meet… — Christian Wiman Human love Copy Share Image
“When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little… — Christian Wiman Atheism Copy Share Image
“The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience… — Christian Wiman Experience Copy Share Image
“And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud Madden me back to an afternoon I carry in me not like a wound… — Christian Wiman Artistry Copy Share Image
Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that… — Christian Wiman Copy Share Image
“The meanings that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or… — Christian Wiman Life Copy Share Image
