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

This is a fabulous book. It is about believing in our age of unbelief. It is about saying what we believe in an age when the language of faith has grown thin, stale, inadequate. It is decidedly not, though, about nailing down our faith in some pat formula of theological statement. Wiman is a poet. Words matter to him. And so he demands authentic, honest language to talk about his encounter with the living God. God’s gifts of grace come to us daily, out of the unexpected, even as he faces death through cancer. He is brutally honest about how hard it is to believe up against the severe skepticism of our day, quick to confess the skepticism that seeps into his own consciousness. Towards the end he says we “come close to Christ” in the “quiet despair” of our fear, fear “of nothingness. Of dying. Of failure. Of change,” of “the isolated self.” It is in real life where Christ meets us. I find in these pages some of the deepest, most honest, most compelling meditations on how we believe and how we talk about our belief. Powerfully, beautifully written—this is another of those must reads for people of faith in our day. This is also one of those very important books for me over the last couple of years.