This capacity to avoid the empty optimism of so much American religion – the word “abyss” appears more than once in “One Time” – finds balance, however, in the flickering hope that also appears in the poem. Whatever else these heavy words might express, they reveal the paradoxical essence of Christianity, that there is no experience of resurrection that does not go through the cross, that defeat and despair mark the places from which solace unexpectedly emerges. There is one particular passage from Christian Wiman’s latest volume of poetry, Every Riven Thing, that remains lodged in my consciousness, lines I go back to again and again: “I do not know how to come closer to God / except by standing where a world is ending / for one man.” This confession comes near the end of an elusive two-part poem, “One Time,” which begins with Wiman staring at a canyon in Arizona and ends with him lying beside his wife in the darkness, silently praying that she would “live and thrive” if the cancer ravaging his body kills him. Meet America’s Most Important Christian Writer By Matthew Sitman
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