Podcast
On Being with Krista Tippett
This book of poetry was discussed, and one poem from it was read. The poem expressed the author's feelings about faith, doubt, and the relationship between them.
Let me read this other poem from the same book, Every Riven Thing.
— Episode: Christian Wiman — How Does One Remember...
Episode: Christian Wiman — How Does One Remember God?
This book of poetry was discussed, and one poem from it was read. The poem expressed the author's feelings about faith, doubt, and the relationship between them.
Let me read this other poem from the same book, Every Riven Thing.
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made, sing his being simply by being the thing it is. Stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why. God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone, trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made. There is given one shade, shaped exactly to the thing itself. Under the tree, a darker tree. Under the man, the only man to see. God goes, belonging to every riven thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. Apart of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.
Episode: [Unedited] Christian Wiman with Krista Tippett
This book of poetry contains poems written after the author received an incurable cancer diagnosis; one poem, "From a Window," started with despair but ended with joy, while another poem, "Hammer is the Prayer," seemed to repudiate the previous poem's sentiments.
Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving.
I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close to the pain as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would. But why should it seem fuller now?
And though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in.