Christian Wiman is an American poet and Yale professor and author. He was diagnosed with incurable cancer more than seven years ago and wrote a powerful book, My Bright Abyss, Meditations Of A Modern Believer about the intersection of pain and suffering and spirituality. St. Benedict cautioned us to keep death daily before our eyes, and My Bright Abyss will touch your soul and twist your heart, and ask you what it is you really believe.

Wiman does not write about cancer, but about belief.

My friend Eve Marko, who I wrote about yesterday, gave me this book at lunch as a gift.

We are undertaking a collaboration, a dialogue, she is struggling to understand how to live and care for her husband Bernie, who suffered a stroke some weeks ago. This book, I think, is the beginning of our dialogue, it is an extraordinary exploration of spirituality from a gifted writer and poet and believer.

I have long been fascinated by the collision between spirituality and real life, how suffering and loss affects our faith and spiritual understanding of the world. Wiman’s book is one of the best I’ve read on that subject. I’ve been poring through it for hours, I keep returning to it. I love the idea of the “bright abyss,” that is the space that occurs between love and belief and the sometimes harsh realities of being alive and staying grounded.

The book is all the more compelling because Eve, a Zen teacher, underline passages she found especially meaningful to her, and that is a way of our speaking, I think. And after reading some of it, I understand why she brought it to me.

On page 29, Wiman writes that what we must realize, what we must even come to praise, is that fact that there is no “right way” that is going to be come apparent to us in life once and for all.

“The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured  by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the the truth of this.

Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.”

Wiman is defining grace in his own words, but I have always believed that grace does not come from living a life without suffering, but comes from the manner in which we deal with it. At lunch, Eve told me she was stunned when I wrote that Maria and I had filed for bankruptcy last year, and for some months feared losing our home. Like many others, she saw me as being much bigger than I am.

When I wrote about the bankruptcy filing, many of my readers were shocked, many wrote and told me they thought I was successful, as if successful people are immune to recessions, divorce, real estate crises, a mental breakdown  and bad fortune. The experience brought home to me that success is not about the books I sold or the money I once had, but about how I faced the sometimes hard complacencies and troubles of the world, owned up to them, and sought to take full responsibility for my life without blame or rage or self-pity. Maria shared this view with me.

As Wimans learned, no one is immune to life, or death, it binds all of us together. My struggle over these difficulties were very real, and very frightening. But courage is not defined by the absence of life, but persisting in the face of it. I never felt stronger than when we sat holding hands in bankruptcy court, or more filled with faith and purpose than when we began our long recovery.

And then again, more perspective. Bankruptcy is not inoperable and incurable cancer.

There is no simple or single right way to live, wisdom does not come with blinding illumination and revelation, we swim in a river of questioning, uncertainty and indecision. We hang onto what remains, what stays with us in the face of so much confusion.

Love and faith do not die without our consent and complicity, and I do not agree to let either die within me, surely not because I was hit by too many storms at once. And they have not died within me. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. And faith is finding myself, in the deepest part of my soul, in the very heart of who I am.