Today I finished reading My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman, and the sentiments of this book will be with me for a long time. Wiman paints beautiful indelible images with his words. He helps me to reflect on what my faith means to me and why it matters. He also offers permission to understand and express faith in nontraditional terms. I believe in God as the spirit of love in the world, which not everyone feels comfortable with, so the sense I empathy that I felt in this book had real power. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
"faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life" (8)
"as long as we can live in this sacred space of receiving and releasing, and can learn to speak and be love's fluency, then the greater love that is God brings a continuous and enlarging air into our existence."(24)
"faith in life [is] some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with the eyes to see it, love." (36)
"Turning inward turned me outward too, to a world made more radiant by my ability to believe in it." (67)
"If two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree, silently or otherwise, that God's love creates and sustains human love...then even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that... enters and nourishes one's notion of, and relationship with, God." (71)
"Perhaps we are the weak ones, and God comes to us inwardly only because we have failed to perceive him in the crying child, in the nail driven cleanly into the wood, in the ordinary dawn sun that merely to see clearly is sufficient prayer and praise." (75)
"silence is the language of faith. Action - be it church or charity, politics or poetry - is the translation." (107)
"'Go forth and spread the gospel by every means possible,' said Saint Francis to his followers. 'If necessary, use words.'" (108)
"hope, as Vaclav Havel has said, is a condition of your should, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself." (166)
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