Eric Metaxas Interviews Christian Wiman

well ladies and gentlemen welcome to Socrates in the city I have to say that this is a particularly wonderful Socrates in the city because I get to have a conversation with a character named Christian Wyman perhaps you've read about him anybody hear of Christian Wyman he'll be showing up any minute and I'm gonna do and I get to ask him anything I want that's those are the ground rules I didn't tell them that but those are the ground rules a couple of things before we start our format is a little bit different from what we normally have in fact we're gonna be doing more Socrates events that are conversations between two people and I often will be just one of those two people just in case you're worried about that but we're gonna we're gonna be doing that and tonight I I've read a Christians book my bright abyss meditation of a modern believer and it is a its prose poetry is what it is which is a coincidence because he's a poet but it's um what I would like to think of as lapidary prose it is just the kind of thing you could inscribe most of the sentences on granite and nobody would look at you funny very impressive very thoughtful I came upon the story of Christian women in this book I guess was in The New Yorker magazine and and then everywhere I turned it seemed I found more stories on him I even opened up the Yale alumni magazine which they keep sending to me even though I've never sent him a dime and by God's grace I'll never send them a dime but I have to tell you that there it was and then I discovered that Christian is going to be teaching at Yale this fall he's already moved his family to New Haven and he just took the train from New Haven to New York I think he's in the room ladies and gentlemen mr. Christian women Christian really i just-i can't-- spent the next hour gushing but i'm gonna try you can start it's uh I can start well that was good that was good I really do have to say that um your book is unlike anything I've ever read at least written by a contemporary writer or contemporary poet it it really is the sort of thing that you want to read with it with it with a pencil there's just a lot of thought in there before I begin asking you questions I want to say up front that Christian is himself a poet and was the editor was right because you no longer I think I'm editor for 36 more hours but for another thing is that right okay well is currently Wow I'm glad we got you in time yeah is currently still is the editor of the extremely prestigious and I would say almost overly well endowed poetry magazine see they don't understand that joke let me explain that poetry magazine that was not a vulgar joke we don't tell those kinds of jokes at Socrates that we know of it was a joke because a few years ago poetry magazine got a gift this was all over the New York Times this is a small poetry magazine and they got a gift of two hundred million dollars now they get the joke let me try that again almost overly well-endowed poetry magazine and so a Christian was tasked with spending that money on poetry and we just don't have time to ask you about that but that's just it's just an incredible story so but so yes so what what really struck me with your story and with this tremendous book which I hope everyone will get a copy of this evening was that you are a particularly thoughtful person you are a really terrific poet and I if you knew how much I hated contemporary poetry you'd be especially flattered and blessed by that the idea that you had somehow began to had somehow begun to struggle and deal with faith of some sort it's it's a gripping story I don't want to tell that story but I do want to ask you my first question is to say what what happened well you know it is it's very strange to me to find myself talking about faith two groups of audiences around the country as I am doing these days for a number of years I I thought it was strange to be talking about poetry given my background it is strange yeah yeah this seems even stranger that I came from a small town in West Texas called Snyder it's in Far West Texas it's about 10,000 people and I grew up in a house with no books and my only real aesthetic experience when I was growing up was religion I I came from a culture that was saturated in faith and for all of the negative things that you could say about that face and you know don't get me started there a lot of positive things that you could say as well one is the sort of enveloping world that it gives childhood and another is the kind of imaginative Flair and risk and mercurial nature that it gives childhood the sense that reality is permeated with something more than itself that that something else is always there terrence malick there's a wonderful job of showing us in his movies that that recent movie tree of life or he shows those of you have seen that he shows a family in central texas waco texas I believe and those scenes are among the most beautiful things I've ever seen because he shows the way in which our lives all of our lives you don't have to be in a rural environment or shot through with moments of timelessness I don't think you have to be a necessarily religious person to feel that in your life certainly I left that place when I was 18 seven and took off in my Trans Am and drove up to a little school in Virginia which was all-male at the time called Washington and Lee University when I was there I didn't even visit the school it was all-male which I somehow didn't hadn't I hadn't I pretended that it was the only school to which I applied it was the only school that sent me stuff in the mail I didn't take any that was college entrance court things like the SAT I didn't take those things I didn't know about it it was a different time and that was a different world and I got there and my face fell away you know like a change of clothing it fell away still easily I remember I distinctly remember the first atheists that I met and and him telling me just you know as as casually as he would you know announce a culinary preference or something that that he was he didn't believe in God and and I thought that he would be struck dead you know he could have been secretive started swiveling his head around I would been no more surprised but it all fell away for me and it it fell away for a number of years and I would never have called myself an unbeliever but I would have called my I would have I would have told you I didn't really believe in God per se I don't meet many poets or artists of any sort who are really sort of dogmatic unbelievers they all they all seem to have some susceptibility to something outside themselves that gives them some sympathy to if not religion per se at least the the world of the Spirit so for years my only connection to call it spiritual life was art and and I gave myself over to making poems and lived all around the world I just would kind of move around to places where I could manage to write poems and cut you up for a second here I want to get back to the Camaro man-ho TransAm awesome um no I want to catch every minute you just you you talk about falling into writing poetry I want to blow your mind but there are a lot of non poets in the room and most people don't fall into writing poetry and I want to ask you a little bit I mean you just make it seem so natural how did you fall in to writing poetry yeah no I know most people don't it's weird you want to do that Norton high school when you were in high school did you know you want to write poems no but I was writing when I was a little kid I was writing things when I was a little kid and and and in fact this is not it anywhere in my book I've never written about this I believe but the first pole not ever published was when I was 7 years old and I wrote a little poem we were going we were living in Dallas Texas we were going to the First Baptist Church in Dallas and which at the time was the largest Baptist Church in the world I don't know if that's still true but I I got up out of my seat when they you know they have those altar calls asked for people to come to be saved I got up out of my seat and this is sort of exemplifies my entire life as a but the conflict between my artistic life and my religious life is that I go to the altar call my parents don't know what the hell's going on there I'm I'm 7 years old going down the aisle and and and you know they probably thought it was great that I was getting saved and but in fact what I did was hand the preacher a Pullman I had written and then and then turned around and ran back up the aisle and the poem about the chickens and the wheelbarrow after this yeah now the poem was I love the Lord and the Lord loves me I will not forget and neither will he nice little rhyme did anybody say we have a budding poet in our midst the poem was published in the Southern Baptists newsletter Wow so it's probably my biggest publication you mind saying that you might sing that again that's beautiful I mean like that I've written it today it would be I think wonderful but the idea that you wrote it when you were seven say it one more time I love the Lord and the Lord loves me no I love the Lord and he loves me I will not forget and neither will he very cute it is it's very cute but yeah I went to college to get rich I went I was an economics major and I was I was tired of being poor I'd seen what being poor was like I'd had it and and so I set up in those economics courses and man I was bored yeah yeah hear you bro I couldn't I was an English major so I'm down with that boredom stuff but I did that until you know I took an English course at some point my sophomore year or something it was just a requirement and I started reading poetry for the first time ever and and that was really it that was really I remember reading very clearly I got this fellowship to go over to Oxford my junior year this were part of the year and and I bought a selection of Yeats and Elliott they were together and and I remember sitting out there and reading those things and and and just being intoxicated by the sounds of them just that there's the music of the of the language that this was new to you in college you'd not been raised in that kind of no no no yeah I was completely new I didn't know that there was such things living poets you know I didn't at all yeah and so I yeah I set out to be a poet they're not causing my it's hardly a living you're right yeah it did not make me rich Yeah right Wow so you just you just fell into this I mean I part of the reason I was so fascinated with your book and your stories is this parallels my story a little bit I was not raised in a home where we read poetry my parents were sitting in the front row and they they hate books and literature of every kind they forced me to watch Sanford and Son and and God has somehow healed that and there but but anyway but that that's pretty interesting to me that you just discovered on your own this love for poetry and and I mean that's where I had interrupted you and I mean to make you digress but I think just explained that you know you are a full-blown poet you've been not only successful as a poet but you've been charged with editing as I mentioned this tremendously prestigious and important poetry magazine so okay so we're where where were you in this story I don't remember I don't remember either I can pick up somewhere that but I was curious what it was that so you were sort of floating along in a world where you didn't really know anyone who knew anyone who was the kind of a Christian that you'd been raised but at the same time you said artists are open to something beyond themselves exactly yeah and I would have conversations with people at times always artists very secular artists about matters of faith but it was very easy to talk to them because we all would easily denigrate people who had faith we all agreed that they were idiots be careful several of those idiots are in this room I'm one of those people huh I'm one of those people no I mean really okay yeah I took several things for me too there's a there's a narrative that's told about me and and that I when I read these stories in the press that you mentioned that and I probably contributed to that was things that I've written where I had a sudden turn back to to God and my life completely changed I didn't really believe in the notion of conversions I don't really believe it happens like that I believe the way that I talk about it in the book is that I finally assented to a faith that had long been latent within me that it was a matter of simply turning towards something that was already there letting it disclose itself within me and there were however some real shocks I as I said I I'd set out my whole life to write poems and matter little other things too I wrote a lot of prose but but my passion was in writing poems could you could you keep it down I want to hear those people hello give them a chance with them a chance all right that's enough thank you all right so I had I at some point it was it was actually before I took over the editorship of poetry I found myself unable to write at all and I've gone through long droughts in the past years but this was the first one that actually stretched I guess longer than a year this went for three years you were teaching during this time I moved to Chicago to teach at Northwestern and then I was there for one year and got the job at poetry magazine so that started 10 years I was it I was at poetry magazine for tinya exactly 10 years so I couldn't write anything at all and and it was I was in a deep depression because of that it I just couldn't perceive the world around me I'd always I mean any artist will tell you this they don't you don't make art because you have an idea then you want to express it you make art because it's the way you translate your experience it's the only way that you're able to be in the world and other if you don't have that it's like having your language taken away you go mute and and all those things that you that would that would ordinarily come out of you are are sort of impacted and corrosive and and and they begin to eat at you and and that's what happened to me and and then I met the woman who is now my wife we've been married almost 10 years and and I fell in love very it was very sudden and we were married for about 7 months and then I got a really bad diagnosis a really bad cancer which has a long story but I won't tell the whole thing but but it led to a bone marrow transplant and the whole really long number of years of difficulties and all of that shocked me in such a way that I needed to give a form to my face I knew when I met my wife Danielle that that I had some kind of faith some kind of access to life that I hadn't had before and we would even find ourselves I talked about this in the book sometimes saying prayers at night even though neither of us had done this in years and it was bizarre for us to do it we felt very self-conscious doing it but we found ourselves doing it before our meals at night and this was before the diagnosis but then after that we needed I needed some form for the faith and so I began going to a church that was just up the street a United Church of Christ UCC Church did that feel awkward for you I mean disclose early on the world in which you you were swimming there it's just not the thing to do to go to church but you'd felt awkward yet you did it anyway it was at once I mean incredibly awkward I still feel awkward in church I still feel ill at ease and I just like I actually felt that way in childhood I was bored out of my skin and childhood and and you know church is often very boring it depends so much of Protestantism depends on the preacher it's a real problem we could talk about it another time but that's really why you go to Redeemer Tim Keller is fabulous yeah yeah is he here No I've lost my train of thought but that's my job yeah you pick it up here you uh well you just didn't say you you baguette I mean it sounds to me again this book you there's so much in there it's so dense it's like a fruitcake in a good way it is very dense there's just a lot there and yet there's a narrative and in this narrative you talk about this it's it's sort of a it's a fitful if drifting towards something can be fitful I don't know but it doesn't seem in other words you don't have a conversion in fact even now as I read the book and you talk about your faith it's it's just very interesting kind of faith it's not typical but it sounds like that that was that was the process I was you and you and your wife somehow oddly were compelled towards something but it doesn't sound like you really knew what yeah I'm she would say very different things Jim she would talk and she also talks about her faith in a very different way than I do so it's not the same she has much less anguish than I do I have I have a well what do you know Wednesday or an economist what is she she said I wish she were to come yeah no see that no she's a poet she's a poet but I I feel like I never felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe when all those years when I didn't really think of God when it was sort of this you know little slight noise maybe in the background it didn't really bother me at all I mean I was enjoying my life like everybody else going through my life and it didn't bother me you know people think that there's a there's this traumatic event and that and that that causes you to some somehow it slices into you and it blares at you and it says change your life and it's actually not my experience in my experience when you have some real trauma like that and somebody says hey buddy you're gonna die what happens is is the world goes client and what you realize is that you walk it's like Ulysses it's like Joyce's Ulysses what that book is the tumult of one man's mind during the course of one day and you our minds the greatness of that book is he makes you feel the Noize of your mind all the time it's just going going going going going you never stop it you never stop it well when you're told you're gonna die it stops like that and suddenly it is deadly quiet and and you can suddenly hear things that you couldn't hear before and and it's a it's a pretty profound experience there's a Jewish theologian whose name I'm forgetting a scholar that who actually has written something about this and traces it all the way back to how the word was delivered to humans but that that was my experience during that time I want to read Marilyn Robinson has author of Gilead has praised your book actually it's Mary Karr who's I want too there's a quote she says that your spiritual ancestors are CS Lewis and thomas merton like Lewis he meaning you is surprised by the joy of falling in love and like Merton he captures the smugness that can poison some atheists as it does some believers and I thought there were a couple of parts in your book were you talking about your faith and it was just fascinating that you were thinking you what you what you seemed to do throughout the book is you look at faith so sharply so clearly that you can see where faith itself can roll over into a kind of smugness in a kind of something dogmatic but you know there many people who are who are making that kind of observation in in our culture I mean it's the endless noise of you know that the people of faith are stupid but but in your careful analysis of this thing that you call faith you you also talk about rolling in the other way the idea who people who are somehow proud about while you actually you wrote about it but but somehow that there's a there can be a pride in not knowing a kind of strange self-exalting pride and saying I don't know or whatever and I I you write about that a lot in the book I mean it seems like on every other that's a real tension for me you know they're good the saying these days is I'm spiritual but not religious and and and that it's a sort of an out I mean I would have said it myself I wouldn't uh turd the words but I understand them completely it is a sort of out in a way and as I said until you get something that confronts you that makes your life demands some sort of structure it's fine to sort of free float around without a cream let's say but then you need a Creed and then suddenly you need something something fixed I think it's easy to become particularly for artists maybe but but maybe for others as well you can find that the energy of your art comes from absence or destitution Emily Dickinson has a wonderful phrase sumptuous destitution the notion of death and you mentioned Marilyn Robinson she has her books her housekeeping and my favorite of her books for need need can blossom and Duval the compensation it requires for when did we know anything so utterly as when we lack it here again as the foreshadowing the world will be made whole she goes on and on and talks it is absolutely beautiful passage at the near the end of that book but you can come so you can become I have found so addicted to the energy of that absence that you don't ever let yourself feel the presence that's in your life and Marion Marion Mars very succinctly puts it without my loneliness I would be more lonely so I keep it you know it's perfect perfect in a good way I you you you seem to vacillate in in the book I guess on your journey toward the the faith that you have but also in the faith that you now have back and forth between saying you need some kind of a Creed but the moment you grab on to it too much you kill it how do you deal with that tension I mean that's all through the book and I think that that's it's important to look at that and so I applaud you now and while I was reading it for for being so rigorous in analyzing faith and again how it can roll this way or roll this way but how do you deal with that tension I know is if somebody says you know do you believe X Y & Z yes or no you know do you believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus yes or no or doesn't it matter what you know that there's so many questions like that that divide and I think that that division can be important it's important to note do I believe this or don't I or why do I believe this or maybe I shouldn't believe this but you seem to come out more in the book in in talking about the idea that we don't want to grab Dogma or Creed's too much it's kind of like saying what does a poem mean and you say if I could tell you what it meant I wouldn't have had to write the poem right so this I didn't come up with that so but but the idea that you know a creed or or the there's a there's a there's use for it but it's limited and our faith shouldn't be limited to that but how do you deal with that because I think it's so easy to err on either side of that I guess yeah I think I think the great I mean we live in a culture of reason and I mean we are replicating the great age of reason that the fallacy is that you're gonna think your way to something that you believe you're gonna rationalize all of this you're gonna figure it out and then you're gonna reach a point at which you can assent to it you're gonna come up with a set of logical propositions to which you can assent and Thomas Merton used to say that trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs it doesn't work Dietrich Bonhoeffer whom you know intimately said said only he who obeys believes that that that that belief comes after you make the motion of obedience I talked before about feeling something not as if I was having some sort of great turning in my life a big conversion but merely sort of ascending to something that had long been latent within me III think it is that subtle of an experience I don't I I don't know how to resolve the tension between dogma and call it mysticism or an experiential religion I find it to be a constant a constant and very frustrating tension but you obviously feel that there that there is a role for creed or dogma otherwise it becomes so attenuated that what does anyone talking exactly and how do you bind a community together how do you I mean faith seems to me communal it seems to me that anytime that I that I that my faith becomes purely personal it leads me to despair I find it going inward inward inward to despair that I need I need some other I need other people around that Christ is always stronger in our brothers heart than in our own again Dietrich Bonhoeffer there very powerful idea if the word Christ bothers you then just substitute something else for it you could say maybe joy is always stronger and our brother's heart and in our own there's there is something that we need to see in other people in order for our experience to have validity but I find this to be a frustrating endlessly difficult question and I don't have an answer for it and I don't want a church you know what I don't run a church don't search a lot of people who run churches don't run Church well thank you when you say you're anguished your wife's not so angrist what do you why are you angry I mean my my instinct is to think that you would be anguished in in the same way that I was and am anguished when I came to faith because most of the people in my universe would simply think I'm crazy and so there's an anguish because you're trying to represent something but it's nearly impossible to explain and so you're just you're just kind of stuck there's no and is that your anguish no I don't feel that I I'm not I I admit I'm bothered by that but I mean I feel lonely sometimes among cuz I've my I live in a secular world for the most part although now I'm just join the Faculty of a Divinity School so that's about to change but it's yield identity school so have no fear there are they were there anywhere they would argue that they're wonderful to people of faith hiding and I can I can out them to you I know Miroslav Volf is a type of Christian that's about it I think but anyway go ahead know the anguish for me is simply not feeling God's presence it's it's simply not feeling it it's being an unbeliever most of the time okay you know so I want to stuff either your ik waiting belief with feeling well maybe I use my words imprecise they call it call it faith if that's better I usually think of belief as having objects the bodily resurrection of Christ or what have you I think of faith is not having a definite object that you can have a be a person of faith and not necessarily be able to articulate what it is that you have faith in belief seems to me to introduce the idea of objects what what do I believe in does that clear it isn't it possible to believe in something bad in other words there are plenty people living in the world who have faith in something that is you know a bad thing to believe in surely you want to dissuade them of that faith so you don't want to portray faith as just generally good I mean doesn't it have to have an object what do you mean when you say it doesn't have an object no I don't think it has to have an object unless you can somehow say that God is an object I mean God is in the way that seemed oh and they said we must believe in God in every way possible except that he does not exist because we have not reached the point at which he might exist somehow God has not we we have not come to the point at which we can perceive what God that's a kind of object listen us yeah I mean she was a she was a a Jew who never quite converted to Catholicism could never bring herself to convert to Catholicism a great writer great writer I recommend gravity and grace if you have a little book of mostly aphorisms collected after her death how do you pronounce her name again they wer never known until this moment thank you very much I can spell it but I can't pronounce it um well I still think I mean when you talk about faith so it's not a transitive verb doesn't need an object I mean well I think yeah a lot of people use it that way but I would like in my own life this is the way that I have defined it try to define it for myself that but yeah I think you can have faith without an object I do i and I think there can even be Christians who have faith without an object that they do not they find that they find themselves incapable of believing in say the dogma that you get in churches I mean there's good dogma and there's bad dog soldier but you know but isn't it our job to determine you know if it's good or bad before we give ourselves to it you don't just want to believe in something because you're told to believe in it at some point obviously you you you want to determine that this is actually true or I think this is true but there are plenty people believing bad things I mean I think and you point that out in your book actually well I'm I guess there you we could draw a distinction between noble ways of being is called a sake let's say calling uh being in abeyance having faith in abeyance or being something like that and ignoble ways or I think a writer like Simone de I think a lot of the artists that I know are people of faith I don't know how else to describe them but there's certainly not Christians and they're not Orthodox Jews and they're not Buddhist and they're not Muslims and so I'm really reluctant to say that they had bad faith they they seemed to me to be living lives that are exemplary in some way they apply themselves to something that seems to be mystical and full of meaning and and when they described his faith yes oh yeah they would describe his face but the minute introduces religion it all falls apart we did a house we different from saying you're I'm spiritual but not religious isn't that I don't think it isn't different I really I think I think that's what I mean I think there are people who can I mean that that phrase has been ruined you know it's sort of become laughable in the culture but there are people who live that way what and that's what I meant you know distinction I meant to live that way be honorably and there are others who don't there can be a kind of rigorous okay spirituality and there can be a kind of flaccid spirituality is it possible that that kind of faith without an object could lead to faith with an object that's probably the hope that would certainly seem invade hope I know that's my hope I mean that's always I feel mostly that I live in that state of faith without an object I'm constantly trying to articulate to myself what it is I believe in I don't you know I don't think a lot of people have go through this I have a sentence in that book that I can't tell whether this is a this is a something I'm called to or this is some fundamental pride in myself that I say that sometimes we're called to unbelief sometimes God calls the person to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms maybe that's true I mean I wrote it I don't know if I have to believe in it you know maybe it's true at one point maybe at another point it's pure pride I'm not sure you you you talk about the centrality of God being fully human and you say someplace that that in a way loving God or knowing God is a precursor to fully being able to love other people or maybe even said loving Christ and some of your friends where someone was put off by that and I think a lot of people would be put off by that I would be put off by that I'm gonna buy it now I'm appalled so but I guess what do you mean by that and and I suspect maybe you talk about your own suffering and about Christ being in the midst of suffering that seems to be a big part of your own faith is it real is it related to that idea no I don't I don't think so I think I think that that idea the notion that you can't really experience the love of other people until you've experienced the love of God or divine love leads to human love it's not mine it's from a Catholic theologian Hans or his Fung Balthasar and and the reviewer in the New York Times attributed to him to me and and so there was you know the confusion is really big on this religion stuff right I get a lot of stuff wrong yeah but now I don't know as Hans and I you there's one radicular idea well it's not ridiculous if you think I mean if you think that all goodness comes of God and that everything that's good is of God then the love that two human beings share whether they know God on any level that that if there's anything good in that love it is of God but they just wouldn't articulate it that way I was I was wondering if that's what you were getting at and saying that I'm not I'm just not sure why you said that but it seems very important that your love for your wife and and this this process somehow we're related well that's what I know in my own life I never experienced divine love until I experienced human love it's the reverse of Balthazar's idea I understand what you're saying but that seems to me perilously close to saying that someone can be a Christian without knowing it like Albert Camus or something that he was you know he was someone I admire enormously great writer seems to me and and people have said oh come and it also a very noble moral moral person and everybody says Oh camera maybe you know as Christians without knowing it Karl Rahner ease to have that phrase not specifically but for Camus but but for others and I think that's a dangerous thing to say because it's sort of uh you know you're you're saying oh Ken we didn't know his own mind you know he didn't know you know we can be above him and say and see maybe something overarching but I don't I just think I wouldn't do that you sure well this gets into really deep stuff I'd like to keep it a little more shallow okay hang on a second you say you you do you do in you in your book I mean you seem to kind of go back and forth but but then you a couple places clearly say that you feel that not just God is important but somehow Christ is important that's like a deal breaker for most people I think that's God can be non-threatening sort of an energy force that lets me do what I like and and then when you get to that Christ thing now at now suddenly you've gone from spirituality into religion or something unpleasant or dogmatic and why do you why does it have to be that for you unless you're you know Deepak Chopra who can make talk about good eyes consciousness which is just as meaningless as you know God and so um so I assume you're not talking about good eyes consciousness but you're talking about that was more Henry Kissinger I apologize but he you you do talk about the centrality of Christ and that's the you know it's the big one hanging out there what do you what do you what do you do with that yeah for me I I guess I have a couple of answers no doubt if I were raised had been raised somewhere else I wouldn't talk about Christ so much you you have to speak the language that you've been given it there's a wonderful theologian George Lynn back who says you can no more be religious in general and you can speak language in general he just doesn't work like that you've got to have a language and my language is Christianity and and I could change it but according to Linda I could maybe learn the language of Buddhism or I could learn the language of today Judaism to name two things that I'm very attracted to to two cultures which really interests me but I would always have a really strong accent and you would know it and it wouldn't really it wouldn't really fit but they but you do make it sound I mean it seems like you're having it both ways because if it's just a language I mean at the end of the day a word is a word so I can translate a word into German or French but it's still we're talking about something specific and in other words if you if if belief in Christ become so attenuated as to mean nothing it's just a language you know that that's I mean that's part of why I think the historicity of biblical faith is important it's not the only thing but but it's important because otherwise it does become so attenuated that it becomes hopelessly vague so I agree that's I it's absolutely important within my religion but do I believe that a Hindu person needs to convert to Christianity I do not and nor what I try to convert that person do you think that there's anybody out there who needs to convert to Christianity or to anything and those because again there are do they're positive the idea that there are they're good things you know beyond the Christian faith but there are also bad things and how does one begin to make those distinctions oh I think Christ is calling people all the time and calling people who don't have any experience of them I think it's it's can be a very difficult thing to hear and takes some real effort to hear sometimes you have to learn to hear it but yes I do indeed think that Christ is crucial to faith absolutely crucial to my victory Oh any notion I have of God which is God made human and suffering as as we suffer but I will not translate that into into some absolute notion that excludes other people that it excludes it seems to me wrong I believe Christ is president and every permutation of reality that we know I believe Christ is president Intuos and president Buddhism present everywhere but I don't think that people have to turn their lives over to them in the way that conservative Christianity teaches or even done even the liberal Protestant churches did I go to maybe they teach it too I just it may be why I'm a bad spokesman for Christianity there you have it you're pretty bad now look what's interesting is I think you'd be surprised I think a lot of conservative Christians would agree quietly with most of what you're saying because I think they've begun to see the limits of certain kinds of expressions that they see more tribalistic or more I mean what I couldn't help and I don't think it's just because you're a poet but in your book you what we're talking about is going back and forth between sort of a noun sense of the world and a verb sense of the world right and artists are into process and verb and that's sort of more feminine and then the kind of patriarchal you know dogma truth with a capital T it's more now and and what you're saying which I certainly think it's true is that real faith is both and that if you you know the Pharisees famously they were they were legal as you know and Jesus kept rebuking them pretty harshly and saying that yeah you're getting all that stuff right and yet you're totally wrong yeah and it's fascinating that you can get all that stuff right and be totally wrong as far as God's concerned it's pretty scary but they were not willing to you know shift their paradigm let's put it that way and I think that but I think that's exactly the key that is exactly where we are today at you know nothing is new and but in your book you you you just so beautifully deal with that and I think you know part of the reason why to talk to you because I don't see anyone really talking about that as bravely as as you've done because you're not trying to be you know you're not quote unquote Bishop John spawn or somebody who's openly heretical is John here good and but I just um it's interesting because at the end of the day you're flirting with what's perceived as heresy oh and and Bonhoeffer talked about that's one of the reasons I love Bonhoeffer is that it's this idea that we're talking about truth and so we have to be free to explore what is truth and and and have to be careful and it doesn't mean that one plus one ever equals two and yet we want to be we want to be careful not to pretend that the whole world revolves around statements and tenets of faith that there's more to it I just I really think you do that so brilliantly and I'm very happy that you that you've written about this what's the reaction been to the book because I uh yeah it's been overwhelmingly positive honestly I did I wrote this book I'm at been attacked some some places but mostly it's been very positive I think I think the New York Times that was a very snarky never feels smart and it she kind of snarky review yeah but still it was fine I mean that that it got reviewed in The Times that they're reviewing a book of religion and the time you know a book on religion you know it I was glad it was there i I was very upset with that one aspect of the review but I'm overwhelmed with the number of people contacting me I can't quite handle it so I just have to say the review in The Times there were parts of it that were utterly stupid and I I say that in love but it's it's a it's it's really you know makes you cringe when you read something you just say I know this is stupid because I know what more about what he's talking about than what he's talking about you know he team compared what he can park he compares you to Joe Los did joel osteen I mean I thought wow was he like on deadline and he just didn't have time to you know that was - anyway just nice he hadn't seen my hell tremendously snarky and and and ridiculous some of that stuff was but anyway but most of the response has been yeah the response has been overwhelming and there's a poet mark strand here in the city once said someone asking them what it was like being a famous poet and he said it's like being it's like being famous in your family yes and had a private Fame all right yeah yeah and and you write a nonfiction book and suddenly everybody's interested it's a different it's very odd for me because I actually don't I'm a poet I mean I that's that's what I think about all the time that's what I care about and and yet suddenly you get a lot of attention for a book that I wrote because I couldn't write any poems that's not true actually that's not that's not it's literally true I went away to Texas and rented this place had this place for a while and and was unable to write and so I began writing these little prose passages to pass the time and they were all about face I couldn't stop them from being about fate and that's how the book started and then I just the book sort of accreted over the next seven years so slowly written but it's true I mean it's tremendously poetic and super precise language you're no Jack Kerouac so yeah beautiful is beautiful and it requires reading carefully I was just thrilled that some of your the folks that you're mentioning you mean you talked about Wallace Stevens you talk about Cormac McCarthy all of these people I I feel like I I knew Cormac McCarthy before in 1983 I knew his work before anyone had heard of him and somebody described him as Faulkner with the volume turned up which is about right he's like um just that somebody has well read as as you would be exploring the subject of fate this way I don't know who are you talking to about this out there and that's the first question and then the second question is what will you be teaching it Yale Divinity School uh I'm talking to a lot of different I still get invited to a lot of to poetry related things or literature literary things there's a very secular audiences and I think they're very curious to talk about faith I find I find people are very curious even if they even if they feel put off by the discussion you know the sort of the ironclad kind of way that the discussion is conducted in public and in this country I find people particularly young people are desperate to have some language for their feelings of finding trying to find meaning in their lives and just desperate for it and so I'm talking to a lot of different people like that I talked to religious groups that I had never would have been in front of in the past and that's very gratifying to me very interesting I don't find it combative and actually if it is combative I just shut down I'm not the Marilyn Robinson has another great line from gilead her she has a preacher say nothing true can be said about God from a posture of Defense it seems to me very true these these arguments that go on between the neo atheists or what have you the fundamentalists or what have you I they seem to me so boring I can't even I cannot even pay attention and so the minute it becomes an argument through so the conversations are are you know they're great I think there's some other people that I mentioned in that book that you may not ever come across Fany how is a wonderful novelist a religious sensibility she's not necessarily thought of as a religious writer but but she's someone who's very great those of you who haven't read Marilyn Robinson she's a very great writer I think one of the great writers of our time and especially especially housekeeping Richard Wilbur he probably does of you if you're not familiar with poetry he would be a great place to start oh he's great he's great yeah he's readable yeah it's very readable I was thinking about brilliant and readable I was thinking what you asked me how do you know if you know when God is calling he has these lines Joy's trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy isn't that beautiful and we even if you feel like you've never had the call of God fine you've probably had the call of joy of some some sense of what of reality spilling out of its boundaries and the weird thing about that experience is that it leaves you with the feeling of being overwhelmingly happy joyful and yet this theme of sadness woven through it and and it's the moment elledge izing itself because we live and we sort of live in the past when you when you talk about Protestant churches depending so much on the preacher I mean it is it's interesting because a lot of great Christian writers have tended to be Catholic because I think Catholics have a much more incarnation of you of the world it's why their churches at least up until recently we're not ugly if that's my wife I'm not here by the way and I need someone who was giving a reading and they and they the phone went off and and and she took me back home actually I can you imagine actually choosing that ringtone I don't know I'm sure it's a friend of mine I know where a future friend or perhaps now a former friend but I what are we talking about oh yeah TS Eliot no we're talking about this idea of but but the ideas that Catholics I mean Gerard Manley Hopkins is a great example but but they have a less I would say that Protestantism especially Protestant evangelical ISM Falls often into this hyper enlightenment rationalistic view of reality ironically where they think of faith is I believe this and this and this and this and you need to believe this and this and this and this and if you don't you're out if you do you're in and that's it yeah we're as Catholics tend to have a more holistic incarnation of you in other words because of there's mystery they they think that art is important they think that God is in everything it's not that it's it's interesting because you can have heresy in either of those directions but just the poem in your book I can't remember who wrote it about the grapefruit who is that oh that's Craig Arnold yeah he was a poet who died he was it was a friend of mine but that it's a poem about him having a grapefruit for breakfast but it's so it's so I mean I have to say folks can get the book just for that poem it is so great all he does is describe with exquisite truly exquisite language what it is to eat a grapefruit and it doesn't seem you know in talking about it now that it's possible to be anything wonderful but it is so I don't know if he uses the word opalescent but his writing is opalescent and it is just so magnificent but what the reason I bring that up is because I'm just kind of hungry right now but the reason I bring that up seriously is that what is it about that poem there's nothing overtly or explicitly about anything beyond the world of the grapefruit or this world but it's some because it's so precise and beautiful it somehow seems to point beyond itself to whether it's God or and it just seems to be luminescent to point to something transcendent which I think all good art does and he's writing about a grapefruit it's just that's exactly what I mean by I finally got it yeah yeah I think that's the perfect example of of someone who seems to me to have to be living had lived because Craig is dead a kind of spiritual life that had no object he didn't I don't I don't know I don't think Craig had a religious bone in his body and and I'm certainly we never talked about that and and that poem though just I mean ramifies with meaning it ends with a little pause a little emptiness he described the whole poem is a description of simply cutting and eating a grapefruit nepal's a little emptiness each year harder to live with in each year harder to live without this beautiful almost Buddhist sense of being inside and outside of a moment for me that's why art is absolutely crucial to religious experience because it those are what those are the moments when I experience God and and it seems to me a poem like that lets me do it and by someone who wasn't himself religious hmmm well I mean it again it gets to this division that you know if it's all about noun and truth and dogma story can't be just about bullet points you know you have to believe these theological tenets it is something is something about story which is by definition a process so you can't nail it down it's in movement it's there's a narrative there's a passage of time there's cause and effect and somehow you can communicate things through art that you can't communicate through Creed's but to say that Kriya I mean there are a lot of people artists you know who would say well I just think all Creed's are stupid and it's all about process and I would say that says limited as saying and Creed is everything and I don't care about your stupid art and I don't mean specifically your stupid art general yeah well I just I think you didn't answer the second question a while ago about what you'll be teaching at Yale Divinity School what will you be teaching there since they don't let you talk about God in any real way yeah uh yeah this is a this is the next chapter of my life yeah I'm teaching it I actually work for the Institute of sacred music well I have a dual important appointment with the Yale Divinity School and so it's permanent that's what I'm gonna be doing from now on and I'm teaching at just one course this fall called poetry and faith and then in the spring I'm teaching a course called accidental theologians so people are doing theology by without meaning to Flannery O'Connor's letters or some of these books that I've been mentioning C Mon VAE or Fanny how and then in the future I'm going to pair up with musicians and teach courses and it's just we're we're inventing it as we go it's not a position that has existed before and so I'm inventing the courses and they're sort of letting me do it and it's a it's a and I feel incredibly incredibly lucky to be there do you believe in luck oh yeah that's I wish my wife were here she would like just reprimanding over the same damn thing before we I'm glad I can channel her but before we go I just want you to respond to you realize of course that Flannery O'Connor famously said you know if the Eucharist is a symbol then I say to hell with it right and and John Updike and I don't know if was 1959-1960 in his poem seven stanzas that Easter talks about the importance of bodily resurrection the idea that it actually happened bodily so here two artists in the case of Updike definitely wouldn't think of him as any kind of dogmatic Christian but both of whom are at some point saying that if it's merely metaphor if there's not a hard object a real thing that sort of they're saying the hell with it what do you make of that side of the coin oh wow this is they're gonna end on this no uh I agree we're gonna sing no I agree I I find that if I am in my own life if I think of the resurrection does metaphorically if I think it was just the church perpetuating into a lot of times then then yeah there's not not much there to Christianity that you need you need the bodily resurrection so I think that's crazy talk you understand yeah I understand you just yeah you just lost everybody I believe rightly in uh right at the end of you'd admit at Pahlavi incredible Charlie Rose was gonna have you on by the way um well let me let's end here let me say this I think that the work you're doing definitely in this book and then it sounds wonderfully ongoing Yale is important because all no one is doing it being willing to rigorously think these things through it's why I love Bonhoeffer and I'm happy to know that you know him and love him and I even reading through your book I I I felt like it's so Bonhoeffer like because Bonhoeffer was in the same way you couldn't pin him down as this or this or this so that he just was I was gonna say free spirit but that's such a horrible cliche I'd like to think of a nice cliche to end on it really is interesting to me that so few people are doing the kind of work you're doing and I think it's why so many folks want to read Bonhoeffer's work because there just isn't a lot of it out there so maybe I can close by thanking you for for writing this book which is just spectacular and somehow I'd like to have you back on the show but it's not a show so but I'd like to I'd like to have you back because there is so much to talk about I mean in the book I you know underline so much there's so much else I want to talk to you about but well we'll end it there before you applaud let me say that as soon as we're done Christian will hang around to sign copies of his books at that table please be orderly because I know many of you gonna want to get your books signed the the rest of us can skip upstairs to the dinner I hope you you will we'll be starting pretty quickly so don't don't linger too long down here we'll be getting started pretty quickly and I can say that I think there'll be food already plated feel free to eat it we'll just assume you've prayed quietly and but feel free to start eating because we won't have time to begin things officially we really do I really do mean it that I'd love to have you back I think that very few people are having conversations anything like this and it's a for us to explore so I want to applaud you again for bravely exploring these themes and maybe we can literally applaud you right now

Channel: socratesinthecity

Views: 20,685

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Keywords: Eric Metaxas (Author), Christian Wiman, Socrates in the City

Id: 69NFpMnb16c

Length: 65min 27sec (3927 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2014