Grace in the face of contingency …

… Finding The Words For Faith — The Dish. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Wiman seems to feel what it means to be a modern believer, his faith always mingled with doubt, his hope always counterpoised by the nagging thought that only nothingness awaits us. There is no faked cheerfulness, no sanitizing the struggles that any sensitive religious person feels today when examining his own heart. Wiman’s work resists neat conclusions of any kind; reading both his poems and prose, you can feel the way his experiences seem to elude his grasp, the words never quite pinning down what he has endured. He has absorbed all the reasons any honest person might offer for not believing – and yet, ultimately, he does.