My Bright Abyss: From a Passage to a Prayer

 

My Bright Abyss

Vileness Metasux Fats

Jun 24, 2024

From the book, “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” by Christian Wiman

***I’ve turned this passage into a personal prayer.***

Lord, I can approach you only by means of consciousness,

But consciousness can only approach you as an object,

Which you are not.

I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world —

Directly, immediately —

Yet I want nothing more.

Indeed, so great is my hunger for you

— Or is this evidence of your hunger for me? —

That I seem to see you

In the black flower mourners make

Beside a grave I do not know,

In the embers’ innards like a shining hive,

In the bare abundance of a winter tree

Whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow.

Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that “seem.”

Lasch Words

 

Christopher Lasch

John Jankowski

2 min read

“[Today,] people find it difficult to acknowledge the justice and goodness of…[a] higher power when the world is so obviously full of evil. They find it difficult to reconcile their expectations of worldly success and happiness, so often undone by events, with the idea of a just, loving, and all-powerful creator. Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.” — ChristopherLasch, “The Soul of Man Under Secularism”

“What democracy requires is rigorous debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. information, usually seen as the preconditions of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively — if we take it in at all.” — Christopher Lasch, “The Lost Art of Argument”