Christian Wiman: The sociologists tell us that women prefer conversing eye to eye while men do better with some degree of peripheral attention, at least when talking with other men. True or not, for years, the two of us have taken walks together setting out from the divinity school where we both teach and making the same regular loop to the streets of New Haven. After catching up on our respective lives and loves, our talk inevitably turned to some issue of theology, philosophy, or literature one of us is wrestling with. We don’t solve any of the old conundrums, but then that’s not really the point. The point is to nourish a friendship that has changed and sustained both of us. Occasionally though, because one of us is sick or one is traveling or for a semester, our schedules are simply too mismatched. We fall out of touch for a while. It was during one of these times that a brief email exchange sparked a question, the question at the heart of Christianity, as well as many other religions. What does it mean to love God? It was Jesus’s chief injunction, of course, though he was getting it from the Hebrew scriptures. That spark flared and after a frenetic and pretty messy series of emails, we realized we’d struck something deep in both of us and also that we’d found a way to walk, so to speak, when we couldn’t. That first question is not how this book begins, but it’s fair to say that the entire exchange is a response to it.

Mark Oppenheimer: Hey friends, this is Mark Oppenheimer and you are listening to Arc, the podcast. Arc is the audio companion to the website Arc, Religion, Politics, et cetera, which is online at arcmag.org, A – R-C-M-A-G.org and is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. This week on the podcast, I have a conversation with the poet Christian Wiman and the theologian Miroslav Volf. The two men who are colleagues at Yale Divinity School have collaborated on a new book. It’s called Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian. And this book allows me to say one of my favorite words, epistolary. This is an epistolary book, meaning it’s composed of letters back and forth. Though this being the year 2026, they did not actually send letters on parchment in the snail mail with postage stamps. They sent each other emails and they collected a group of those emails into this book, Glimmerings. You’re wondering who are Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf? For many of you, these names are obscure. They are not household names unless you’re in a very special kind of household. They are rock stars in their respective Christian fields. Chris Wiman is a poet and essayist. He’s the former editor of Poetry Magazine and he now teaches poetry at Yale Divinity School. He has a fan base in the world of poetry at large, but he is especially known for the way that his writing deals with themes of faith and Christianity. Put another way, to a certain kind of aspiring minister with a poetic soul, Wiman is a very important figure right now. It’s also the case that he’s been battling a pernicious cancer for the past couple of decades and his poems and his essays about living in the shadow of death and dealing with immense pain are often assigned to students in medical school, people studying to be hospital chaplains, people curious about hospice care or end of life care. So he has a specific audience among those who are interested in Christian or faith-based poetry, another audience of people who are interested in cancer and suffering to be blunt. And then just an audience of people who love good writing. Miroslav Volf is a theologian at Yale. He has endured a different kind of suffering. He has not, as far as I know, suffered from a threatening cancer, but he grew up the son of a Pentecostal Christian minister in communist Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito. And that means that his faith was always something that was very risky until he moved to the United States. And he writes a lot in his theology about what Christianity has to say about the trials that we face in our everyday life. In particular, he has become known as somebody who writes about Christian points of view on careerism and ambition. Given that worldly goods and worldly temptations are often thought to bring people a little bit farther away from God or Jesus Christ, if that’s how you see God, they are a problem for Christian theology. And Wolf’s writing about jobs, career, money, ambition has a wide following. He also writes about other topics and in this book, he writes back and forth with Christian Wiman about all sorts of things, faith, life, God, religious observance, suffering, family, you name it. The book Glimmerings came out just a little while ago and I talked to them a couple months back about their friendship, which developed over long walks that they took in New Haven’s Prospect Hill neighborhood. I read the book and I asked if they would sit down and talk with me and they said yes. And you can find a video of this conversation on our YouTube channel. That’s youtube.com/arc magazine, youtube.com/atarcmagazine. But for now, for those of you who are not near a computer screen or don’t want the video, don’t want to see our ugly mugs, but just want to listen to two men talking about sickness and the afterlife and faith and Jesus and more. Here’s the audio of that conversation. Enjoy. I have a weird first question. So one of your blurbs is from my friend Shai Held, the rabbi. And he writes, “Arresting and beauty and remarkable and it’s all to our honesty. Glimmerings is a gem of a book I will be returning to time and again. This is a deeply Christian book, yet as a non-Christian, I was able to find both challenge and inspiration on almost every page. What a beautiful book this is. ” And I think if I’m not yet, he’s the token Jew in your blurbs. Everyone else is, I don’t know what Mary Karr, does she have a faith life? Do we know she’s Christian?

Miroslav Volf: She’s Catholic.

MO: She’s Catholic. Yeah. And Patrick is Catholic. Anyway, you got some wasps, you got some Catholics, you got Nicholas Wolterstorff, you got a reformed Protestant, but then you’ve got this Jew. And a lot of the book is about Jesus Christ and God as Christians see him, or at least as you two Christians see him. And I’m curious if you hope it reaches non-Christians, if you expect it reaches non-Christians.

MV: Shai is a good friend. So we talked about the correspondence even as it was taking place. Your question, do I expect it to reach? I’m not sure exactly what to do with the reach. I’m hoping people will read it and take from it whatever they find useful and helpful. But Shai is, I think, really capacious in the way in what he’s able to incorporate and integrate into his very deep Jewish faith. And he’s kind of a guy that I hope reads a book kind of a person. I hope reads the book.

MO: We’re going to get back to some of the Jews in here because it’s me here. Would one of you read the introduction, which gives us a sense of what the book is for people? It’s jointly written. I think it’s signed both of you or the preface, I guess, which is on Roman numeral 15. It’s signed by both of you, but maybe one of you would read it aloud. Chris, would you read it aloud?

CW: Sure. The sociologists tell us that women prefer conversing eye to eye while men do better with some degree of peripheral attention, at least when talking with other men. True or not, for years, the two of us have taken walks together setting out from the divinity school where we both teach and making the same regular loop to the streets of New Haven. After catching up on our respective lives and loves, our talk inevitably turned to some issue of theology, philosophy, or literature one of us is wrestling with. We don’t solve any of the old conundrums, but then that’s not really the point. The point is to nourish a friendship that has changed and sustained both of us. Occasionally though, because one of us is sick or one is traveling or for a semester our schedules are simply too mismatched. We fall out of touch for a while. It was during one of these times that a brief email exchange sparked a question, the question at the heart of Christianity, as well as many other religions. What does it mean to love God? It was Jesus’s chief injunction, of course, though he was getting it from the Hebrew scriptures. That spark flared and after a frenetic and pretty messy series of emails, we realized we’d struck something deep in both of us and also that we’d found a way to walk, so to speak, when we couldn’t. That first question is not how this book begins, but it’s fair to say that the entire exchange is a response to it.

MO: So the entire exchange, this series of letters back and forth, you see as being prompted by the question, what does it mean to love God?

CW: Yeah, we had a brief email exchange about that. I can’t remember how it started, but I responded to you or something and that sparked a quick exchange. And then as I was thinking about it, I thought, what if we made this a conversation?What if we really focused on what faith means to us right now? And I brought it up to Mirisov and he was thinking the same thing. And he responded almost immediately and said, let’s do it.

MV: As I recall it, I think what’s here also in the book recorded somewhere is our very different senses of love of God and approaches to love of God or more basically how animating that is in our lives. I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God. Whereas from Chris, this was kind of the energy of not just poetic creations, but of life as he lives it. That to me is a very interesting contrast and I was eager to learn more.

MO: Which is also interesting because you come out of a Pentecostal tradition originally and Chris, I don’t know what kind of church you’ve landed in, but you came out of a Southern Baptist or Baptist church.

CW: Evangelical.

MO: But your identity now I think of as more liberal Protestant. Is that fair?

CW: Yeah. If I have an identity, I guess that’s –

MO: So if one were to put stereotypes on it, one would say you’re all about praising the Lord all the time and you’re reticent about God language, but in fact that doesn’t work out at all.

CW: Well, I’m not sure about that. I think Miroslav is more comfortable with the language as we talk about the big concepts at the beginning of this book. He’s more comfortable with him than I am a lot of the times. I mean, I think I say in the book, I don’t think of myself as a Protestant or Catholic. And I don’t feel at home anywhere. In Christianity, I don’t feel at home. And that’s part of what the book is about is that sense of homelessness. And I think Miroslav does feel at home.

MV: I feel less certain about God somehow being in front of me and I am facing God and having some kind of a interchange, which is what I grew up with, which is what I witnessed every single day. My mother’s prayers were kind of a source of her life. And that’s how she talked to God actually. That’s what she told me. I could never, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to address. I pray and nothing happens. I pray and it dissipates. But I still felt always and do a certain kind of presence of God more
behind, more underneath. But for me, it’s real and it’s not so much an intellectual level, although that’s there too. But there is a basic existential sense in which that seems to be the case. Yeah,

MO: You have a great exchange in the book where you say, “I feel God is sort of behind me and under me. ” And Chris comes back and he says, “I don’t really know what that means.” So we’ll get to that in a second, but let’s back up a minute. And so when you figured out, okay, we’re going to do this by email, at what point do you lay on top of that the knowledge that we’re going to get a book contract and we’re going to get some money and Harper’s going to let us go talk to people and put a marketing budget? And does that affect the exchange at all?

CW: That was all afterwards. I mean, at some point we thought we’ll probably publish this, but we figured it’d be a small press, but we didn’t talk at all about where’s it going to be published? And it was a big surprise. But once

MO: You think it’s going to be published anywhere, do you then start censoring yourself a little bit? Because I think I would. I think the second I knew there was an audience, I mean with most of my friends, I’m pretty free. I don’t worry about is it going to get hacked or whatever I think. Is there going to be an Epstein Files situation? But I think my friends and I are both ignominious enough that this will stay private. But the second that someone said it’ll be published anywhere, even in the Daily Bugle or whatever, the Westville Gazette in my neighborhood, I would write differently.

CW: Yeah, I’m not sure I do. I mean, I guess there’s two questions there. One is that I didn’t really think I was going to live. And so I didn’t really care what was in what I said or how people took it. So that was a pretty strong animating factor. But also I also feel like as a writer, I never get rid of that consciousness, that self-consciousness that somebody might see this or it’s not even that exactly. It’s just the self-conscious of being a writer. You’re always crafting things. I mean, I can’t write a letter to a friend without suddenly crafting sentences.

MO: No, I’m the same way. And I’m always mystified by writing teachers who talk about just free write or pre-write, just let go. If you’re doing that, I almost think people who do that aren’t writers, that if it’s productive for you to do it badly for a while, then you wouldn’t know how to do it well. I don’t mean for that to sound highfalutin or judgey. I know there’s people for whom that’s part of the practice, but I’m always self-conscious to some extent.

CW: Yeah, so am I.

MV: But it was important to me. I think we talked briefly also about it, that Chris doesn’t become a vehicle through which I’m addressing, I don’t know whom, out there. So that it has this concreteness I’m writing to him to particular situation and I’m writing about myself. And I think it took some discipline for that not to simply go out of hand into some kind of theological treatise or something of that sort in my case.

CW: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, that did really focus it because I was completely concerned with how does Miroslav hear this? How’s he hearing it? Nobody else.

MO: Is it a slight upside having a quasi-terminal diagnosis that sometimes you feel like it doesn’t matter? I can write whatever I want. I mean, what you just described of feeling liberated because you didn’t think you were going to live, so who cares how people read this? It sounds a little nice. Is that crazy or potentially offensive? I know you wouldn’t opt for cancer, but – It’s

CW: Really looking on the bright side.

MO: I know you wouldn’t. I’m not suggesting that on balance cancer’s good. I’m just saying

CW: I’m regretting that I wasn’t in a situation like this.

MO: Well, I do sometimes think if I did have a terminal diagnosis at the end of my life, I have this morbid fantasy where like, well, boy, I’m going to call the ex – girlfriend who screwed me over. Boy, that boss who fired me, speaking of the Templeton Foundation. Boy, are they going to get an earful? How freeing it would be to know that I have limited time left. But people don’t do that, so maybe that’s not how it feels. But is it affected? Does it feel qualitatively different to be writing under a sword like that?

CW: It’s been a number of years for me, but I mean, this was a particular instance where it seemed I was out of options. But in all honesty, the exchange was completely… This was like a lifeline for me. And it was the intimacy that it created and enabled. The freedom came from it being a correspondence, which I’ve never done any book like that or it’s never even occurred to me. So that was the real freedom.

MV: For me, mortality did figure in a sense. I don’t know. I would’ve quite written the book this way if I was 30 years old and I didn’t care as much. There was not almost something to protect in writing. I was able to write more, this is how I think what I feel. This is how I’m going to express. I don’t care what people think as much as I might when I was 30.

MO: Yeah. I have a friend who told me, a friend who’s 80, who told me that when he was 50, he decided he wasn’t going to any more meetings he didn’t want to go to. And I thought, that’s right. At 50, you’re not quite at… There’s probably a different set of things that you don’t do after 70 or after 80 or whatever. At 50, I’m going to stop going to meetings that feel like bullshit to me. At 51, I feel like I’ve mostly achieved that.

CW: Richard Wilbur, he didn’t quite agree with that. He thought that you should still go to all the academic meetings and everything, but he would bring a book. And read it under the table.

MV: I had to call it who was translating Carl Bart while he was in faculty meetings.

MO: I mean, you can’t quarrel with that use of the time, right? I mean, you’re translating Carl Bart, you need every minute you can get. So page one is a letter that Chris Wiman wrote to Miroslav Volf, February 28th. What year? Do you know what year that is when the book starts?

CW: No clue. 23 must be 2023. Yeah. Okay.

MO: Let’s call it 2023. I

CW: Think 22. And you

MO: Write – 22. Well, here’s a hint. You’re going to be 56 years old. “Dear Miroslav, I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m 56 years old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me. And I don’t know what faith means. “Now the letter into the book and the book to some extent go on to explicate that, but can you just tell me what did you mean by that? Because you are a Christian, you believe in God, whatever that means. But I would think that faith would be, I don’t know, pretty simple in that regard.

CW: It should be.

MO: So what did you mean when you said I don’t know what faith? Had faith just become occluded or cloudy or invisible or had this been a change or have you never known what faith means?

CW: I think I’ve never quite known. There have been times in my life when I’ve been more secure at it and understanding what faith means. I think it is a very simple thing ultimately. And it seems to me a weakness not to assent to that simplicity. But for some reason, for me, there is great resistance to those words or great… I don’t know what the word is exactly. The words are fraught, faith and belief. The word faith. Faith and belief. Yeah. Belief I’m actually not even interested in as a verb. Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that. Faith is your relationship with God, your individual relationship with God. And yeah, I often feel at sea. I am a person of faith, but I feel like if you put me on the spot, but in my own mind all the time, I don’t know what it means.

MO: So then how do you even know to call yourself a person of faith? Why does that seem a settled case? But the language that describes it seems fuzzy.

CW: Well, as I say in the book somewhere, it’s a gut feeling like Trump. He has a gut feeling.

MO: Faith is like the conviction that Iran will turn out well. You just have to know it.

CW: No, but I compare it to the same way that I have organized my life around poetry. The same way I know that I love my wife in a different way that I’ve ever loved anyone. It’s the same gut instinct.

MO: Well, I understand why you love her. I mean, I know her a little bit, but also when you quote her letters to you and it’s actually better written and deeper than anything either of the two of you say. Shoot, why am I not reading Danielle writing this book? You should read Danielle. I did read Danielle’s book, but I was like, she should write all your books. So the faith is obvious, but what it means is not.

CW: I think I recognize faith in some lives when it seems to be apparent in some lives in a way that I’m not sure it isn’t mine.

MV: Is faith hard? I mean, I would describe it as often difficult. In a sense, if I understand faith as trust and actually to be in the state of trust, not just to ascend to it somehow, but actually it’s essentially to trust. I find it often difficult. And I’m uncertain about it so that doubt is always, I won’t say infesting, but maybe that’s not quite the right word. It’s always there present, almost like a constituent element of it being a trust rather than some kind of certainty and control.

MO: At some point in this book, there’s a little back and forth about the question of whether it ever vanishes entirely. One of you says, “I can’t imagine that it ever completely goes away.” And one of you says, “Well, I think you, Chris, saying, well, how could it not be the case that some days it’s just not there?” And am I right that you were skeptical of that?

MV: I can’t recall. You can’t recall.

MO: But I mean, I always figure –

CW: It’s about the absence of Godhead. You said it in this classroom actually where we’re recording this podcast that you’d never experienced the absence of God in the way that I was describing.

MO: Even though God’s less is more in the background for you or more sort of hum of existence, it’s always there. And for you it’s more, I mean, you write on page 14, God is relation full stop. It’s much more relational. When God’s there, there’s more there there, I would say, or more form to it, but sometimes it’s not there at all. Is that well put?

CW: Yeah, I think so. I like what Miroslav said about doubt being a constitutive element of faith. I think of it as absence being a constitutive element of presence. I get that from Simone Weil. Sorrow being a constitutive element of joy. For me, they are always completely bound up. And so it’s not one or the other. I mean, you can experience the presence of God in God’s absence. It’s a fundamental paradox, I think. So it’s not as if you’re shifting back and forth. It’s always the two things together in my own life.

MV: I guess I differentiate between existentially, and I don’t know what I said in this room here in front of what, 60 students that we’ve had.

MO: This is the class you co-teach on suffering.

MV: Yeah. But certainly existentially, I don’t feel that God is present very often, but I have also theological convictions that are also very deep-seated. They’re not existentially enacted, but nonetheless, they’re there and do important work. And that is that God is actually present. The God in whom I believe is such or God whom I doubt is such that God is always present.

MO: So I mean, you’re a theologian, you’re a poet, and you say you have theological convictions, that God is always present.

MV: And of course – Christian convictions, I would say.

MO: Okay. And you write theology. I mean, you read books and you read these books and you write these books. But you’ve also talked about, certainly in your childhood, seeing a lot of passionate Christians who were not literate Christians. And you have that wonderful moment where you talk about your grandmother’s piety, which was not an intellectual piety. You’ve both seen people whose Christianity has nothing to do with works of theology.

CW: Right.

MO: Yeah. So why do works of theology matter at all? Is it a more profound faith, a deeper one? Do it undergirded? Does it help you stay Christian when otherwise you might not? What’s the point of the project given that some of the best Christians are indifferent to it?

MV: But I have these questions. They’re nagging at me. So I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the inner logic of the trust or the project of trust in which I’m involved. And it raises all sorts of significant questions. And I realize that for a lot of people that is an obstacle to faith and it becomes an obstacle to faith for me if it’s stubborn and won’t be pushed away, that question.

MO: So is there an apologetic purpose to what you’re doing or a missionizing purpose that there are people who need theological answers to questions to become Christians or better Christians and through your own work, your own questions, you’re going to help get them there?

MV: Maybe, but primary is actually more personal. That is the same. Actually, most of the books that I wrote, I write for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience. I don’t have an audience and I imagine, and I don’t know whether I would be emotionally intelligent enough to write to an audience like this. I write what deeply moves me. And I can name books that came out of existential question before which I was standing, ended up the whole book and I enjoy them. And then sometimes they wag their fingers at me, “But you wrote in your book.”

CW: You’re not living up to this
MV: Exactly. Which is good, which is what I want them to do.

MO: How did the walks start? I mean, you came here what, 10 years ago, dozen years ago? 13. 13 years ago. You were already living here in New Haven and teaching at Yale.

MV: One of my great moments at Yale was I was on provostial committee when we were considering Chris’s appointment and I said yes. So I thought that was great.

CW: I didn’t know that until we did another podcast. He’s owed you ever since.

MV: No, no. Everybody was totally for him.

MO: I’m sure. There’s so many possible friendships to choose from on the faculty. How did you guys find each other and how did the walk start?

CW: We met because Miroslav’s wife Jessica took the very first class that I taught here, poetry and faith. And so we met through her and she’s a writer and she was brilliant in that class. I was so lucky to have her in there. I don’t remember how we, maybe the four of us got together or something. I don’t remember.

MO: And then why walks?
CW: I don’t know why we started taking walks. We started having lunch and then I think it’s what we both admit in the book that men like to walk or men –

MO: I just read and reviewed a couple books on male friendship and they are chock full of theories about women relate, but me have to do stuff together to relate. Men need to be hunting or fishing or throwing a ball or something. Do you think that’s true?

CW: I mean, it’s been more true than not in my own life. I certainly have friends that I’m perfectly happy to sit across a table from and- And just talk. Have a chat. But yeah, if you can play a sport with a friend or something like that, then that’s great. I mean, walking activates your mind and you don’t have to look at the other person, you’re just walking in the same way. And we would start here and go all the way down to downtown New Haven and come back up and it would take exactly one hour. It was perfect.

MV: And you get sort of exercise for the day. You feed two birds from the same hand.

MO: Fair enough. Chris, what do you mean when you write that God doesn’t exist until I turn my attention to him? Do you literally mean that you can activate his presence in the world and otherwise there’s no God?

CW: Sort of. I mean, that comes directly from Simone Weil. I mean, she says that God is present in exactly the extent to which we have the capacity for attention. And that’s a big point of disagreement. And that’s not a theological conviction that I have because I don’t think I really have any theological convictions, but it is again my intuitive sense of being in the world that somehow attention has to be activated in order for presence. And I mean, sometimes your attention can be activated. It’s not this effort of will necessarily. In fact, Weil talks about it the ways of certain kinds of will have to be eradicated for that to happen. But it is a quality of attention. And I find it not… I mean, when we talk about God, I think God and consciousness are similar things, words for maybe the same thing. And the relationship, the kind of presence that I’m talking about occurs between us and the world as well, that there’s a kind of reciprocal attention that goes on, a reciprocal seeing or something. And maybe I use that phrase. I know I’ve used it elsewhere. And I think that is God. I mean, that unity between us and creation is the presence of God.

MO: So then one of the tensions that’s there, I wouldn’t say tensions between you, but one of the things you’re trying to understand about each other is how important then is it that God exists partly in the person of Jesus? And am I right that there’s some disagreement there about the need for, not the need for Jesus, but the role that Jesus plays in faith?

MV: I think the disagreement, at least from my perspective, how I see it is more that I think that kind of the quote unquote objectivity of the existence of God, whatever exactly we mean by when we say God is a condition of possibility of God being between us or God being object of my attention. So I don’t understand what would it mean for me to create God, except to create maybe God for myself. Also to bring God in relation to myself through an act of attention, which I think is right. But just for that reason, I think I need also certain beliefs about God so that which I bring is not simply product of my subjectivity at the moment.

CW: We’ll come to Jesus in a minute, but I would say we all create God, that there’s no way around it. Even the most fundamentalist believer is inevitably creating some version of a subjective God that you can have these beliefs of
MO: Catechisms. A religion, confessions.

CW: Right. But that situation, that individual subjectivity seems to me inevitable, inescapable.

MV: I don’t disagree with that so that each one of us has a particular, I would say, take on God, particular experiences with God. And that’s just right and corresponds to the particularity of the self. But that’s the particularity of the common God as God for me rather than simply my creation of God.

MO: I mean, in one of your letters, Miroslav, you write to Chris in a postscript, “What is it that you came to know about yourself and about God when you came to know Christ?” And I don’t feel like you… You guys don’t always answer each other’s questions. I don’t think you answer that one. So is there something that you came to know about God when you came to know Christ? And actually, I’m not even sure how you came to know Christ because in your book, My Bright Abyss, you do talk about a kind of youthful epiphany where you were sort of so slain in the spirit, you had to run to the basement, you had to leave the room. And you also talk about sort of seeing God through your grandmother’s death. I mean, there are these moments. They’re not dependent on Jesus in any way. And you’re not somebody who’s interested in confessions and catechisms. So I’m actually curious, I’d love for you to answer the question. How does Christ, the figure of Christ, bring you closer to God or to your own faith in whatever?

CW: Well, I can’t remember if I say it in the book, but there was a period of time when I was greatly suffering and everything became lit up for me in a way that was enfleshed. I mean, material reality seemed, it made the word incarnation mean something in a way that the word doesn’t mean if it’s not happening. And so there was that which I took to be Christ. And there was also my understanding of suffering, that I understand God to be suffering with us and God to have suffered exactly what we’ve suffered. And yeah, that’s a very important, that is the essence of Christianity for me.

MV: The first point that Chris just made, I’m hungry for that. And I think in the course of the book, I return one more time to the same thing. And I think to me, that’s so incredibly important because in some ways you can think of it theologically, you can read spiritual writers who write about similar kinds of experiences or even who describe Christ as this glowing presence of God in the world. But Chris has this profound experience and I want to know more about that. I’m completely taken by that.

MO: You’re jealous.

MV: Kind of. Spiritually. Yes, yes.

MO: So you knew to think of it as Christ. As you say, we all create these things for ourselves in part. And one reason that you did create this or recreate this experience in your mind, identify with Christ is because of course you knew the New Testament, because you knew about Jesus Christ. Do you think there are people who perhaps in similar moments of suffering have similar experiences, otherworldly dissociative, epiphanic, whatever you want to call it, experiences who, because of where they were raised or what they read, don’t know who Jesus Christ is and then identify it with something else?

CW: Absolutely.

MO: You do?

CW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think Christ is present in lives that admit him at all, may not believe him, may not have ever heard of him. Yeah, that’s my understanding of what Christ is. Yeah.

MO: You’ve been listening to my conversation with theologian Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman. We’ll have more in a moment, but for now I want to commend our website to you. It’s arcmag.org. We’ve been running content about the 250th anniversary of our country, the sestercentennial, as people should learn to call it. It’s a more elegant and specific word than just semi-quincentennial half of 500 years. Sestercentennial is a special word for 250 years. And we’ve been running pieces about that birthday, including a really beautiful one by my friend Tom Gogola. It’s about how stamp collecting took him back to his childhood in the mid 1970s and made him think about the bicentennial the last time around. Commemorative stamps have come out again for the sestercentennial. Some of them have been curated by the clothing designer, Ralph Lauren. But Tom’s essay is not about that. It’s about growing up working class on Long Island, losing his mother young and finding solace in stamps. So go over to arcmag.org and read that essay and so much more that’s at arcmag.org. I also want to announce here for the very first time that we are soon to begin including in the Arc family of podcasts a pod called Eminent Americans. It’s hosted by Daniel Oppenheimer. He of the fashionable last name. He’s my brother. I confess. And he does a lot of what I do, but the people he interviews come from the world of secular arts and letters, much as the people I interview are often from the religious world. It’s Dan’s take on the contemporary American or Anglo-American intellectual scene. He’s had many terrific guests. Some of them are people I’ve also had on like Damon Linker. Others are not. Others are people like the biographer Benjamin Moser, for example, or the historian Jason Sokol and many more. Eminent Americans will make its debut pretty soon and we’re going to drop one of its episodes into our feed. So if you get into your podcast zone, whether at the gym or in the automobile and try to listen to Ark the podcast and sometime in the next few weeks discover you’re listening to Eminent Americans, that is why because we’re going to do some cross promotion. But for now, back to my interview with Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf. I’ve talked to a number of friends lately. I mean, this would include my friend Molly Worthen, who you probably both know has had this sort of somewhat famous conversion historian at Chapel Hill whom I’ve known since college. And she among others have pointed to having done the reading as bringing them to Christianity. It often starts with C.S. Lewis and ends with N.T. Wright. And that with all due respect to, and again, I’m talking about a few close friends in this case, that always baffles me. It always seems to me that it has to start from some sort of embodied lived experiential understanding. And then perhaps the theology can refine ways of thinking about it. Or in your case, Miroslav, I guess you’re saying there has to be a set of things to think about there, a content there and theology or catechisms or confessions give you that.

MV: But I think it’s secondary. I agree with that. I think you were suggesting it, but Chris also stated, I think in my case, it’s clearly the lives of people around me that play that role.

MO: So my question was when you read about people who, and this is sort of a common move for preachers. I’m going to give you these books. And again, lately it seems to be a lot of N.T. Wright, but I’m sure there were other people 50 years, I don’t know who it was 50 years ago. I’m going to give these books and you’re going to see that on the preponderance of the evidence that Jesus was a real historical figure and that he was crucified. Okay. And that he rose from the dead and was walked among them three days later. And as a logical, empirically grounded, rational person, you’ll just see that this is what it is and you’ll come to it. And it’s always, partly for reasons I can’t articulate, seems like an impossible way to get there. How do you feel when you… Neither of you has those stories. I mean, you were both raised with a lot of religiosity to begin with and then you’ve also had different ways of settling into Christianity as adults. Those aren’t your paths. So when you see those paths, how do they strike you?

CW: I’m very bored by that kind of apologetic writing, but I understand why someone… I mean, somebody might have a real hunger for God and just be… I mean, the way God reaches them might be intellectual. They might respond to that. Go ahead.

MV: Or sometimes I think that they need a permission to go there and this gives them permission, but that the impulse might be from somewhere else coming and that makes it possible. It’s kind of a bridge.

MO: Yeah. I mean, as I think about it, the people for whom this is the bridge are people who really… Everything goes through books. Everything goes through big fat volumes. It could be as simple as I’m intimidated by big fat books. I like slim volumes of poetry. Maybe that’s why I like. I like stuff with big margins and 14 point font and I know that I can through –

MV: I thought you were a historian.

MO: – In an afternoon. Well, there’s one reason I didn’t become an academic historian. It’s true I started that way. And I realized I one time was talking to my advisor, John Butler, one of my advisors. And I said, “Do you really love being in the archives?” And he said, “I love it. ” He said, “Oh God, give me a full day in an empty archive, just me and the boxes of papers. It’s heaven.” And I thought, “That’s not me at all. What the hell am I doing here?”

MV: Where’s that tennis record?

MO: Yeah. I said, “I’d rather be playing tennis. I’d rather be watching TV. I’d rather be… There’s so many things I’d rather be eating ice cream.” And I’m sure there are things in my professional life that do reach that level, but they’re not archive. I realized they weren’t archival. And I’m not somebody with a lot of… So the Yiddish word, but you’ll recognize from German, sitzfleisch. I’m not somebody who can put my ass in the chair for hours and hours. It’s just like some people can do six hours in a chair and some can do 90 minutes. I think that actually could be very important to how one comes to anything.

CW: Yeah, it’s true.

MO: Yeah. Late in the book, Miroslav, you write to Chris, “For me, the Bible is the finger pointing toward Jesus Christ, a very human figure. Christian theologians have only rarely believed that God dictated the Bible the way the Muslims believe that God dictated the Quran. I leave a lot of room for omissions and additions for revisions and embellishments.” So what do you mean by that, that the Bible is the finger pointing toward Jesus Christ? Is that why the Bible came along? Is that because we needed something to encode and record Jesus Christ? Is it because the Jews had the Bible? What do you mean that it’s the finger pointing toward Jesus Christ?

MV: Well, so primarily I haven’t viewed the New Testament and the experience of the early Christians was encounter with the person. They were living communities, but they’re communities of memories of something that originally organized the life around the particular person. And so it’s always kind of pointing back. And then when you see how they relate to the Hebrew Bible, they relate to it both as their own sacred text, but in it, they go for these little shiny objects. Those shiny objects are what they perceive to be the pointers to Jesus Christ and read then that text in the light of Christ in certain way. So in that sense, I think if we read the Bible as some kind of a compendium of beliefs or if we read it as a treatise, we miss it. It’s relatively simple people that are articulating the sources of their source of their own faith by pointing to Christ. And that’s why you have these four different gospels and stories that conflict. Nobody was concerned about precision and description.

MO: How did God line up? Well, that’s why these apologetic works like N.T. Wright always strike me as fool’s errands because they’re trying to say, look, if you read closely enough and know enough languages, you can see that it all makes perfect sense. But faith doesn’t make perfect sense and religion doesn’t make perfect sense. Let’s leach all the mystery out of it.

MV: Yeah. I think to be fair to Tom, I think Tom might recognize that various gospels have discrepancies that cannot be harmonized. And he would give it to you a kind of hermeneutic key not to read this as if that were history, but read it as if it was preaching for instance. But nonetheless, that behind it rise certain kind of solid convictions and something that can be asserted as actually true.

MO: And wouldn’t require every person to be making perfect statements all the time. That would be an unfair burden on it. Chris, at the end of one of the letters in, it was late March of 23, you ended with this Richard Wilbur poem. I really like Richard Wilbur. And maybe you’d read the poem for us and I couldn’t figure out why you put it there. I want you to tell me why you put it there.

CW: It the one that’s Joy’s trick is to supply dry?

MO: No, it’s the thrush and the wildflower.

CW: Oh, what page is that?

MO: 36 on having misidentified a wildflower. I was just looking for its relevance. When you guys use Rilke, it feels very opposite. I see why they’re discussing Rilke. And here I couldn’t figure out why you were bringing in Richard Wilbur except maybe to introduce… One never needs a good reason to drop Richard Wilbur, but I just was trying to find the thing in it that related to your book. And maybe there is none, but maybe read it for us and then tell me why it’s there.

CW: Yeah. The poem’s called On Having Misidentified a Wildflower. A Thrush Because I had been wrong, burst rightly into song in a world and not vague, not lonely, not governed by me only. And I think the reason it’s there is it seems to me to perfectly express the preceding sentence, “There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it. ” The surprise in that poem is that he gets, of course it’s a conceit as if this thrush is actually singing because he’s been wrong about the name of the wildflower. But the world clicks into place. His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world. He has another poem where the mind is like a bat and he describes it except sometimes a graceful error corrects the cave. When he has the bats flying all around, the mind does that through reality and sometimes a graceful error corrects the cave. And I find this poem just magical. It’s great. The way he gets this whole existential dilemma philosophical conundrum in these four lines of poems.

MO: Yeah, it’s super compressed.You could unpack it forever. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about the Jews who pop up in this book besides Jesus, of course. I’m always intrigued by the Jews that Christians make use of. I mean, it’s really interesting. So let me come in hard and say none of y’all’s interested in Talmud. The stuff Shai Held spends his life with, never see it in Christian theologians. I’m sure I’m wrong. I’m sure there’s exceptions. You can see you searching the… The stuff of the yeshiva is utterly uninteresting to Christians. Whereas Levinas is everywhere for Christians. I always used to joke to one of my friends who was in Div school, is like, “If I audit one more Div class where they say, and the great Jewish theologian or philosopher Levinas,” I said, Jews don’t read Levinas. What is it with you guys in Levinas?

MV: He reads Talmud.

MO: He reads Talmud. But okay, I haven’t read Levinas. I’m not going to opine on that. But there’s Heschel in here. There’s Simone Weil, who of course is Jewish, but then we don’t know if she became a Christian at the end, isn’t that right? We think she may have been baptized, but no one knows.

CW: No one really knows.

MO: No one really knows.
CW: But dhe certainly renounced her Judaism.

MO: She renounced her Judaism, right? And then you both talk at length about someone named Etty Hillesum.

MV: Hillesum. Yeah.

MO: Hillesum, whom I had never heard of. Who was a Dutch Jew who began writing, keeping a diary. Did she end up dying in the Holocaust?

MV: Yes. Yeah.

MO: Maybe just teach me about who she is. Do you expect that your readers will have heard of her? Am I the ignoramus here? Is she actually quite famous? Because you make a lot of her and quite beautifully so, I would say, but never heard of her.

MV: I don’t know about her fame. I have actually encountered her first through Rowan Williams. He has –

MO: Archbishop,

MV: Former archbishop. Former archbishop. I think there was a short text, maybe Tokens of Trust, where he refers to her and some of the things he quotes her and some of the things were just so incredibly luminous. And when I learned a bit about her story, I started reading her and I’m taken by her.

CW: I’ve taught her for years. She was Jewish in Amsterdam and had no particular, but secular, had no particular religious impulse or anything when she was on her training. And then suddenly found herself praying at one point in her life. And the prayers are, I mean, some of them are included in her book. I mean, the things she would pray. And they’re Jewish, they’re Christian at times, Christian inflected at times. She clearly read the gospels. You can’t really describe them. Well, I mean, her goal was to become the living heart of the barracks, as she said.What’s that Westerbork is the camp that they were sent to before being shipped to Auschwitz or wherever.

MO: I’ve deliberately never learned. I’ve never been to concentration camps. My daughter who’s in high school just went over March break. Her high school sent a trip to Germany and Poland, which in part was to go to concentration camps. And she came back and sort of said, “Well, first we’re in Auschwitz one and then Auschwitz two. And one of them is Birkenau, so it’s Auschwitz-Birkenau. And then Bergen Belsen is this. And some of them were death camps, but not concentration camps.” And she had the whole taxonomy and she looked at me as if I would know this stuff. And I thought, I never wanted to know this stuff. The more obscure this is to me, the better. That’s my –

CW: I’ve never been either. And I’ve been around there. I could have gone, but I find it so disturbing to think of visiting. I find it so difficult.

MO: I don’t make a virtue of my ignorance of it, but I also don’t like museums.

CW: I don’t either.

MO: Right on. So when you say the beating heart of the barracks,

MO: She became the saint of the camps basically.

CW: Essentially. But that ironizes it a little bit. She really did spend the rest of her life helping. She went to the Westerbork voluntarily because her family was there. And so she said, “Well, I’m just going to go there.” I forget what the number is, but the place was designed to house like 1,500 people and had

MV: 30,000 people

CW: In there. And she spent the rest of her life, which wasn’t long, but recording what was happening and taking care of people. And it’s sort of an astonishing light among all that darkness. I mean, her last bit of writing is a postcard, which she flung out of the train as it went to Auschwitz. And it’s saying, “We left singing.” I mean, it’s –

MO: How do we know? That sounds like an urban legend.

CW: But they have it.

MO: They have it? They found it? Yeah. In her handwriting and all that.

CW: Yeah, they have it.

MO: Yeah. All right. I’m persuadable, but you know what I mean? It has the air. It sounds like too perfect.

CW: Yeah, it does.

MO: Right. That’s interesting. And then Heschel, what does Abraham Joshua Heschel mean? Why is he in this book? What’s the significance for each of you of him? You both quote him at different points.

MV: I came to Heschel through my doctoral supervisor, Jürgen Moltmann, who discovered the passion of God in Heschel, especially in Heschel’s book Prophets. And read then his book on Sabbath, which is I think an amazing book. He always spoke to me as a figure with whom I could clearly identify. And it seems to articulate that kind of dynamic relationship to God that’s very, very compelling. So every time I read Heschel, I am enlightened and I’m enlivened, if you want to put it this way.

CW: Well, he’s a good writer. He is a good writer. Yeah.

MO: Especially for someone writing in his fourth language or whatever

CW: It was. Yeah, his prose is good. And I mean, he was very important to me when I was returning to faith. I first read him, he was a Jewish friend of mine, a guy named Andrew Patner who recommended him. But his fundamental idea that has helped me so much is that faith is mostly faithfulness to the times when you had faith, which I find pretty helpful. I mean, you need to be faithful to that person you were at that moment when you had it and not let that become encrusted over with cynicism or doubts or resistance. But honestly, I love that God in search of man and Man Is Not Alone. The other one, both those books are so well written. I mean, they’re just so clear, his ideas.

MO: And also they’re not poetry, but they’re short and economical in the way that poets want to be.

CW: He uses metaphors. He does. He uses metaphors to make his ideas clear. Yeah. Yeah.

MV: And yet he’s a profound thinker or maybe because he’s such a profound thinker. I got to him also deepen my understanding of him through Shai Held. Shai has written a doctoral dissertation on Heschel.

MO: On Heschel. Yeah. No, I know. And I’ve never talked to Shai about Heschel. I should. I should. Chris, in your letter in which you quote Heschel at length and then talk about… And then say on the other hand you say, “But all of this is awfully abstract. We have not mentioned Christ who slams reality into place around us in a way that makes all talk about existence and being seen like evasions. I call myself a Christian because those abstract ideas about God, by which I take you to mean Heschels are not enough.” Which fair enough.

CW: But any theologian.

MO: Yeah. Right. And I get that. And it’s at the end of that letter. I’ll read the last paragraph. Actually, you should read the last paragraph on 20.

CW: You mentioned the transplant. This goes to the very heart, that Heschel quote above. “I’ve written these paragraphs as well as the previous letter from a room in Mass General where my body has been subjected to various extremities in order to keep it a body to keep me in it. People sometimes say that God becomes clearer in moments of suffering, but this is not necessarily true. What becomes clear is one’s longing for God. Everything is stripped away and very little else seems to matter. After living with cancer for 20 years, I have been too close to death too many times to fear that anymore. What I fear is dying without God. These letters help me feel God’s presence, or at least the possibility of that. ”
MO: I want to end with both of you on that note. Let me start with you, Chris. So is it really true that you don’t fear death? Year death without God, but not death. Death itself isn’t scary.

CW: Quite true.

MO: That’s insane to me. I’m so afraid of death.

CW: Yeah, but I think it’s a pretty common experience. If people come very close once and then you come away from it and I think it’s pretty common that the fear goes away.

MO: So interesting. But I’m guessing that even if the fear goes away, there would still be, let’s say you knew I have five minutes, I’m about to give my last… There are people who are conscious right to the end and they know the end is there. And let’s say you were one of those. I still have to imagine the overwhelming thought would be I’m about to leave my wife and children. I mean it’s still horrible.

CW: It’s grief.

MO: It’s grief. It’s terrible grief.

MO: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s not fear.

CW: Yeah.

MO: And when you say what I fear is dying without God, is that because of the uncertainty? If there’s no God, the uncertainty of what happens to your soul? Is it because if you’re dead, you’re not there to worry about whether it’s God or not. So what’s the fear? Is it the actual passing would just be harder if you felt alone?

CW: No, it’s just that’s what I want most in my life is a presence of God. And I fear dying without that. Yeah, just being alone at the moment of death. But no, it’s not an afterlife or anything like that that I’m thinking about there.
MO: So when you’ve come close or closest, has God been with you then?

CW: Well, that one time that I described earlier, yes.

MO: Yes. Right.

CW: Yeah, very much. And there were moments this time where, I mean, yes and no. I don’t –

MO: But given that God was so very much with you that one time, and maybe this gets back to Heschel’s point, faithful to the person with faith, Right. That would be some reassurance that God is lurking every time, I would think.

CW: Yeah. I didn’t have the kind of mystical experience that I wouldn’t describe what happened to me as a mystical experience. People who have near death experiences, capital N-D-E, they come back utterly transformed for the most part. And the fears that they had are gone. Their lives are changed. It really changes their existential metabolism somehow.

MO: It’s like the best drug in the world. It’s like the ayahuasca trip to adult ayahuasca trips,

CW: Right? Right. And I didn’t have an experience like that. It wasn’t like that. And so for me, it is still a struggle to have faith, to be faithful to the moment when I had faith, but it does burn in my body. I do still feel it. I does live in me.

MO: And then Miroslav, you wrote at one point that you were, I want to get this right, that you were afraid that your letters to him, your emails to Mass General had a, was it a sort of admixture of condescension or pity that you worried?

MV: Yeah, that’s particular one letter where at the tail end of one segment about thinking about God. And when I reflected about God for Chris as being result of attention, I was worried that he won’t have God in that situation of need because attention might be lacking. And so –

MO: If God’s presence requires your attention and there you are in immense suffering and with all the business of dying going on, does it almost send God away that you can’t give attention at that point?

MV: Exactly. If God is not the one who breaks through your lack of attention to make God’s self known, somehow I felt his conception of God is making it impossible for him to have the experience of God and articulating it in such a way felt a kind of condescension toward Chris’s own wrestling and condescension at the moment where he was vulnerable. And I wasn’t quite sure that this was appropriate. And I remember in the morning, those are our nightly reflections in the morning. I remember thinking, should I or should I not? Should I or should I not? And then I did and needed Daniel to rescue me.

CW: But that’s the good thing about these letters because if you were writing a book, you would go back and you’d think, maybe I’d take that out or maybe I’ll tone that down. But there wasn’t any of that.

MO: And I am curious, Miroslav, I assume you’ve also befriended, loved, maybe even nursed other people who are near death. I never have. I mean, my grandfather a little bit, but I wasn’t there the last few weeks. And his mind was mostly going. I’ve never had a friend who’s very close to a death that they know is coming. My parents are both alive and so forth and so on. And I’m curious, people can step on all over, can have two left feet when it comes to deploying God talk with people who are dying or very sick. You get something wrong and someone says that’s the least helpful thing you can say. Don’t worry, God’s walking beside you. Fuck you. What are your thoughts on this? I mean, vis-a-vis both your friendship with Chris, but maybe other people you’ve talked to. I mean, it’s almost a chaplaincy question, I guess, but how do you talk about God with people who may really be feeling the absence?

MV: Yeah. And I’m not sure actually that I know. I often make the crazy dumb excuse that I’m a systematic theologian, which is to say I’m impractical theologian. I think about these things.

MO: Call a practical theologian, right?

MV: Yeah. Right. So in some ways I find that, and that’s partly also feeling of unease in this letter because I haven’t been trained as a chaplain. And most of the people who I’ve experienced nearing death have been pretty kind of naturally brought there, both of my parents. And so there was not this worry of mine. I had to be present to them and that was basically it. And maybe that’s what I should have concluded with regard to Chris as well and not to make too much of our convictions about God at that moment.

MO: So last question, do either of you have an epistolary life otherwise? Are you postcard senders, letter writers, compulsive emailers, or is this a special thing you guys have that doesn’t spill over to how you treat your cousins or college roommates or bridge partners?

CW: I write regular letters to a friend of mine, the novelist Naeem Murr, but it’s mostly just keeping in touch. I can’t remember if I said it, and maybe I didn’t say it in the book. It was on podcast. All through my 20s and 30s, I mean, letter writing was my part of my creative life

CW: And they’re all just gone. They’re all just

MO: You don’t know where they are?

CW: I didn’t keep copies.

MO: Well, presumably you got ones back from some people. Do you have those?

CW: I have those, yeah.

MO: You weren’t narcissist enough to keep carbon copies of every letter you sent for a future biographer.

CW: I didn’t, but that was really important, particularly in my 20s. It was really important for me. I mean, I’d spend hours on them.

MO: Interesting.

MV: Yeah, my first experience. Interesting.

MO: No letters back and forth to Behind the Iron Curtain? There was no-

MV: Not really.

MO: Not really.

MV: Not really.

MO: Interesting.

MV: But enjoyed so much that Shai and myself at one point, even before this letter exchange, about a year before started and it was aborted due to my, I don’t know, negligence, uncertainty about it. And it has been tended to resume.

MO: Oh, well, good. I can hardly imagine a better correspondent than Shai or a correspondent I’d rather have than Shai Held. That’s pretty awesome.

MV: I’m quite fond of him.

MO: All right, gents. Chris, Miroslav, thank you so much.

CW: Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for having us.

MO: Thank you. Yeah. This interview with Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf, authors of the book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian was co-produced by me and Ark and the Danforth Center and the Yale Divinity Schools Center for Faith and Culture. Over at Yale Div, we have relied on the extraordinary talents of Evan Rosa. And here at Washington University, we have relied as ever on the extraordinary talents of my deputy, David Sugarman, who edited this podcast and our controller, Sherry Pena, our director, Abram Van Engen, our events director, Hannah Pierce, and many more fine people. Make sure you’ve subscribed to Arc the podcast. Also check out all the content over at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and we’ll see you soon.