[The Bookshelf #82] A Fugitive Gleam

Elisabeth Elliot, Justo González, Christian Wiman

Friends, thanks for reading these thoughts on books. If you’re so moved, please share this edition with a friend.

I enjoy writing for you—and I enjoy hearing from you, so do let me know what you’re reading these days.

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What I’ve Read Recently

“People who have been away from God,” writes Christian Wiman in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (FSG), “tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal shadow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.”

If that paragraph resonates with you, so will the book. If it doesn’t, well, it won’t.

Wiman, whose work has comforted and confounded me over the years, has here set out to grapple—as only he can—with the mysteries and paradoxes of hope and despair, sorrow and joy. The book is comprised of fifty chapters of varying length, bracketed by a prologue and epilogue, both titled “Zero.” Some of the “entries” are nothing more than a single short poem. Others are longer essays. Others still read like a commonplace book; entry #18, for example, consists of a series of possibly related quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, Yehuda Amichai, Søren Kierkegaard, W.B. Yeats, Katie Farris, August Kleinzahler, Vernon Watkins, Gabriel García Márquez, and George Oppen.

These entries were written, it becomes clear, over many years. And for most of that time, Wiman was living with what seemed to be an incurable cancer. (As of last spring, he is in remission.)

“I had—have—cancer,” he writes in one of the early entries. “I have been living with it—dying with it—for so long now that it bores me, or baffles me, or drives me into the furthest crannies of literature and theology in search of something that will both speak and spare my own pain.”

Zero at the Bone doesn’t lend itself to summary; CliffsNotes ain’t happening here. That’s because Wiman isn’t making some singular, easily regurgitatable argument. He’s not solving a problem with actionable data. In these entries he’s searching and wrestling, lamenting and hoping. You can’t accuse him of not telling the truth.

“One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. ‘I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,’ writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘and You gave them to me.’”

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What I’m Reading Now

For a while now, poco a poco, I’ve been making my way through Justo González’s magisterial The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (HarperOne). It’s long and not exactly a page-turner. But González—a Cuban-American and Methodist historian of the church—writes with characteristic warmth, giving this book a degree of readability that sets it apart from similarly well-researched tomes. So much so that I intend to tackle the second volume as well before the year is through.

Reading church history, it seems to me, is one important way of understanding where we are in the scheme of things, as particular kinds of Christians in one particular moment in time. It puts the divisions and dilemmas of our day in perspective. When we see examples in church history of faithful sacrifice and courageous conviction—those who embody the fruit of the Spirit—we can be encouraged. And when we see our spiritual forebears wandering through proverbial wildernesses of error—the bloodshed of the Crusades comes to mind—may we be humbled.

The men and women who populate the story of Christianity (and The Story of Christianity) are indeed “a great cloud of witnesses,” as the author of the letter to the Hebrews puts it. As we get to know them, we’re better able to recognize what faithfulness looks like while identifying and avoiding maybe just a few of the snares that so easily entangle. The Lord being our helper.

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What I Might Read Next

For missionary kids of a certain age—at least among the children of Bible translators—there are few figures who loom as large over our imaginations as Elisabeth Elliot. I read a couple of her books when I was younger (my feelings were mixed). More recently I appreciated Kathryn T. Long’s God in the Rainforest, a nuanced retelling of the deaths of five American missionaries—including Elisabeth’s first husband Jim—and how that story would become “the defining missionary narrative for American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century.”

Now, on the recommendation of our friend Wes, I’m eager to read the new biography Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (Crossway) by Lucy S. R. Austen. It’s up next.

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As always, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these reflections. And do let me know what you’re reading these days.

Tim

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