Gone for the Day, She Is the Day
Gone for the Day, She Is the Day
Dawn is a dog’s yawn, space
in bed where a body should be,
a nectared yard, night surviving
in wires through which what voices,
what needs already move — and the mind
nibbling, nibbling at Nothingness
like a mouse at cheese
Spring!
Sometimes one has the sense
that to say the name
God is a great betrayal,
but whether one is betraying
God, language, or one’s self
is harder to say.
Gone for the day, she is the day
opening in and around me
like flowers she planted in our yard.
Christ. Not flowers.
Gone for the day, she is the day
razoring in with the Serbian roofers,
And ten o’clock tapped exactly
By the one bad wheel of tortilla cart,
and the newborn’s noonday anguish
eased. And the om the mind
makes the traffic and the bite
of reality that brings it back.
And the late afternoon afterlight
in which a much-loved dog lies
like a piece of precocious darkness
lifting his ears at threats, treats, comings, goings…
To love is to feel your death
given to you like a sentence,
to meet the judge’s eyes
as if there were a judge,
as if he has eyes,
and love.
— Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing
My introduction to Christian Wiman’ works was the book “My Bright Abyss”. The intimacy that his works create is I think what made him a unique voice, that is an intimacy between him and the readers, and humanity as a whole to the world and God. It is a voice that can only be known because it is the string that ties humanity together; suffering. The book is a wrestle, like Jacob when he wrestled with God (Genesis 22:24). In an interview with Eric Metaxas, Christian Wiman said that after he was diagnosed with cancer, seven months into his marriage, “I needed some form for [my] faith” and he continued, “I’ve never felt the pain of unbelief, until I believe”. The suffering he went through demanded a form of faith, a structure, a creed.
Then I read his collection of poems, “Every Riven Thing” . I was just glad that I was sitting in the back of the library as I wailed my eyes out at the end of the book. It was this poem, Gone for the Day, She Is the Day. I do recommend reading My Bright Abyss first or along as you read his poetry, I think it gives a little more context for the creative decisions he made.
This article is an estuary of the poem above and his book My Bright Abyss, everything I quote will be from this book.
Theology
In My Bright Abyss, he said, “So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful — perhaps the most powerful — side of God.”
Dawn is a dog’s yawn, space
in bed where a body should be,
a nectared yard, night surviving
in wires through which what voices,
what needs already move — and the mind
nibbling, nibbling at Nothingness
like a mouse at cheese
Let’s begin with the first stanza, it is a description of the mundane and everyday but there’s also a hint of frustrations: “surviving”, “wires”, “nibbling”. Then he continues to his mind, where it is a constant nibbling of vapor, intellectual pride it is, always in search of reason. Reason and intellect is usually gendered as masculine and we only understand God in half when we neglect the feminine voice. Wiman found God in the “voices of women”, we don’t just reason and ascend to faith once we have enough reasoning.
“Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except and so far as it preserves, and protects that wonderful, terrible time, when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.”
Then suddenly “Spring!” it came out of nowhere, least expected. Isn’t that what God is like? He shows up in the most unexpected time, and place. He shows up in a form we do not expect, we think of God in a certain way and He simply turns it upside down.
It is a transition, from the grumpy, intellectual, skeptic to a joyful, sunny spring, child.
Language
“Sometimes one has the sense
that to say the name
God is a great betrayal,
but whether one is betraying
God, language, or one’s self
is harder to say.”
In My Bright Abyss, he said “Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul ‘moves’ toward God, but that is only the limitations of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul. Faith is the word ‘faith’ decaying into pure meaning.” Thus why the “betrayal of language”, words decays into pure meaning. Language is a symbol, an interpretation of reality, it is not reality and therefore we feel the anguish of the limits of language. We have betrayed ourselves when we isolate our life only to reason because reason is not equal to reality, reality creates reasons and everything else that cannot be reasoned. Likewise with language, language is not equal to reality, reality contains far more than what language can convey.
“At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.”
She is gone for the day, turns out she has always been the day. She is everywhere and around me, like flowers in my backyard. “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” (Song of Songs 4:12)
And ten o’clock tapped exactly
By the one bad wheel of tortilla cart,
and the newborn’s noonday anguish eased.
And after the revelation of Christ, it is back to the mundane everyday language as the first stanza. We think that after our encounter with Christ, we will be lifted up from this world, to the “extraordinary” (whatever that word means to you) but Christ is not found beyond this life. To find Christ beyond is to find Christ here and now.
“God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love.”
“Paul Eluard said a century ago: ‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’ Or, more to the point, Christ two thousand years ago: ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ We cannot get beyond our lives until we eliminate all notions and expectations of a “beyond.”
Death
To love is to feel your death
given to you like a sentence,
We are sometimes brought to the lowest point by force; life happens to us by force.
Then you’re face to face with the absurd, and when you find out that he has eyes, you are at Love’s sight.
“I waste too much time in the little lightless caverns of my own mind. So much of faith has so little to do with belief, and so much to do with acceptance. Acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us.” Faith is an ascend and the acceptance of grace is the ascension of faith. The ascension requires you to do nothing but accept a gift, so that you may not boast.
“My God my bright abyss
Into which all my longing will not go
Once more I come to the edge of all I know
And believing nothing believe in this.”
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss