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Evan Rosa: Hello friends. Thanks for listening to For the Life of the World. I've mentioned over the past few episodes, we're going to be taking a summer production break for the show. That means no new episodes from now until September. Looking back over these past 249 episodes, there's so much that remains relevant for today. We never intended any of these episodes to have a shelf life, so while we're busy researching and developing and interviewing and editing new shows, we'll be releasing a few standout moments from the past six years. You can expect those to come out each Wednesday, and if we have any additional updates or announcements, that's how we'll be sharing them with you. Thanks for listening to the show, and we're excited about what we're bringing you in the fall. Enjoy today's episode.

Evan Rosa: Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf have been friends for quite a long time. The poet and the theologian share a sense of urgency about questions of faith, doubt, love, injustice, suffering, meaning, and God. They often disagree, but their friendship over the years is the bedrock for this shared search — at times expressed in lunches or dinners with their spouses, at times slow side-by-side walks, a paced discussion that might wander down the hill from Yale Divinity School to downtown New Haven, leap from a metaphor, ascend to heaven, linger in a hallway, or meander into an email.

For these past 20 years of friendship, Chris has been living with a rare and incurable form of cancer called Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia. In the fall of 2022, these walks became emails. Chris's illness was particularly bad. But if you're familiar with Chris Wiman's poetry, then it wouldn't be surprising that Chris was also wrestling with deep theological questions at the time — specifically faith and what it means to love God. It can be such an abstract question for men dealing with such a concrete diagnosis.

Unafraid to admit uncertainty, Chris wrote to Miroslav — quote — "I don't know what faith means anymore. I'm a 56-year-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." But with the stability and patience of a friendship, this becomes fertile ground for authentic and genuine questioning, real intellectual and emotional and spiritual searching, and that found its way into an extended correspondence through email. That correspondence is now with us as the book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian.

This episode is a collaborative project between Arc Magazine and For the Life of the World. Mark Oppenheimer is the editor of Arc Magazine, and he teaches at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He gathered in person with Miroslav and Chris this past spring to discuss the book, and I recorded it. Before passing you off to Mark, I want to make a recommendation that you listen to the Arc Magazine podcast — you can find it at arcmag.org, that's A-R-C-M-A-G dot org. It's a beautifully designed website and a really well-done magazine on religion, politics, et cetera. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Mark Oppenheimer: Miroslav and Chris, thanks for being with me.

Christian Wiman: Thanks for having us. Good to see you, Mark.

Mark Oppenheimer: It's good to see you guys.

Miroslav Volf: Good to be here with you.

Mark Oppenheimer: I have a weird first question. So one of your blurbs is from my friend Shai Held, the rabbi, and he writes: "Arresting and beautiful and remarkable, and it's all too rare 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 — he's the token Jew in your blurbs. Everyone else is — I don't know, does Mary Karr have a faith life? I think she's Christian, she's Catholic. Yeah, and Patrick is Catholic. Anyway, you've got some WASPs, you've got some Catholics, you've got a Nicholas Wolterstorff blurb, you've 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 expect it reaches non-Christians.

Miroslav Volf: You know, Shai is a good friend. 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 he's able to incorporate and integrate into his very deep Jewish faith. He's kind of a person I hope reads the book.

Mark Oppenheimer: We'll 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 by 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?

Christian Wiman: 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 sparked, 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: 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?

Christian Wiman: 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, you know what, what if we made this a conversation? Like, what if we really focused on what faith means to us right now? And I brought it up to Miroslav, and he was thinking the same thing. He responded almost immediately and said, let's do it.

Miroslav Volf: As I recall it — I think what's here also in the book recorded somewhere — is our very different sense of the 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.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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.

Christian Wiman: Evangelical, yeah.

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

Christian Wiman: Yeah, if I have an identity, I guess that's it.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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.

Christian Wiman: 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 it than I am a lot of the time. I mean, I say in the book, I don't think of myself as Protestant or Catholic, and I don't feel at home anywhere in Christianity. I don't feel at home. That's part of what the book is about — that sense of homelessness. And I think Miroslav does feel at home.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel less certain about God somehow being in front of me and I am facing God and having some kind of 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. That's how she talked to God — that's what she told me. I could never — I didn't know how to address it. I pray and nothing happens. I pray and it dissipates. But I still felt, always, a certain kind of presence of God — more kind of behind, more underneath. For me, it's real, and it's not so much on an intellectual level, although that's there too, but there is a basic existential sense in which that seems to be the case.

Mark Oppenheimer: Yeah, 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 to you and 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. 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?

Christian Wiman: That was all afterwards. I mean, at some point we thought we'd probably publish this, but we figured it'd be a small press, and we didn't talk at all about where it's going to be published. It was a big surprise.

Mark Oppenheimer: Once you think it's going to be published anywhere, do you then start censoring yourself a little bit? Because 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, you know, is it going to get hacked or whatever, is there going to be an Epstein-file situation. I think my friends and I are ignominious enough that this'll stay private. But the second that someone said it'll be published anywhere — you know, even in the Westville Gazette in my neighborhood — I would write differently.

Christian Wiman: 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, so I didn't really care what was in what I said or how people took it. That was a pretty strong animating factor. But I also feel like, as a writer, I never get rid of that self-consciousness — that somebody might see this. Or it's not even that exactly, it's just the self-consciousness of being a writer, you're always crafting things. I can't write a letter to a friend without suddenly crafting sentences.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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. 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. Maybe I don't mean for that to sound high-falutin or judgy, I know there's people for whom that's part of the practice, but I'm always self-conscious to some extent.

Christian Wiman: Yeah, so am I.

Miroslav Volf: But that was important to me — I think we talked briefly also about it — that it isn't that Chris doesn't become a vehicle through which I'm addressing I don't know whom, out there.

Christian Wiman: Right, right.

Miroslav Volf: So it has this concreteness — I'm writing to him, to a particular situation, and I'm writing about myself. 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.

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

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

Christian Wiman: It's really looking on the bright side.

Mark Oppenheimer: Yeah, I know you wouldn't, I'm not suggesting that on balance cancer is good, I'm just saying — well, I do sometimes think, like, if I did have a terminal diagnosis at the end of my life, I have this morbid fantasy — well, boy, I'm gonna call the ex-girlfriend who screwed me over, that boss who fired me, you know, speaking of the Templeton Foundation, boy, are they gonna get an earful. How freeing it would be to know I have limited time left. But people don't do that, so maybe that's not how it feels. But is it effective — does it feel qualitatively different to be writing under a sword like that?

Christian Wiman: It's been a number of years for me, but 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. It was the intimacy that it created and enabled, and the freedom came from it being a correspondence. I've never done any book like that, or it's never even occurred to me. That's where the real freedom was.

Miroslav Volf: You know, for me, mortality did figure in the sense — I don't know, I wouldn't have quite written the book this way if I was like 30 years old. I didn't care as much. There was not almost like 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 it. I don't care what people think as much as I might when I was 30.

Mark Oppenheimer: Yeah, I have 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, you know, that's right. At 50, you're not quite at — there's probably a different set of things you don't do after 70 or after 80 — but at 50, I'm gonna stop going to meetings that feel like bullshit to me. And I think, at 51, I feel like I've mostly achieved that.

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

Miroslav Volf: I had a colleague who was translating Karl Barth while he was in faculty meetings.

Mark Oppenheimer: I mean, that's — you can't correlate that use of time. If you're translating Karl Barth, you need every minute you can get. So page one is a letter that Chris Wiman wrote to Miroslav, February 28th — what year is that, when the book starts?

Christian Wiman: No clue. It must be 2023.

Mark Oppenheimer: Okay, let's call it 2023. 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 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 faith would be pretty simple in that regard.

Christian Wiman: It should be, you know.

Mark Oppenheimer: So what did you mean when you said you didn'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?

Christian Wiman: I think I've never quite known. There've been times in my life when I've been more secure in understanding what faith means. I think it is a very simple thing, ultimately, and it seems to me a weakness not to ascend to that simplicity. But for some reason, for me, there is great resistance to those words — the words are fraught, faith and belief. Belief I'm actually not even interested in, as a — it doesn't — 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, like — I am a person of faith, but if you put me on the spot, in my own mind, all the time, I don't know what it means.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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?

Christian Wiman: Well, as I say in the book somewhere, it's a gut feeling.

Mark Oppenheimer: Faith is like the conviction that Iran will turn out well — you just have to know it.

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

Mark Oppenheimer: Well, I understand why you love her, I know her a little bit — but also, when you quote her letters to you, it's actually better written and deeper than anything either of you say. Like, shoot, why am I not reading Danielle writing this book? You should read Danielle's book.

Christian Wiman: I did read Danielle's book. I was like, she should write all your books.

Mark Oppenheimer: Yeah. So the faith is obvious, but what it means is not.

Christian Wiman: I think I recognize faith in some lives — it seems to be apparent in some lives, in a way that I'm not sure it is mine.

Miroslav Volf: Is faith hard? I would describe it as often difficult, in a sense, if I understand faith as trust — actually to be in the state of trust, not just to ascend to it somehow, but actually existentially to trust. I find it often difficult, and I'm uncertain about it. So the 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.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 — I think you, Chris — says, well, how could it not be the case that some days it's just not there? Am I right that you were skeptical of that?

Miroslav Volf: I can't recall.

Christian Wiman: It's about the absence of God. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you said — you said it in this classroom, actually, where we're recording this podcast — that you'd never experienced the absence of God.

Mark Oppenheimer: Right. Even though God's less in the background for you — it's more sort of the hum of existence, it's always there. 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 form to it. But sometimes it's not there at all.

Christian Wiman: Right.

Mark Oppenheimer: Is that well put?

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

Miroslav Volf: I guess I differentiate — existentially, I don't know what I've said in this room, in front of what, 60 students that we've had —

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

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

Mark Oppenheimer: So you're a theologian, you're a poet, and you say you have theological convictions that God is always present —

Miroslav Volf: Of course, Christian convictions.

Mark Oppenheimer: Okay. And you write theology — 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. So why do works of theology matter at all? Is it a more profound faith, a deeper one? Does it undergird it, 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?

Miroslav Volf: 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 kind of inner logic of the trust, or the project of trust, in which I'm involved. And it raises all sorts of significant questions. 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 move, if it can't be pushed away.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 you're going to help get them there through your own work, your own questions?

Miroslav Volf: Maybe, but primarily it's actually more personal — the same. Most of the books that I wrote, I've written for myself. I'm one of those writers who doesn't have an audience. I don't know whether I'd be emotionally intelligent enough to write to an audience like that. I write what kind of deeply moves me, and I can name books that came out of an existential question before which I was standing, and it ended up the whole book. I enjoy them, and then sometimes they wag their fingers at me.

Christian Wiman: "You're not living up to this."

Miroslav Volf: Exactly, which is good — which is what I want them to do.

Mark Oppenheimer: How did the walks start? I mean, you came here, what, 13 years ago?

Christian Wiman: 13.

Mark Oppenheimer: You were already living here in New Haven and teaching at Yale.

Miroslav Volf: One of my great moments at Yale was, I was on the Provost's committee when we were considering Chris's appointment, and I said yes. I thought that was great.

Christian Wiman: I didn't know that until we did another podcast.

Mark Oppenheimer: He's owed you ever since, right?

Miroslav Volf: No, everybody was totally for him, I'm sure.

Mark Oppenheimer: I mean, there's so many possible friendships to choose from on the faculty — how did you guys find each other, and how did the walks start?

Christian Wiman: We met because Miroslav's wife, Jessica, took the very first class I taught here, Poetry and Faith. We met through her — she's a writer, and she was brilliant in that class, I was so lucky to have her in there. That's how we — I don't remember exactly how, maybe the four of us got together or something.

Mark Oppenheimer: And then why walks?

Christian Wiman: 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.

Mark Oppenheimer: Do you think so? I just read and reviewed a couple books on male friendship, and they are chock full of theories about how women relate, but men 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?

Christian Wiman: It's been more true than not in my own life. I certainly have friends I'm perfectly happy to sit across a table from and just talk, have a chat. But if you can play a sport with a friend, or something like that, that's great. Our walks — walking activates your mind, you know, and you don't have to look at the other person, you're just walking in the same way. 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.

Miroslav Volf: And it gets you exercise for the day — you feed two birds from the same hand.

Mark Oppenheimer: Fair enough. Chris, what do you mean when you write that God doesn't exist until you turn your attention to him? Do you literally mean that he's only there insofar as you can activate his presence in the world, and otherwise there's no God?

Christian Wiman: That comes directly from Simone Weil. She says that God is present in exactly the extent to which we have the capacity for attention. That's a big point of disagreement — that's not a theological conviction that I have, because I don't think I really have any theological convictions. But it is my intuitive sense of being in the world, that somehow attention has to be activated in order for presence. Sometimes your attention can be activated without it being this effort of will necessarily — in fact certain kinds of will have to be eradicated for that to happen. But it is a quality of attention. When we talk about God, I think God and consciousness are similar things, maybe words for the same thing, and the kind of presence I'm talking about occurs between us and the world as well — there's a kind of reciprocal attention that goes on, a reciprocal seeing, and I think that is God. That unity between us and creation is the presence of God.

Mark Oppenheimer: So then one of the things you're trying to understand about each other is how important it is that God exists partly in the person of Jesus. Am I right that there's some disagreement there about the role that Jesus plays in faith?

Miroslav Volf: I think the disagreement, at least from my perspective, is more that I think the objectivity of the existence of God — whatever exactly we mean by God — is a condition of possibility of God being between us, or God being the object of my attention. I don't understand what it would mean for me to create God, except to create maybe God for myself, to bring God into 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 what I bring is not simply a product of my subjectivity at the moment.

Christian Wiman: We'll come to Jesus in a minute, but I would say we all create God — there's no way around it. Even the most fundamentalist believer is inevitably creating some version of a subjective God. You can have these beliefs, you can have catechisms, a religion, confessions — but that individual subjectivity seems to me inevitable, inescapable.

Miroslav Volf: I don't disagree with that. Each one of us has a particular take on God, particular experiences with God, and that corresponds to the particularity of the self — but that's the particularity of God for me, rather than simply my creation of God.

Mark Oppenheimer: In one of your letters, Miroslav, you write to Chris, in a postscript: what is it that you came to know about yourself, about God, when you came to know Christ? I don't feel like you always answer each other's questions — I don't think you answered that one. So is there something you came to know about God when you came to know Christ? Actually, I'm not even sure how you came to know Christ, because in your book My Bright Abyss you talk about a kind of youthful epiphany, where you were so slain in the spirit you had to run to the basement, you had to leave the room. And you also talk about seeing God through your grandmother's death. There are these moments — they're not dependent on Jesus in any way, and you're not somebody interested in confessions and catechisms. So I'd love for you to answer the question: how does the figure of Christ bring you closer to God, or to your own faith?

Christian Wiman: 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. It made the word incarnation mean something in a way that I've never understood the word to mean, if it's not happening. 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. Yeah, that's a very important — that is the essence of Christianity for me.

Miroslav Volf: The first point that Chris just made — I'm hungry for that. In the course of the book I return one more time to the same thing, and I think it's so incredibly important. 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 it.

Mark Oppenheimer: You're jealous, spiritually.

Miroslav Volf: Me too. Yes, yes, yes.

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

Christian Wiman: Absolutely. Yeah, I think Christ is present in lives that don't admit him at all, may not believe in him, may not have ever heard of him. That's my understanding of what Christ is.

Mark Oppenheimer: I've talked to a number of friends lately — this would include my friend Molly Worthen, who you probably both know, who had this 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. There's always — it often starts with C.S. Lewis and ends with N.T. Wright. And, with all due respect — 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, a content there, that theology or catechisms or confessions give you.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, but I think it's secondary. I agree with that — but you were suggesting it, and Chris also stated, I think, in my case it's clearly the lives of people around me that play that role.

Mark Oppenheimer: So my question was, when you read about people who — and this is a sort of common move for preachers, you know, I'm going to give you these books, and lately it seems to be a lot of N.T. Wright, but I'm sure there were other people 50 years ago — I'm going to give you these books, and you're going to see, on the preponderance of the evidence, that Jesus was a real historical figure, that he was crucified, that he rose from the dead and 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, for reasons I can't fully articulate, seemed like an impossible way to get there. Neither of you has those stories — 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?

Christian Wiman: I'm very bored by that kind of apologetic writing. But I understand why someone might have a real hunger for God, and the way God reaches them might be intellectual — they might respond to that.

Miroslav Volf: Sometimes I think they need permission to go there, and this gives them permission — but the impulse might be coming from somewhere else that makes it possible. It's kind of a bridge.

Mark Oppenheimer: Yeah. As I think about it, the people for whom this is the bridge are people who really love — everything goes through books, big fat volumes. I'm not that — it could be as simple as I'm intimidated by big fat books, I like slim volumes of poetry, I like stuff with big margins and 14-point font, you know, I can get through it in an afternoon.

Miroslav Volf: I thought you were a historian.

Mark Oppenheimer: Well, there's a reason I didn't become an academic historian. I started that way, and I realized — I 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, gimme a full day in an empty archive, just me in the boxes of papers, it's heaven. And I thought, that's not me at all. Am I doing — where's the tennis record? I said I'd rather be playing tennis, I'd rather be watching TV, I'd rather be eating ice cream. I'm sure there are things in my professional life that do reach that level, but they're not archival, and I'm not somebody with a lot of — you know the Yiddish word, but you'll recognize it from German — sitzfleisch. I don't, I'm not somebody who can put my ass in the chair for hours and hours. Some people can do six hours in the chair, some can do 90 minutes, and I think that actually could be very important to how one comes to anything.

Christian Wiman: Yeah, it's true.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 Christ? Is that why the Bible came along, because we needed something to encode and record Jesus Christ, or because the Jews had the Bible? What do you mean, it's the finger pointing toward Jesus Christ?

Miroslav Volf: Primarily, I've viewed the New Testament and the experience of the early Christians as an encounter with the person that were living communities, communities of memories of something that originally organized the life around the particular person. So it's always kind of pointing back. And 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 — and those shiny objects are what they perceive to be the pointers to Jesus Christ, and they read that text in light of Christ, in a certain way. So in that sense, if we read the Bible as some kind of compendium of beliefs, or as a treatise, we miss it. It's relatively simple — people are articulating the sources 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, about making it all line up.

Mark Oppenheimer: That's why these apologetic works, like N.T. Wright, always strike me as fools' 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 — it seems to leach all the mystery out of it.

Miroslav Volf: 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 you a kind of hermeneutic key — not to read this as if it were history, but read it as if it was preaching, for instance.

Mark Oppenheimer: Okay.

Miroslav Volf: But nonetheless, behind it rise certain kinds of solid convictions, something that can be asserted as actually true — it wouldn't require every person to make perfect statements all the time. That would be an unfair burden.

Mark Oppenheimer: Chris, at the end of one of the letters, in late March of '23, you end with this Richard Wilbur poem. I really like Richard Wilbur, and maybe you'd read the poem for us — I couldn't figure out why you put it there, I want you to tell me why.

Christian Wiman: Is it the one that's "Joy's trick is to supply"? No —

Mark Oppenheimer: The thrush and the wildflower.

Christian Wiman: Oh, "On Having Misidentified a Wildflower" — what page is that on, 36? I was just looking for its relevance — you know, you guys, when you use Rilke it's quite — it feels very apt, I see why they're discussing Rilke — but here I couldn't figure out why you were bringing in Richard Wilbur, except maybe to introduce, you know, there's no one who ever needs a good reason to drop Richard Wilbur, but I was just trying to find the thing in it that related to your book, and maybe there is none, or — but read it for us and then tell me why it's there.

Christian Wiman: The poem's called "On Having Misidentified a Wildflower" — "A thrush, because I had been wrong, burst rightly into song in a world 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, of course, it's a conceit, as if this thrush is actually singing because he'd 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, except a grace, 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. I find this poem just magical, the way he gets this whole existential, philosophical conundrum into these four lines.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 am always intrigued by the Jews that Christians make use of — it's really interesting. Let me come in hard and say: none of y'all is interested in Talmud, the stuff Shai Held spends his life with — never see it in Christian theologians, I'm sure there's exceptions — but the stuff of the yeshiva is utterly uninteresting to Christians, whereas Levinas is everywhere for Christians. I used to joke to a friend of mine who was in Div school — if I audit one more Div class where they say "the great Jewish philosopher Levinas," I said, Jews don't read Levinas. What is it with you guys and Levinas?

Miroslav Volf: He reads Talmud.

Mark Oppenheimer: I haven't read Levinas, so I'm not going to opine on that. But there's Heschel in here, there's Simone Weil, who of course is Jewish — but did she become a Christian at the end? Isn't that right, we think she may have been baptized, but no one knows?

Christian Wiman: No one really knows. But she certainly renounced her Judaism.

Mark Oppenheimer: She renounced her Judaism, right. And then you both talk at length about someone named Etty Hillesum, who I'd never heard of, who was a Dutch Jew who began keeping a diary. Did she end up dying in the Holocaust?

Miroslav Volf: Yes.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 I'd never heard of her.

Miroslav Volf: I don't know about her fame. I actually encountered her first through Rowan Williams, the 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 from her were just so incredibly luminous. When I learned a bit about her story, I started reading her, and I'm taken by her.

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

Mark Oppenheimer: I've deliberately never learned this stuff. My daughter, who's in high school, just went, over March break, on a school trip to Germany and Poland, part of which was to go to concentration camps, and she came back and said, well, first we were at Auschwitz I, and then Auschwitz II, and one of them is Birkenau, and then Bergen-Belsen is this, and some of them were death camps but not concentration camps — 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 it is to me, the better.

Christian Wiman: I've never been either. I've been around there, I could have gone, but I find it so disturbing to think of visiting, I find it so difficult.

Mark Oppenheimer: I don't make a virtue of my ignorance of it, but I also don't like museums.

Christian Wiman: I don't either.

Mark Oppenheimer: Right on. So who — when you say the beating heart of the barracks —

Christian Wiman: She became — I mean, that idealizes it a little bit — she really did spend the rest of her life helping. She went to Westerbork voluntarily because her family was there, and she said, well, I'm just going to go there. The place was designed to house something like 1,500 people, and they had 30,000 people in there. She spent the rest of her life, which wasn't long, recording what was happening and taking care of people. It's sort of an astonishing light among all that darkness — her last bit of writing is a postcard, which she flung out of the train as it went to Auschwitz, and it said "we left singing."

Mark Oppenheimer: How do we know that? That sounds like an urban legend.

Christian Wiman: They have it. They found it, in her handwriting.

Mark Oppenheimer: All right, I'm persuadable, but you know what I mean, it has the air — sounds a little too perfect.

Christian Wiman: Yeah, it does.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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? You both quote him at different points.

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

Christian Wiman: Well, he's a good writer — especially for someone writing in his fourth language or whatever it was. His prose is good. He was very important to me when I was returning to faith — I first read him because a Jewish friend of mine, a guy named Andrew Peter, recommended him. 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. You need to be faithful to that person you were at that moment when you had it, and not let it become encrusted over with cynicism or doubts or resistance. But honestly, I love God in Search of Man and Man Is Not Alone — those books are so well written, so clear in their ideas.

Mark Oppenheimer: And also, they're not poetry, but they're short and economical, the way poets want to be.

Christian Wiman: He uses metaphors to make his ideas clear.

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

Mark Oppenheimer: I've never talked to Shai about Heschel, I should. Chris, in your letter, where you quote Heschel at length and then say, on the other hand — 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 this talk about existence and being seem like evasions. I call myself a Christian because those abstract ideas about God — by which I take you to mean Heschel's — are not enough. Which, fair enough —

Christian Wiman: But any theologian —

Mark Oppenheimer: Right. And it's at the end of that letter — I'll read the last paragraph, actually, you should read the last paragraph, on page 20.

Christian Wiman: "You mentioned the transplant. This goes to the very heart of 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."

Mark Oppenheimer: I want to end with both of you on that note. Let me start with you, Chris — is it really true that you don't fear death, you fear death without God, but death itself isn't scary?

Christian Wiman: Quite true.

Mark Oppenheimer: That's insane to me, I'm so afraid of death.

Christian Wiman: I think it's a pretty common experience, if people come very close once and then come away from it — I think it's pretty common that the fear goes away.

Mark Oppenheimer: That's so interesting. But I'm guessing that even if the fear goes away, there would still be — let's say you knew you had five minutes, you're about to give your last breath, there are people who are conscious right to the end and know the end is there — I still have to imagine the overwhelming thought would be, I'm about to leave my wife and children.

Christian Wiman: Oh, that — yeah, that's still horrible, that's grief.

Mark Oppenheimer: It's grief, not fear.

Christian Wiman: Yeah, yeah. And when you say what I fear is dying without God — is that because of the uncertainty, if there's no God, about what happens to your soul? Or is it that the actual passing would just be harder if you felt alone?

Christian Wiman: No — it's just that what I want most in my life is the presence of God, and I fear dying without that. Just being alone at the moment of death. It's not about an afterlife or anything like that.

Mark Oppenheimer: So when you've come close, or closest, has God been with you then?

Christian Wiman: That one time that I described earlier, yes — very much. There were moments this time where, I don't know, yes and no.

Mark Oppenheimer: But given that God was so very much with you that one time, and maybe this gets back to Heschel's point about being faithful to the person of faith — that would be some reassurance that God is lurking every time, I would think.

Christian Wiman: Yeah, I think — I didn't have the kind of mystical experience, I wouldn't describe what happened to me as a mystical experience. People who have near-death experiences come back utterly transformed, for the most part, and the fears that they had are gone, their lives are changed — it changes their existential metabolism somehow.

Mark Oppenheimer: It's like the best drug in the world, the ayahuasca trip to end all ayahuasca trips.

Christian Wiman: Right. I didn't have an experience like that, and so for me it's 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, it does live in me.

Mark Oppenheimer: And Miroslav, you wrote at one point that you were afraid your letters to him — your emails to him at Mass General — had a sort of admixture of condescension or pity, that you worried about?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that's a particular letter, where at the tail end of one segment about thinking about God, when I reflected about God for Chris as being a result of attention, I was worried that he wouldn't have God in that situation of need, because attention might be lacking.

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

Miroslav Volf: 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 made it impossible for him to have the experience of God and to articulate it. I felt a kind of condescension toward Chris's own wrestling, condescension at the moment when he was vulnerable. I wasn't quite sure this was appropriate. I remember thinking, in the morning — those were nightly reflections — should I or should I not, should I or should I not? And then I did, and needed Danielle to rescue me.

Christian Wiman: But that's the good thing about these letters — if you were writing a book, you'd go back and think, hmm, maybe I'd take that out, or tone that down. But there wasn't any of that.

Mark Oppenheimer: I'm curious, Miroslav — I assume you've also befriended, maybe even nursed, other people near death. I never have — 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 they knew was coming. My parents are both alive. And I'm curious — people 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 — and you think, well, right. What are your thoughts on this, vis-à-vis both your friendship with Chris but maybe other people you've talked to? It's almost a chaplaincy question, I guess — how do you talk about God with people who may really be feeling the absence?

Miroslav Volf: 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, an impractical theologian.

Mark Oppenheimer: I think that's a practical theologian, right?

Miroslav Volf: Right, so in some ways — and that's partly also a feeling of unease in this letter, because I haven't been trained as a chaplain — most of the people I've experienced nearing death have come there pretty naturally, both of my parents, and so there wasn't 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 in regard to Chris as well — not to make too much of our convictions about God at that moment.

Mark Oppenheimer: 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 two have that doesn't spill over to how you treat your cousins or college roommates or bridge partners?

Christian Wiman: I write regular letters to a friend of mine, a novelist, but it's mostly just keeping in touch. All through my twenties and thirties, letter writing was part of my creative life, and they're all just gone — I didn't keep copies.

Mark Oppenheimer: Well, presumably you got some back from some people — do you have those?

Christian Wiman: I have those, yeah.

Mark Oppenheimer: You weren't narcissist enough to keep carbon copies of everything, for your future biographer?

Christian Wiman: I didn't. But that was really important, particularly in my twenties — it was really important for me, I'd spend hours on them.

Mark Oppenheimer: Interesting.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, my first experience — no letters back and forth behind the Iron Curtain, there was no — not really interesting.

Mark Oppenheimer: Interesting.

Miroslav Volf: But I enjoyed so much that Shai and I, 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 tentatively resumed.

Mark Oppenheimer: Oh, well, good. I can hardly imagine a better correspondent than Shai Held — that's pretty awesome.

Miroslav Volf: I'm quite fond of him.

Mark Oppenheimer: All right, gents — Chris, Miroslav, thank you so much.

Christian Wiman: Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for having us.

Mark Oppenheimer: Thank you. Great book.

Evan Rosa: This episode featured Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman. You can find their book, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian, wherever books are found. This episode was made in partnership with Arc Magazine of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. A very special thanks to Mark Oppenheimer and David Sugarman for making this possible. [NAME UNCLEAR IN SOURCE AUDIO] is our production assistant. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.

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