Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine for the last four years and author of books such as Ambition and Survival: Becoming and Poet, explains how learning his death is imminent soon after falling in love and getting married has “led him back to God.”

The essay reminded me rather a lot of Tim McGraw’s song Live Like You Were Dying.

I have a few things to say about this.

First of all, a disclaimer: I am a Practical Atheist. This means that I behave as an atheist, but abstract away the niggling problem of God’s existence. In short: I do not deny God’s existence, I simply refuse to worship Him. I do not empathize with the relief expressed in finding God, perhaps because I am quite relieved enough assuming that he doesn’t exist or that, at the very least, his existence has no bearing on my life. I also found Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything immensely entertaining, and agreed with much of it (although how he expects anyone religious to get past the first chapter is beyond me – it’s little more than a litany of complaints about ‘why atheists don’t like religions’).

I have some issues with how Mr. Wiman embraces God – though they are personal, and stem from beliefs in what justifies belief than anything else. However, he touches on some issues I consider very important in the exercise of religion, if one chooses to worship a god.

Justifications for Faith

Mr. Wiman experienced a terrible, and tragic, shock at perhaps the worst time in his life. He fell in love when he was depressed, and love pulled him out of depression; he describes it as “the sense I have is of color slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive.” He got married and, in the first year of his marriage, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable cancer in his blood. He doesn’t have a prognosis, and can obtain no idea of what to expect – symptoms experienced by others are varied and seemingly random.

He reached out to the notion of god with his new wife, and embraced Christianity after a lifetime of agnosticism.

The concerns I have about Mr. Wiman’s conversion are rooted in one thing: I do not think that making such a monumental decision – whether it is about religion, money, or politics – should be made when under intense emotional pressure, one that is relieved if the decision is made in the affirmative. The closest parallel I can think of today in recent politics is the Iraq War, and the steady erosion of civil liberties in the US. After 9/11, we were terrified of terrorism and eager for ‘justice’ (vengeance?) or, at the least accountability. In that very emotional time, we did things we would have never, under normal circumstances, considered; things that we are already coming to regret.

Faith, of course, is usually far less damaging if you turn out to be wrong. I say unless because there are a few doomsday cults floating around that get together and commit suicide. I would advise thinking very carefully about joining one of those…

I do not dispute the fact that taking to Christianity when he did has lent Mr. Wiman great emotional relief, and in all likelihood made the remainder of his life much better. There is an immense amount of value in the sense of peace, acceptance, and love one can get from religion; especially in extremely trying time – such as the specter of an unpredictable death. After all, there is a reason that religious people are, on average, happier and less stressed.

But I do question whether or not Mr. Wiman would have embraced Christianity if he had not been presented with his fatal disease, if his conversion would have been complete, and if he could have attained the same emotional relief from another source. I am of the opinion that while religion is a sufficient provider of emotional support, it is not a necessary one: Mr. Wiman could have obtained his emotional peace from another source. Christianity simply seems to have been the most convenient, the most accessible, and the most reliable.

From that standpoint: I do not think that Mr. Wiman’s testimony can be used as justification to persuade people to convert. It does, however, provide valuable insight into how to approach religion and how it can help, and proffers advice on how to face death.

The Strength of Faith

Perhaps because Mr. Wiman was an agnostic for his entire life, or perhaps because he was a poet, I find myself agreeing with a great deal of what he has to say about how he worships God. If I chose to worship God, I would do it in a very similar way.

I will preface this by saying that I believe that a great deal of what Mr. Wiman says correlates more with Buddhism that with classical Christianity, or at least the Christianity we’ve built over the past two millennia.

What struck me most was how Mr. Wiman thinks about faith – what it means and how to approach it:

I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.

[…]

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do […]. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world.

I came to a similar conclusion when I decided to ‘become’ a Practical Atheist. There is an intense difference between being religious because you have grown up in a religious family, attend church because you always have, and never examining why and what you believe and being religious because you choose to, every moment of the day, with a full understanding of the reasons and the consequences.

I call the first “weak faith,” and all too often it unnerves me. I do not like how some religious people refuse to accept the world; willfully disbelieve what science has discovered, take the Bible at its literal word, and deny the validity of other choices. I find people like Anne Coulter scary, and the fact that these people do things like build a Creationist Museum bewildering and unnerving. People who deny reality to maintain their own belief structure, who choose willful ignorance over informed choice, and who the go out and try to impose their beliefs on the rest of the world scare me.

The latter I call “strong faith,” and it’s something I think is very valuable. The value of faith lies, in part, in how very difficult it is to maintain. True faith, in my mind, involves actively choosing, each and every day, to worship God. To live by the principles of your religion, in the face of doubt. Indeed, faith without doubt is fundamentally worthless – there is no choice, and this you cannot
have faith: what you have is acceptance. If you never question the existence of God, never doubt the principles and laws of your religion, then you do not have faith. You merely accept God, in the same way you accept gravity, or the sun, or your emotions.

Mr. Wiman’s statement that he prays because he doubts mirrors my own beliefs about why people should pray.

I also agree that faith – the exercise of faith – should not be an internal state of mind. We live on this earth; if you are Christian, you believe that God placed you on this earth. The act of faith is the choice to believe; the exercise of faith is how you act – from faith – within the world. Personally, I do not believe evangelism is how one expresses faith – I think that faith should be expressed in every action you make, your decisions about your place in the world, and how you relate to other people. Faith in God should emanate from you into the world, and you act and participate in it.

Action becomes a validation of your faith, and each action is another choice of faith; each action should strengthen your faith.