Member Review

*endless thanks to Harper One for the early copy!!

It's difficult to be any percentage of objective and critique this collection of letters* but I will attempt to share some initial thoughts after having greedily consumed all the words in a day and a half, ignoring most responsibilities. The difficulty lies in the fact that Wiman is my favorite poet, writer, speaker, and a favorite general person, so I was tempted to unquestioningly agree with everything he writes here. I do love the fact that the book ends with a poem, and its one of his own. I think he so often quotes others (as you see here but also in his essays and his own works) that he kind of negates how strong his own thoughts and writing (and poems!) are and how effective they are at breaking down defenses, especially about faith and Christianity and theology and religion and the whole scope of existential thought patterns. I hope he knows and sees how grateful people like myself are that he exists and we are alive at the same time, what a glorious gift. To have his miraculous recovery from cancer explained, in much more vulnerable detail and feeling through these letters than I've read before, was truly life-giving and life-sustaining and faith-reviving.

I've never read Volf before, though I have Exclusion & Embrace queued up from the local library, and thus was kind of pre-dispositioned to not take his arguments and thoughts as seriously. I also have an automatic kind of aversion to men discussing theology, I'm just over the lack of diversity in modern religious-ish writing. [Notice, in contrast, how many times Wiman points out that a main reason he dislikes Apostle Paul or the Church of Christ or the modern church is because of how poorly they treat women]. However, you might ask, isn't Wiman also a man, a white man at that? Yes. I'll respond with the same thing I said about author David Dark: he's someone I've allowed to be a spiritual and literary and religious influence in my life, and there are *very few* white men I allow in any of these categories. And I guess Volf is just too thinking-oriented for me to really identify with much, whereas Wiman blends thinking and feeling and doing so well. My faith these days is mostly expressed and experienced through the arts - with music and communal singing highest on the list, and visual art, poems, fiber arts, all other forms of expression ranking much higher than sermons or scripture reading. I think it has to do with that head-and-the-heart divide, but also, I can argue against myself and say that music and poems contain words, as do sermons. It's just different...I need to *feel* something first (I also grew up in a charismatic church like Wiman's) and then I will decide how to talk about it, how to express or explain it, or if it even needs to be expressed.

That's probably enough words from me, so I'll just end with how grateful I am also to add these poems mentioned to my 'attention collection' (a phrase from David Dark):
"Old Pewter", Seamus Heaney, on which the book title is based - "Glimmerings are what the soul's composed of"
"1382", Emily Dickinson, "sumptuous destitution"
"Aubade", Philip Larkin
(I was already aware of this one from Wiman's earlier writings, but it's worth mentioning here and he talks about it more extensively in this book).

*emails :)