Joy in Pain?

This week Bill Moyers interviewed poet, Christian Wiman, who held us spell-bound as he shared his experience of deepening faith since receiving a fatal diagnosis. ". . . faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product," he said. My current experience of being with family as my niece lives into her third week on a ventilator, opened me to hear Christian's description of how God's Incarnate life with us is terrible in pain as well as in exquisite joy. "We grieve the reality of our loss, not the loss of our reality." "This is why," Christian continues, "even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow." "For many people God is simply a gauze applied to the wound of not knowing, when in fact that wound has bled into every part of the world, is bleeding now in a way that is life if we acknowledge it, death if we don't." "Christ is contingency." (Those are challenging words.) "Christ's life is right now," not by any necessity other than who he is and who we are.