Tiffany Thompson: Welcome to The Understory podcast. I’m Tiffany Thompson, the executive editor of Comment magazine.
On Friday night, May 29th, in the middle of our Understory Festival, Comment hosted an abbondanza of music, discussion, theater, and beauty at the Washington National Cathedral. The Understory Uprising was a public event that asked, What does Christian humanism sound like when you let it sing? Comment‘s contributing editor, author, and podcast host Elizabeth Oldfield led a soulful discussion between theologian and author Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman that explored friendship as a theory of change as presented in their co-written book, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian. At the close of that discussion, Elizabeth asked Christian to recite “In the Time of Fire” from his collection The Dance, which came out this past July. She believed it was the spirit of wisdom calling to us in these perilous times. We’re delighted to share both that poem and Chris’s insightful introduction about its creation and content. This conversation was recorded live in the main nave of the National Cathedral during the high point of celebration of the Understory Festival hosted by Comment magazine.
Christian Wiman: I had a sense of a prophetic voice speaking, and it sort of came to me at night once. And the poem started out in the voice of a man addressing a crowd—a big crowd. And then as I wrote the poem, the voice changed to the voice of a woman. And I didn’t change it. The poem changed it. And so I went with that. I never thought about it. Man, woman, I didn’t care. I just wanted the poem.
But then Elizabeth said that backstage to me, that she thought it was the spirit—the voice of wisdom, the spirit of wisdom. And it went with a jolt through my spine, because it hadn’t occurred to me.
In the Time of Fire
She had a vision of the vowels of doves floating like snow in a common dawn. Not so much freed from gravity, she said, as in league with it. A slow, deliberate dance of chance and law.
She spoke of loneliness as a kind of sleep, nocturnal sorrows that marked the mind as lightly and palpably as prints in damp sand.
We cannot eat an image, we cried. Say it. What must we do to be saved?
There was a man, she said, who all one night, beside a lake that glimmered darkly, kneeled, because within him there worked some stricken and almost animal thing whose need he knew he was. He stilled his heart. He willed away the small rustlings and retreats behind him with the thought he thought of God. But when the dawn resolved and the lake enlightened, uneasily he rose, pierced by the thirsts that he had hindered.
A rumble went among us, glancingly, like a flame flickering limb to limb in a stand too wet to catch.
Remember the arctic eyes and pain-seamed face of the old woman selling flowers on the subway? The girl so glowing she seemed a nimbus of herself? Remember the rain that random afternoon plucking on the roof above you where you lay, matching the lassitude that it released. Look hard enough, look lightly enough, and the unlooked-at world looks back at you. That reciprocal seeing is the sight of soul.
And the man, we clamored, who set himself ablaze outside the embassy, that animate lick and jag that danced him back to ash, and the shining child crushed in the push for flour—are these lights to light the caves of our unconsciousness? Darkness, then?
She led us to a steep bluff that overlooked the blister city with its maddening sanity of high-rises and highways, black lattices of train tracks like legible scars, row after row of lights implying lives, each seeking to be itself in a mud of dread and wasted days, and said, Within affliction there remains a space. Within that space, a means of reaching free. A solidarity of solitudes forged and refined by the fires that are ours. A soul can die, but it requires consent.
Beneath us glittered the endless city. Above us struggled the unpolluted stars.
It’s time, she said. You are ready—and vanished back into the multitude before we could think to ask who we were, or for what.
