Twenty Contemporary Writers of Faith: Scott Cairns

by Micah Mattix on August 13, 2012

Scott Cairns has been around. Born in Washington, Cairns studied in Virginia and Utah and taught in Ohio, Texas and now Missouri; and while he grew up Baptist, he turned to Presbyterianism and the Episcopal church before joining the Greek Orthodox. His work shows a mind sensitive to life’s manifold sufferings and joys.

In 2009, I described Cairns as taking on the role of a “slow pilgrim” in his poems. He is “slow to hear, slow to believe,”  a “‘slow learner’ who, like a tortoise that cannot be paper trained, either admits his own slowness “utterly / ashamed” or dismisses it with “an honest shrug”: [click to continue…]

The Formalist and the Mystic

by Micah Mattix on August 6, 2012

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on God, translated for the first time in English. Rilke was a gifted poet who rejected the Catholicism of his youth partly because of the empty formalism of his mother. (It seems she would take the young Rilke on pilgrimages, to shrines, and other places to improve the family’s standing in the eyes of others.) “I shudder,” Rilke once wrote, “at her absent-minded piety, her obstinate faith, at all those caricatures and distortions she has clung to, herself as empty as a dress, like a phantom, terrible.”

Instead of rejecting God entirely, however, Rilke did what we too often tend to do–he remade Christ in his own image. Christ was divine, but so are we all, according to Rilke. His death did not propitiate our sins; rather, it was simply the result of a life fully lived:

I cannot believe that the cross was meant to remain; rather, it was to mark the crossroads. It certainly was not meant to be something to brand us everywhere. It should have dissolved in him. Is it not something like this: he wanted to simply create a taller tree on which we could more easily mature?

And:

When I say the word “God,” I do so with great conviction and not by rote. It seems to me that people use this word without thought, even if doing so from deep pensiveness. It may be well and good if this Christ should have helped us say the word in a firmer, fuller, more convinced tone of voice; but let us put a stop to involving him all the time.

Christ was an original mind who followed his intuition (or his own “divinity” or “spirit”), not the directives of others. Thus, like Emerson, Rilke transforms Christ into a mere example. He is someone who rejected the small-minded morality of others in favor of what Rilke would call life or beauty. This, of course, allowed Rilke to do the same (especially regarding sexual morals) and, ironically enough, feel all the more spiritual for doing so.

In the end, Rilke’s artistic mysticism is just as self-centered as his mother’s formalism. He empties Christ’s death of its specific significance and uses the words and figures of Christianity, like his mother used its forms, to live more fully not for God but for himself.

Twenty Contemporary Writers of Faith: Franz Wright

by Micah Mattix on July 24, 2012

Like Denis Johnson, Franz Wright is one of those literary figures who should have been found dead from a drug overdose in some motel room in California years ago. Wright’s father, the poet James Wright, left the family when Wright was eight. His mother remarried, and by Wright’s own account, her second husband was an abusive man, both towards Wright and his brother Marshall and their mother. Wright decided early on that he wanted to be a poet. He studied at Oberlin College, where he began taking drugs, and published his first book of poems at 21. After college, he made ends meet with odd jobs and his writing and translations, while continuing to struggle with drugs and, like his father, alcohol. Wright married briefly, continued to write, drink and take drugs. He suffered a number of mental breakdowns over the years and was hospitalized on five different occasions, his last at McClean Hospital in Belmont. In 1998, however, he met Elizabeth Oehlkers, married, and converted to Catholicism.

In an interview for Christianity and Literature, Wright speaks of his conversion like this:

You know, there was a time when I thought of Catholic churches as excellent places to drink. I liked to go in and sit, they’d be empty. That was when the doors were open. They keep them locked now. […] What happened was wherever I lived, wherever I happened to be; and I lived all over the place. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve found myself wandering into Catholic churches and sitting in the back and feeling really safe and happy for a while. You know, not always drinking. And I couldn’t participate. One of the things that is so poignant about the Eucharist celebration is that it represents human beings sitting down at a table and eating together and being a family. It’s not something that I experienced a lot of. I think that might have drawn me to it. It felt like a place of unqualified love and I hadn’t had that.

[click to continue…]

Christ against Other Gods

by Micah Mattix on July 21, 2012

Over at Books & Culture, I have a piece on the late poet Reginald Shepherd, a gay African-American poet from the Bronx who was interested in what he called the “myth” of Christianity throughout his life. At the end, right before he died, his partner tells us he converted. The nature of that conversion is between Shepherd and God. Yet, as I note in the review, in his final poem “the cold power of mythology’s gods is contrasted with the humble power of grace”:

Here we have a God who descends to man, becoming a weak, suckling child, in order to save. This God is indeed different from the cruel, misanthropic Greco-Roman gods of pure force. In this final poem, Shepherd captures the essence of what makes the “star” of Christianity unlike the mythical “stars” of the Greco-Romans. And it is something that both attracts and repels Shepherd. It is “a pearl, an irritant.”

Whatever his final state with respect to God, Shepherd clearly understood the radical difference of the gospel, and it is this difference that made the gospel both so appealing and so repelling to him. I wonder if this is why Christ in Revelation expresses such loathing towards those that are “lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold.” Those who either love or hate the gospel have at least understood it is something different, something otherworldly. However, those that express either a tepid acceptance of Christ (such as in “cultural Christianity”) or a tepid rejection of Him (in what we could call “cultural agnosticism,” which often holds that Christ was good but not God) steadfastly refuse to acknowledge even this.

Twenty Contemporary Writers of Faith: William Baer

by Micah Mattix on July 17, 2012

I was going to begin this series with Amit Majmudar, who writes from outside the Christian tradition but whose work, to borrow Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, is “Christ-haunted.” Instead I’ve decided to begin with the Catholic poet William Baer. I may get back to Majmudar (and other writers whose faith commitments are a bit nebulous) in a twenty-first post.

Born in 1948, William Baer studied at Rutgers and New York University before completing a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina under the poet James Dickey. He was the inaugural editor of The Formalist (1990-2004) and is the author of five volumes of poems, a number of works of film criticism, various collections of interviews with other poets and several plays. He lives in Evansville with his wife and two children and is currently the Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair at the University of Evansville. [click to continue…]

Twenty Contemporary Writers of Faith

by Micah Mattix on July 9, 2012

A common complaint of Christians is that there are no great living Christian writers. To some, it seems, the Christian imagination died with C.S. Lewis and Walker Percy.

Yet, while there is no one of the stature of Percy at the moment, there’s a lot of great work being done by novelists and poets alike that take faith seriously. As I have noted elsewhere, the category of Christian fiction or poetry is problematic. Nevertheless, over the next few months, I’ll be introducing readers to twenty writers whose work shows an understanding of orthodox Christianity and excellence in craft.

I’ll begin next week with a poet few have heard of: Amit Majmudar.

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