Every Riven Thing – A Poem for Friday

Posted by DJL on Mar 9, 2012 in Poetry | 5 comments

Given this Sunday’s Gospel reading from John 2, where Jesus makes manifest that God will no longer be contained in the Temple but is now, in Jesus, on the loose, I thought Christian Wiman’s poem Every Riven Thing was appropriate. But this isn’t simply a tribute to the God present in nature; it is testimony to the God who appears in brokeness. As Wiman says in an interview with Radio Open Source:

Riven means broken, it means shattered or wounded or unhealed, and I think that notion is very important to me and my notion of God and of religion: that we are broken creatures, very broken creatures. And I don’t think of God as necessarily healing that brokeness as much as participating in it.

Wiman has had a fascinating and poignant journey as a poet and a Christian. He shares his story and talks about his life, his return to faith, his battle with cancer, and his poetry in an essay originally published in The American Scholar called “Gazing into the Abyss.” In the meantime, I commend to you his poem and pray that at least once this weekend you’ll sense God’s presence in one of the “riven things” in your life.

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing (2010).