Christ Episcopal Church: Christ Church Artist Series with Christian Wiman

Wednesday, May 15, 7 p.m.

“And I Was Alive: Faith in a Faithless Time”

Lecture with Q & A session and reception to follow

Then I fell in love. I say it suddenly, and there was certainly an element of radical intrusion and transformation to it, but the sense I have is of color slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive…We usually think of falling in love as being possessed by another person…But it also felt, for the first time in my life, like I was being fully possessed by being itself. “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality,” Weil writes, and that’s what I had, a joy that was at once so overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things that, again for the first time, that’s what I began to feel: rootedness” –Christian Wiman, “Love Bade Me Welcome” (Gazing into the Abyss)

Celebrated poet and essayist Christian Wiman has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review. He has also published three well-received books of poetry, most recently Every Riven Thing, which The New Yorker ranked among the best poetry collections of 2010. Wiman recently announced that he will leave his position as editor of Poetry magazine to join the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

This event is free and open to the public. Christ Episcopal Church is located at W. High Street & 2nd Street NW. Free, downtown street parking is available, but save time to find it. You can also find paid parking in the downtown Water and Market Street lots.