It's okay, I'm going to get you to read, um, hardly because it's just one of my favorite poems of yours, but it's Five Houses Down, which is a little picture in a neighborhood.

Yeah, this is a guy who lived down the street, um, um, And the poem is real in that sense.

And I would work for him with my friend from a very young age.

I mean, the speaker in this poem is probably 12 or something.

Five houses down.

Oh, you need to know that a sapper, I mean, if you're in England, they know this.

Yeah, sappers defuse as bombs.

It's over three pages, so hopefully it's

Maybe that'll introduce listeners who aren't familiar with your work to you, but also to the contents of what we're going to be talking about today.

Yeah, I've been at Yale Divinity School for 14 years.

And Miroslav was one of the first people that I met here.

I met him through his wife who took the very first class that I took and that I taught.

And we hit it off and we began having meals and taking walks together.

And eventually the walks became a regular thing and we would do it.

every other week or so um take a long walk around new haven and just catch up with each other and and inevitably those conversations were um heavily focused on theology i have no background in theology um i mean it's kind of an odd place for me to end up at yale divinity school no i never went to graduate school at all um and Um, at one point, so that went on for a number of years and Miroslav and I've taught classes together.

And so I'm curious what your how do you sustain faith in the day to day when, you know, the great suffering and the great joy is maybe not quite as tangibly present?

Chris, what do you mean when you write that God doesn't exist until I turn my attention to him? Do you literally mean that he's only there, you can activate his presence in the world and otherwise there's no God?

Sort of.

I mean, that comes directly from Simone Weil.

Okay.

I mean, she says that God is present in exactly the extent to which we have the capacity for attention.

And that's a big point of disagreement.

That's not a theological conviction that I have, because I don't think I really have any theological convictions, but it is, again, my intuitive sense of being in the world.

Yeah, the poem's called

And I'd love to hear from your perspective, Christian, what that means.

Yeah, I was away from God for, well, that's not the right way to put it.

I was away from any religion for two decades.

And the way God survived in me was through art, making art and also experiencing art.

And if I go back and look at that, the art that I made in those times, I can see that it's filled with God, that nothing, there's no big change.

But I wasn't willing to accept the revelations I was given in my work into my life.

It didn't change my life at all.

That's because I don't think that union with God is dependent on my hunger for God, nor even on my hunger construed as a divine gift.