Poetry has become as important to me as any reading and contemplating I do, which is why I'm always eager to remind you about our ongoing initiative, the Poetry Radial Project.

It's a place where you can discover the poetry that so many of our guests fold into their lives, and you can also delve deep into reading and listening to the many wonderful poets we've had on the show.

Check out one of my favorites that Mary Oliver read for us. I happened to be standing. You'll also find Naomi Shihab-Nai, John O'Donohue, Lailie Long Soldier, and many, many more. All that at onbearing.org slash poetry.

Support for onbearing with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives, a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

Christian Wyman is a writer who has come to give voice to his own surprise, to the hunger for faith, and the challenge of faith for people now. His Texas upbringing was soaked in both the history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture.

He wasn't formally religious for years after he left home, lived all over the world, and became a poet. Then when he was in his late 30s, he married the love of his life, found God again, and was diagnosed with an incurable, unpredictable cancer.

So Christian Wyman is more aware of his mortality than most of us, and he's bearing a kind of poetic witness to something new happening in himself and in the world.

I am convinced that the same God that might call me to sing of God at one time might call me at another sing of Godlessness.

Sometimes when I think of all of this energy that's going on, all of these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on being.

Christian Wyman is a professor in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He's published several volumes of poetry and prose, most recently Hammer is the Prayer.

I spoke with him in 2012 when he was the esteemed editor of Poetry magazine. He's a prolific writer of essays that are philosophical or theologically reflective and always in their own way both honest and poetic.

One called the limit, for example, begins with this arresting sentence. I was 15 when my best friend John shot his father in the face.

The scales of that shooting at which he was present and of Christian Wyman's own destructive anger as a child mingle with observations like this.

It was nearly dusk, my favorite time in West Texas, the light like steeping tea shadows sliding out of things.

I always talk to people about this and I've heard and read a lot of stories about the interesting ways religion and spirituality get communicated to us as children.

I have to say, Christian, that your story of all of them that I've heard all these years is the most familiar to me.

Growing up, it absolutely immersed in this religious universe, which meant everything, right? But then when I left that place, and like you, I went far, far away, the religious piece stopped to make sense as well because it was the whole package.

Yeah, I think for me it was a big loss. I didn't realize exactly how large a loss for years because I just like so many people dispensed with it and became an agnostic or whatever you want to call it.

But I wonder, you know, I've got little kids now and I do think about what I should teach them and how I should teach them in terms of their spiritual lives because I greatly value the way I was raised, which was completely immersed in that culture.

Going to church twice on Sunday and Wednesday night.

Yeah, yeah, sometimes even more. We had to learn Bible verses and say them at the heels and you were able to view the hymns and had this singing.

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