Tobias Wolff on Faith and Doubt
Writer Tobias Wolff has a beautiful essay in the New Yorker that makes the point that art and poetry are often the means by which we come to faith. He tells the story of seeing a Bergman film, “Winter Light,” at a local church, with a friend while a student at Oxford. He begins by telling the story of the film, and the aftermath in the church: Tomas, a Lutheran pastor and widower, is suffering a crisis of faith, barely going through the motions of his ministry; indeed, he can’t even find the heart to treat his lover, a schoolteacher, with kindness. One of his parishioners has become obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At his wife’s urging, this man, a fisherman, comes to the pastor for reassurance, some blessed word of hope that he can grasp as a lifeline, but Tomas can offer nothing but the bleakness of his own despair. The fisherman commits suicide. Yet Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally ...