To be innocent is to retain that space in your heart that once heard a still, small voice saying not your name so much as your nature, and the wherewithal to say again and forever your wordless but lucid, your untriumphant but absolute, yes. You must protect this space so that it can protect you. You must carry it with you through whatever milieu in which you find yourself growing too comfortable: the seductive assurance and instant contempt of secularism, the hive-like certainties of churches, the mental mazes of theology, the professional vale of soul making that a life in literature can become. Something in you must remain in you, voiceless even as you voice your deepest faith, doubt, fear, dreams . . .

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss