Frederick Buechner - Buechner 101: Essays, Excerpts, Sermons and Friends

A Tribute to Frederick Buechner,
by Barbara Brown Taylor ............................................. 17
The Road Goes On from A Room

Faith and Fiction from Secrets in the Dark ................ 83
A Room Called Remember from Secrets

have been foisting Frederick Buechners books at religious friends for thirty years now. I think I can be a pest in my insistence that anyone interested in God, grace, meaning,and truth needs to immerse his or herself in his memoirs, essays,

novels, and sermons. (He is sort of annoyingly prolific, putting the rest of us writers to shame, with 36 published books so far, some of them bestsellers, and one (Godric) a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But he writes about the most important issues of our lives, with such wisdom, understanding and wit, that one forgives him all over again for his genius.)

I thrust him into peoples unsuspecting hands; Telling Secrets, or Godric, or The Sacred Journey, and tell them, You have got to read this.

They take a stab at his name: Boooookner, rhymes with Kookner? Broochner?
No, Beekner, Frederick Buechner, the person I consider Americas most important living theologian, that most amazing mixed grill of gentle intelligence: a brilliant, lovely religious thinker with a great sense of humor, and a first class writer.
Someone first foisted him into my hands in a derided sermon,when I was still teaching writing, at the very end of my drinking,which is to say, the end of my rope.
I have read this paragraph from Whistling in the Dark to every single class I have ever taught. I think it is my single favorite passage in his books:

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

Which is God, and which is the kingdom, right? Even typing it up now, I am blown away by how Buechner manages to be both plain and majestic at the same time.

Two years later, when I got sober, someone gave me another of his books, The Alphabet of Grace. I read Alphabet over and over,like I read C.S. Lewiss Mere Christianity. No one has brought me closer to God than these two men.

Both of them were great preachers and teachers, and writers.Both would have been famous as only theologians,or only writers,but they were both. Be still my heart.

The way Buechner writes about the natural word can bring tears to my eyes, because he sees and conveys both the visible and divine beauty in the wild strawberry and the stars, a chickadee and sweet human behavior. His sense of humanity informs myown now, of our dark confusion and radiant hopes, our selfish strivings, and gorgeous tenderness, our ruin and resurrection. He has been, like all great mentors, marbled into me, even as he has stimulated and goaded me into deeper self-discovery.

A few years later, when I saw some words of his used as the epigraph in the marvelous Prayers for Owen Meany, written by one of his early students, John Irving, my heart leapt, as if a friend had hit the big time:

Not the least of my problems is that I canhardly even imagine what kind of an experiencea genuine, self-authenticating religious experiencewould be. Without somehow destroying me inthe process, how could God reveal himself in away that would leave no room for doubt? If therewas no room for doubt, there would be no roomfor me.

Buechner writes of the truth, both of the Gospel, and of his own damaged family, and of our truth, sight unseenweve never metin a way that is so precise, revelatory and profound,that it makes me experience an awakening to spiritual reality all over again, each time. He writes about the joy and grief and mystery and confusion of each human life, his faith journey, his family, the existence of God in the most unlikely places, ie. right in front of your damn nose, in the meadow, in the baby, in the sky, in the apple tree. He writes about listening, to your own heart, to the rhythms and narrative of your own life.

And he understands how fickle and confused we are better than any preacher Ive ever heard. Forget what I said about the above passage being my favorite: listen to this one, from his novel The Return of Ansel Gibbs:

If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, youre either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: Can I believe it all again today? No, better still, dont ask it till after youve read