Frederick Buechner
No one has touched me with their writing like Frederick Buechner.
When I am writing a sermon and think I have nothing to say, I read Buechner. When life gets hard, I read Buechner. When I was feeling a call to ministry, it was his writing that was illuminating my path.
He wrote clearly and beautifully about things that most writers struggle with. On his process, he quoted Red Smith: "Writing is really quite simple; all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein.” He showed tremendous vulnerability in writing about his family’s foibles and his father’s suicide, and he was able to move beyond that horrific event to show how it affected him for the rest of his life.
Buechner wrote 39 books. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but he never pastored a church.
I think in part it is his theology that continues to captivate me. He didn’t really believe that God directly acted in human affairs, but that chance played a large part in our lives. Nevertheless, he wrote, “through the chance things that happen, God opens up possibilities of redemptive human change in the inner selves, even of people who wouldn’t be caught dead believing in Him.”
I met him once, at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, where he was a guest preacher. After the service, I went up to him and told him how much his books had meant to me. He was gracious and we shared a little conversation, and he said, “You sound like you’re on the right path, Bob,” or something like that. He seemed like the kind of person that I would like to have for a friend.
There is a theme that runs through his books that says “listen to your life.” That has been good advice for me, even when it was unclear what I was listening for. And like Elijah with the sound of sheer silence in scripture, I am listening still.
Here’s just a sample of his writing:
WE FIND BY LOSING. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing. God knows. That is all that matters.
Out of Nothing he creates Something. Out of the End he creates the Beginning. Out of selfness we grow, by his grace, toward selflessness, and out of that final selflessness, which is the loss of self altogether, "eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man" what new marvels he will bring to pass next. All's lost. All's found. And if such words sound childish, so be it. Out of each old self that dies some precious essence is preserved for the new self that is born; and with in the child-self that is part of us all, there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.
-Originally published in A Room Called Remember
