Frederick Buechner is on the verge of becoming one of my favorite writers. Everything I read by him seems utterly inspired. He may even be my favorite non-fiction writer, because in many ways he is a combination of the two favorites I already had: Philip Yancey and Anne Lamott. He has Yancey’s burden to find the truth and gift for articulating things that ought to be beyond articulation, minus his melancholy. And he has Lamott’s passion and love for people without her loosey-goosey approach to the gospel. It’s incredibly refreshing and encouraging.
Secrets in the Dark is a collection of sermons taken from Buechner’s life as a preacher. I’d read snippets of some of these in other places – Yancey, for one, tends to quote him copiously. But reading his brilliant statements in the context of the sermons from whence they came makes them that much more powerful. I hesitate to quote here for that reason, but I want to at least share a few of the things he said that meant the most to me.
One of his great gifts is the way he takes Bible stories that, for someone like me who has grown up hearing them, have grown a bit rusty and stale. I’m not even sure how to read some of these stories as written anymore; I know that a lot of their power is lost on me simply because I can basically recite them. Buechner retells them in a way that gives them back their freshness. For instance, the story of Jacob when he wrestles God. This story has always struck me in a peculiar way but I’ve never been sure why. I didn’t understand why God would allow Jacob to think he was winning for so long only to permanently cripple him right at the end, nor did it make sense to me that Jacob would ask for blessing, when his more immediate need would seem to be healing, or protection. After reading Buechner’s rendering of the tale, I get it now, and it is incredible. He tells the story of the wrestling match after brief synopses of other episodes from Jacob’s life, namely when he traded for his brother Esau’s birthright and then stole the same brother’s blessing from their father Isaac. He also gets rich and marries multiple wives who bear him multiple sons. When he meets God by the river, he’s on his way to claim the land that Isaac gifted him before his death. Jacob’s whole life has been one blessing after another, most of them undeserved, and I hadn’t ever put that together before. And as Buechner says, the only blessing missing now for Jacob is the one only his Creator can give him. “Not a blessing that he can have now by the strength of his cunning or the force of his will, but a blessing that he can have only as a gift.” Of course. And that makes so much sense because that’s how all of us are. We seek blessing from family, friends, jobs, looks, etc., but at the end of the day, if any of us had God in a chokehold, we would still demand His blessing. Because none of the rest of it is enough. As Buechner says in a later sermon: “The old saying is that where there is life, there is hope, and I think that the hope that there is is the hope that, if not tomorrow or the next day, then some fine day, somehow life will finally give us the present that, when we open it, will turn out to be the one we have waited for so long, the one that will fill the empty place, which is the peace that passeth all understanding, which is the truth, salvation, whatever we want to call it. But one by one, as we open the presents, no matter how rich and wondrous they are, we discover that not one of them by itself, nor even all of them taken together, is the one of our deepest desiring.”
And this needs no comment, except to say that it may be the most encouraging thing I have ever read in my life: “We have survived, you and I. Maybe that is at the heart of our remembering … we have made it to this year, this day. We needn’t have made it. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. There were times we almost hoped we wouldn’t, were ready to give the whole thing up … But [we] didn’t. [We] have not given up … weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least up just often enough to light us if not to the right path through the forest, at least to a path that leads forward, that is bearable. Faint of heart as we are, a love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive … It is the Lord, it is God, who has been with us through all our days and years whether we knew it or not … There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts – whether we believe in God or not – that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.”
The above phrase “less than human” refers to a common theme in Buechner’s writing. He muses often on the idea that we are all becoming either more or less human at any given time, and that our primary goal on earth should be to reach a kind of ultimate human state, wherein we always act the way that we were made to act. Of course, we will never reach this state, and fortunately Buechner acknowledges that. But he also says that whenever we act more human than we know we are capable of, that is the power of God in us. And the interesting thing about his theory is how earthbound it is. He admits that we will never be all we can be in this life, but he seems to make the case that we have a finite number of chances to treat others in a way that calls forth the best version both of our humanness and theirs, and that that is why we are here. This is really compelling to me because all I can see most of the time is my failure to live up to any sort of potential, and the only thing that gets me through facing that failure is my understanding that in heaven I will finally reach it. But that doesn’t excuse me from my responsibility to communicate grace and healing in very potent ways while still on earth. Buechner urges us to spend our time “living out of our humanness in a way to call forth the humanness of the people with whom you are living and your own humanness.” What if I spent my mental energy seeking to understand who everyone I encounter is in their most purely human form? And what if I made it my mission to bring out as much of that humanness as possible, instead of fixating on all the sin and brokenness in people that makes my life so hard? Hmmmmm.
By far the best sermon in this collection, I think, is the one titled “Faith and Fiction.” The thesis of this sermon is that fiction writers and Christians have a great deal in common, and he goes on to explore the specifics of this claim. It is everything that I’ve been trying to say to everyone around me for so long, mostly about why writing stories matters so much to me. “Whatever your faith may be or my faith may be, it seems to me inseparable from the story of what has happened to us, and that is why I believe that no literary form is better adapted to the subject than the form of fiction.” YES. Thank you Frederick Buechner, for so eloquently saying what I’ve been trying and failing to put into words for years. He also says the following to people who write “Christian books:” “You have got to be honest not just about the times that glimmer with God’s presence but also about the times that are dark with his absence, because needless to say you have had your dark times like everybody else.” His definition of a good religious novel is one that is “less about the religious experience than a novel the reading of which itself is a religious experience.” And THAT is what I have been trying to say all this time about why I would so much rather read Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Helprin, or J.K. Rowling than most of what can be found on the fiction shelves of a Christian bookstore. And that is why, if I ever publish anything, it probably won’t be on those shelves.
My weekly must-read, New York magazine, recently published an article about Tony Judt, a local intellectual currently dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Judt is matter-of-fact about his condition. He doesn’t appear to be shying away from the imminence of his death. However, he also doesn’t think he’s going anywhere after he dies. The saddest part of the article was the end, when Judt was quoted as saying, “You might draw lessons from [bad things that happen], you might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me."
To that Buechner says, "Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn't mean a damn thing." Clearly Judt has chosen the second hypothesis, but I for one can't live like that. If life doesn't mean a damn thing, then we go through an awful lot of pain for nothing. No, I choose to believe it is in fact so full of meaning that we can't begin to comprehend it in this life, and it will take all of the next one. Buechner is a writer who helps my heart live as though that is true.
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