Issue 275 - Frederick Buechner |
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August 2022
"Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
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In his memoir, The Eyes of the Heart, Buechner tells of a time his aged mother asked him, “Do you really believe anything happens after you die?” He said that he did, and one reason was simply “because I had a hunch it was true.”
He goes on to explain that if all people, “the victims and the victimizers, … the good-hearted and the heartless all end up alike in the grave and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy.” But “even at its worst,” Buechner insisted, “life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness.”
It was that mystery that Buechner sought to explore in all his writing – novels, sermons, memoirs, and more.
After his death, I went looking through my bookshelves and, to my surprise, found one of his novels I had not read. The Storm tells the story of Kenzie Maxwell, a has-been writer, and his extended, dysfunctional family. His own life tainted by scandal, Kenzie and his rigid, self-righteous brother haven’t spoken in years. As Kenzie approaches his seventieth birthday, his 20-year-old daughter playfully asks him what he is going to do “now that you’re so old.” His first response is, “I will continue to do penance.”
Indeed, Kenzie has much to repent, much to regret, as do the other deeply-flawed characters in the book. And yet, beneath it all, or rather, through it all, Buechner keeps giving us glimpses of holiness and the mysterious workings of grace.
Earlier in Kenzie’s life, Buechner tells us, he had written a book about some of the more bizarre Christian saints, whom he thought of first as “these crazies and misfits with their pointless acts of self-sacrifice and grisly martyrdoms.” Yet he was drawn to them, despite their oddities, because their lives seemed to point to something beyond themselves, “something even more outlandish than they were who had fallen in love with it, and yet it was at the same time so full of stillness and loveliness and ultimate sanity that to live blind to its existence, the way he always had, struck him as more outlandish still.”
Thank you, Frederick Buechner, for calling us out of such blindness, for offering, in memoir and in fiction, glimpses of the sacred mystery at the heart of all existence.
--Bill
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A very famous preacher once said that if Jesus wanted his disciples to get the message, first he healed them, then he fed them, then he drove out their demons, and if they still didn’t get it, then Jesus told them stories.
I was never a very famous preacher, but I was fortunate enough to study under a master storyteller, theologian, and spiritual writer, Megan McKenna. That was when I was member of the Catholic Lay Preaching Guild of the Archdiocese of San Antonio. Later, as a member of Isaiah Ministries (itinerant preacher 1994-2004), I fell deeper in love with the scriptures and looked to Frederick Buechner as something of a mentor. His style of storytelling brought the Gospel stories into a place in the imagination that was believable. The way to make the scriptures come alive, I found, was to tell stories. My goal as I studied his style was to gild the narratives so that the hearers would treasure the truths.
My three favorite Buechner books are: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC; The Alphabet of Grace; and Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who. I very often borrowed his story of Gabriel at the Annunciation from Peculiar Treasures, (1979 ed, p. 39):
“She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.
He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,” he said.
As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.” (Luke 1:26-35)
Since now I am retired and no longer looking to Buechner for preaching inspiration, his books are a go-to for spiritual reading and meditation. This story of Gabriel is worthy of meditation and lectio divina. It probably will make its appearance in an Advent Retreat this coming December.
--Jan
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Be sure to catch our next issue in early September.
We will highlight a guest author,
Katheryn Spink and her essay
"Where is Hope"
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Buechner on the Mystery of the Resurrection |
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Copyright (c) 2022 Soul Windows Ministries
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Sincerely,
Bill Howden and Jan Davis
Soul Windows Ministries
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