Around 35 years ago I discovered Frederick Buechner as a novelist, pastor, and writer. Buechner was most at home in imaginative story-telling that was both down to earth and unembarrassed about the traffic of prayer and thought that goes between earth and heaven. It was in the front room of our manse in Aberdeen, the monthly meeting of ecumenical clergy, about eight of us. For a decade, over each year we met to plan inter church occasions of fellowship, mission and worship. That group was the most effective, enjoyable and able gathering of clergy I have ever had the joy of being with over a good few years. We were friends, we differed respectfully, we co-operated at every opportunity, we supported each other in our varied forms of ministry. Every month we spent a whole morning doing this, and the first hour we discussed the chapter of the book we were reading together. Books we read included John Zeisler's Commentary on Romans, one of the first to weave the implications of the (then) new perspective on Paul; The Persistence of Faith, by Jonathan Sacks, at the time recently appointed as Chief Rabbi; the biography of George MacLeod by Ron Fergusson; and we read Frederick Buechner.
The book we chose was Telling Secrets, the third volume of his memoirs, 106 pages of wise candour about what goes on in the heart of a son, a father, a husband, a pastor, a novelist – all of them one person trying to integrate each with the other in a life of faith in which the love of God was both gift and demand. That book occasionally brought tears to our eyes, tears of recognition of our own hopes and bereavements, failures and achievements, our prayers, promises and the realities that often collided with them. Buechner is that good, or at least so honest he exposes his readers' easy dishonesties, and speaks compassion into souls trained in unsparing self-criticism.
Over the years I have read Buechner, in that way commended in Thomas Cranmer's lovely collect – "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." Buechner I have found to be that best kind of friend to have as a voice in a book; nourishing, honest about his own inadequacies and confident in the adequacy of the grace of God. His essays are long conversations of insight and wisdom into what makes human experience both fascinating and ordinary. His sermons are beautifully written, not as literary, but as human documents, in which the exegesis of the text invariably becomes the exegesis of the human heart and the exposition of the grace, mercy and love of God. His theological musings, gathered in several books combine witty aphorisms and sharply observed truth as applied to the struggles of ordinary folk trying to make their lives work.
Few writers have rescued me as often as Buechner. I don't mean that in any exaggerated sense of major crises. I mean rescued me from the cynicism that can grow like algae on the surface of a pastor's heart' I mean rescued me from complacency about the miracle of life itself as one-off gift and as lifelong responsibility; I mean rescued from ever thinking that God's call, my vocation, was ever up to me or dependent on my skill, education, even perseverance. No, Buechner gave us what for me remains the finest anatomy of vocation:
"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."
Deep. It's one of Buechner's favourite words. Depth not superficiality; the truth beneath the surface of things; finding our treasure buried under habits of self-deception; working hard as a miner in search of the ore out of which is smelted the precious metal of a life worth living because a life worth giving. Diving deep into who we are in order to become who we are meant to be, and doing so in the faith and trust and hope that is nurtured from the depths of divine love. Not for nothing did Buechner study with people such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Muilenburg. These were theologians familiar with the depths; and from them Buechner learned to dive, to dig, and to search for the truth of the human heart in its hunger for God, and meaning, and purpose, and the joy of integrating all three of these into a life well lived.
A paragraph from his remarkable essay, 'Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain' will show you what I mean about the candour, compassion and self-deprecating wisdom of Buechner:
"I have no qualifications for speaking about adolescence with anything like authority except in one respect. I am sixty four years old. I have fathered children. I have written books. I have letters after my name and an ecclesiastical title before it. But to call me an adult or grown up is an oversimplification at best and a downright misnomer at worst. I am not a past participle but a present participle, even a dangling participle. I am not a having-grown up one but a growing-up on, a groping up one, not even sure much of the time just where my growing and groping are taking me or where they are supposed to be taking me. I am a verbal adjective in search of a noun to latch onto, a grower ins earch of a self to grow into…I speak about adolescence with authority because in many ways I am still in the throes of it. This is my only qualification for addressing myself to the subject here. I am a hybrid, an adult adolescent to whom neither term alone does full justice…" (The Clown in the Belfry, 84-5)
I read that and recognise a voice I can trust not to overload my conscience with all those positivity memes that tell me I can be anything I want to be. What I can be is someone on the way, a pilgrim on a sacred journey towards who and what it is God called me to be and made me for. And lurking in the background of so much that Buechner writes those aspirational words of Paul:
"Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
Leave a Reply