Not All Who WONDER Are Lost
On August 15, 2022, Frederick Buechner died at age 96. My daughter said, “I thought he died a long time ago, like Shakespeare, or some of the other people you quote.” I laughed.
“Authors pass but books persist.” [1] And books offer a window into the soul of their writers.
Introduced to Buechner’s writing while I was in seminary, God has used his writings to help me think. About life. About doubt. About how Christians fear the challenge of thinking deeply about their faith and default to letting others think for them.
Frederick Buechner, author, preacher, and theologian, shared life-giving words through books and sermons that conveyed deep faith underlying doubts his honesty compelled him to reveal. As he thought about the mysteries of life, his deep insights traveled to published pages.
Faith That Sees Beyond
In a chapter titled ”Faith,” he describes the gritty, ugly side of life, ”a ruined landscape,” viewed from a train in New York City on his way home.
From train to bus terminal, ”I’ve walked along West Forty-Second Street plenty of times . . . seeing what’s there and trying not to see it,” what he referred to as “the seamy side of things.”
Suddenly ”I was scared stiff that I would somehow get lost in that awful place and never find my way out.”
Contrasting the light and warmth waiting at home––“love enough to see me through the night”––he said “I felt guilty about having, at home, the kind of peace the victims and victimizers of Forty-Second Street not only don’t have but don’t even know exists.”
“But I wouldn’t let myself feel guilty long . . . I felt something more powerful and real.”
“We live in a world that tries to kill us” . . . ‘But by faith,’ says Hebrews,” instead of [life being] ”as empty of meaning and purpose as a glacier” [we see] ”something of the power and the glory and the holiness beneath the world’s lost face.”
Reluctantly, he wrote about his own life.
“Because of this story of Jesus, each of our own stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.”
Secrets in the Dark, ”The Two Stories”
Reading his book while at the same time having to read through a tower of academic books for seminary classes, I fell into a well of souls with a man who said he was too secular for Christians and too religious for secular tastes.
A Man of Sorrows, Acquainted with Grief
His father committed suicide when he was ten years old. Raised by his wealthy grandmother, well-educated, Buechner became a Christian as an adult. His childhood trauma resonates with my own.
Buechner refers to what his Old Testament seminary teacher said, “We can’t really hear what the stories of the Bible are saying until we hear them as stories about ourselves. We have to imagine our way into them.”
Buechner notes that he had made the hard choice not to pursue a career as a secular writer, knowing that he sacrificed wide appeal if he had broadened his message to attract the masses. Or he could have weakened the message, depending on how you view things.
As each of us finds ourselves born into a story already in progress, we face the same kind of choices amid the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time) where the culture, our own experiences, and belief systems shape what we do with our lives. We make our choices and our choices make us.
“Listen to Your Life”
“If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.“
—Now and Then
quoted from Philip Yancey’s article in Christianity Today
Somewhere on the long and winding road that led me to knock on Buechner’s door, I wondered why I had never heard of Buechner [BEEK-ner] and why no professor or pastor or teacher had ever referred to Buechner’s writings. Instead, a classmate’s comment, “You need to read Frederick Buechner,” prompted me to purchase Secrets in the Dark, A Life in Sermons.
Buechner’s words gave me the title of this website. Reading the words, ” . . . we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other’s stories” gave me the courage to write words that other people might read. Graduating from seminary, I found myself focused on story. Your story, my story, the stories Jesus told.
The Thinker’s Frontier: A Battle Without and Within
“[T]here are really two frontiers: the outer-–concerned with issues such as civil rights, the peace movement and poverty, the frontier where justice does battle with injustice, sanity with madness, and so on-–and the inner, where doubt is pitted against faith, hope against despair, grief against joy. It’s this inner frontier that I live with and address myself to. And when I feel like justifying myself, I say that ultimately the real battle is going to be won there.“
—From an interview in the Christian Century, November 16, 1983
He’s right, you know. What you and I see happening around us, what we read or watch on the news, concerns those outer battles. Issues. Social and political. Moral and ethical. And those battles keep us agitated and frustrated and defeated by our inability to conquer the evil that exists in this world.
The real battle takes place within, where beliefs and ideas and principles conflict, often leaving us wounded and subject to doubt about the holiness of God and his power to defeat the enemies that assail us.
When questions come and doubts arise, those who have set their hearts on pilgrimage through this life travel a worn path from strength to strength. [2]
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, ”Not all who wander are lost.”
Not all who wonder as they wander are lost.
[1] quoted in blog, “Miller’s Book Review,” August 17, 2022, quote from a novel, The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin
[2] Psalm 84
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/17/frederick-buechner-religious-novelist-dead/
2 Comments
Kimberly Kennedy
Thanks for sharing. Now I want to go read his books…or at least Secrets in the Dark, A Life in Sermons.
Carol
I have read and reread this one. Marked like a roadmap. I’ve read none of his fiction, but a few other books of essays and a devotional. Secrets in the Dark is arranged chronologically as he wrote or delivered those messages, which helps to see his depth of character, personal growth, and openness to change. Enjoy.