EDITOR’S NOTE: The Buechner Review is proud to collaborate with a growing number of higher education institutions and seminaries around the world in hosting writing competitions. Named in honour of Frederick Buechner, these competitions encourage student entries of written pieces inspired by his work. This edition of the Review features three pieces, selected from last year’s competition winners by our editorial board. We are proud to present the first of these to you here: the winning entry of the 2025 Frederick Buechner Writing Competition at Vancouver School of Theology.*
In The Sacred Journey (1982), Frederick Buechner modeled and invited the reader into a startlingly fresh practice in which to encounter and understand God.
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that journey. Listen back to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like Hell…. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and past for the sound of him.[1]
Like many others, I have returned often to these words, finding that they resonate increasingly with the deep truth of my life: that God has made God’s self known to me in the very “sweet and bitter” music of my days, not off at a distance, and not only in the ostensibly sacred. As I have leaned into this practice of remembering and listening, certain themes have begun to emerge, forming a kind of credal structure for my faith. I sometimes write short poems as part of my attempt to pay attention to what is emerging. I offer here four of these poems alongside four credal themes that have grown into my life.
The Mystery and Persistence of the Divine, and the Work of Paying Attention
Always, this Presence, with
us,
Hurricane Lantern
when the lights go out:
the warm and the way
onward
I was five or six when I tried to pray, alone, for the first time, over a lost orange plastic drum. It was a sort of last-ditch experiment in the face of that rising untethered feeling I still get when something is lost. I remember the shock of finding it, almost immediately, and, more than anything, I remember the sudden sense of a loving presence, of my deep, true self also being found and seen for the first time. At Christmastime, we often hear one of the Hebrew names for God spoken and sung: Immanuel, “God with us,” that loving presence who draws close, steady as a hurricane lantern in all kinds of darkness.
In our current era, trusting that there is a God often requires a certain type of stubborn insistence on magic, like the character Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), stamping out the Queen of Underland’s fire with his bare foot and saying, “I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”[2] Part of believing in magic, of course, is that one must stay open to mystery and to learning from “the community that stretches around the world and down the centuries.”[3] What a gift that mystery can fearlessly hold hands with both doubt and faith.
Etty Hillesum, a Jewish mystic who kept a compelling diary during her time labouring in the Nazi-controlled Westerbork transit camp, embraced this link between doubt and faith. She wrote about the mystery of questioning God’s “seeming helplessness” while finding profound consolation in uncovering the “deep well” of God “dwelling” within her and the other women she worked alongside.[4] She also wrote extensively about inner listening, about paying attention to how God moves in that “quiet room” inside each of us, in order to know how to face external horrors.[5] Hillesum is joined by many other travellers in the faith in this practice of turning toward the quiet room within, where God dwells.
Indeed, Buechner, nearer to the end of his life, while still emphasizing his certainty that “God speaks through the hieroglyphics of the things that happen to us…” wrote:
But I have come to believe more and more that God also speaks through the fathomless quiet of the holy place… within us all which is beyond the power of anything that happens to us to touch although many things that happen to us block our access to it, make us forget even that it exists…. Even when we have no idea of seeking it, I think various things can make us fleetingly aware of its presence—a work of art, beauty, sometimes sorrow or joy, sometimes just the quality of a moment that apparently has nothing special about it at all like the sound of water over stones in a stream or sitting alone with your feet up at the end of a hard day.[6]
God, he says, is there to be found, if we can become quiet enough to listen. This is our work then, this paying attention without and within, to the magic of being found and being beloved.
The Brokenness in our World and in me, Met by Christ’s Mercy
Ali, The Custodian, Who Takes Away—
who wakes up, in the dark
(plaid flannel, thermos coffee)
to hurry to
the triangles of brown, spiky glass at the end of the slide
the dripping, red words on the kindergarten door;
(every night, the other mom said to me, they come every
single night)
who wakes up, before the backpacked children
arrive
and call out to his smile as they fly past
(Hi, Ali!
Hi, Ali!)
into the fresh of a new, new morning,
into the mercy, have
mercy
have
mercy
on us.
As any parent will tell you, many complexities exist alongside the joy of raising children. One complexity I have encountered is a thicker layer of heartbreak over the darkness in our world, in contrast with a child’s fresh, unknowing trust. Mothering has drawn me to sit in remembrance and compassion with both the loss of my own child self’s innocence and the evils in which I am also complicit. In response to these realities, I encounter the strength of Christ’s mercy, for all of us victims and offenders. Christ, like the endlessly kind and indefatigable custodian at our small public elementary school, who takes away all the “sins” of my children’s little world, making it as good as new, over and over.
The effect of experiencing God’s wild grace, “grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials” is that, more and more often, I am unable to view myself as removed or above the other, and instead I begin to “forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.”[7] The grace of Christ comes to me as a great leveller, and my failings — all of our failings — draw me closer to the other and to God. In this, I am discovering what the saints before us meant when they spoke of felix culpa, the “happy fault” of our transgression. [8] We are told that it is by our weakness, not our perfection, that we are drawn close to God, and holding this, I am able to retain hope for God’s imaginative, transformative work in the world.[9]
Being Alongside Christ When we Suffer, the Comforter who Makes all Things New
Hallowed be Your Name
November 18, 2017
Nothing so holy have I heard as
the quiet of that room
the nurse’s shoes, hushed, tapping the floor
slow
taking his still and silent body
away
to the bath
and back to me
to hold.
Holy, holy, holy.
---
November 23, 2018
Nothing so holy have I heard as
your voice—
(square baby bear boy)
wild love-cry to me of
life
after
death;
You, dripping child,
Held up high out of my belly
Solid and snuffling
wet into my shaking chest—
Holy, holy, holy.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, grappling to reconcile his faith with the death of his son, writes, “God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers…. Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it… To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer… But mystery remains… Why does he not at once relieve our agony by relieving his?”[10] When my baby boy was stillborn, eight years ago, I was staggered by the immensity of grief that followed. I kept thinking I would eventually return to who I was before, but that loss marked a “before and after,” an entirely new way of travelling with Christ, and with others.
We had picked out our son’s name long before he was born: Jasper, which means “bearer of treasure.” In the hospital, writing his name on the forms for the funeral home, I had a sense of God asking me to hold my hands open for the gifts of Jasper’s life that would be arriving. In the years that have followed, as I have stayed with this stance of stubborn “hands open” anticipation of God’s goodness, I have watched so much beauty appear that I would not have known had I not carried and loved my son throughout his life and his death. This posture is gradually carrying over to other forms of suffering that find me. I have begun to understand the paradox of God making “beauty from ashes:” while the grief remains, something beautiful grows from the wound that never could have existed otherwise.[11]
One of these beautiful things was the birth of my youngest son, a year later. Experiencing both these births taught me that the sacred presence of God can be just as strong in sorrow as in joy, and that sacred joy does not replace sacred sorrow, but rather grows alongside. There is much that I am still waiting for, hands open on my lap. But I trust in God’s millions of small and large resurrections within and around me, if not here yet, then in what is to come. Indeed, suffering has taught me to lean harder towards heaven. As Buechner knew so well: “Faith is both the dreaming and the crying. Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.”[12]
Christ’s Life as Solidarity with and Liberation of the Oppressed, Calling me to Partner with Him in Mutual Belonging
“Refugee Family Drowned on Channel Crossing,” October 28, 2020
(Give us Today)
I arrange the cucumbers, tidy half moons
in my children’s silver lunchboxes
on this, the morning after she died in the cold water
holding her baby up as high as long as she could if only—
she could reach
this
white warm kitchen,
this lunchbox, this cup of tea, this buckle, this school bell song—
The early Church and Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople laboured to articulate “that God’s inner life was triune” — an assertion that mattered so much to them because it affirms “that the deepest reality is communal.”[13] I find that within the framework of this deepest reality, all the other themes of my credal structure fit together. It is a relational God who draws us to pay attention, alongside Christ, to what the mystery, brokenness, joy and suffering of our lives are telling us. I believe it is imperative to ask: in all this listening to our own lives, how do we also listen for God in the life of the other?
Any understanding of Christ must be shaped by the implications of his historical life, which, by every account, was marked by repeated movements towards the margins of humanity, both relationally and geographically. Jesus drew away from physical spaces and cities of prestige and moved towards where those in need could be found.[14] Many of us in the Western world today have lost this orientation towards the margins, a loss which leads us into our own oppressions. While seeming free in our abundance, we may be carrying the heavy weight of maintaining and controlling our own security with our power and wealth.[15] We all need rescue, in one way or another, and some of the tonic for those of us stuck in detached cycles of consumption and protection could be the very act of partnering with Liberator Christ in lifting up “the lowly” and filling “the hungry with good things.” May we experience mutual liberation, discovering instead the light and easy burdens of working alongside Jesus, alongside each other.[16] Or as Buechner says, through the character of Brendan, “‘To lend each other a hand when we’re falling…. Perhaps that’s the only work that matters in the end.’”[17]
Made in the image of God, we are somehow of God. Thomas Merton, a contemporary of Buechner, put it this way: “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself.”[18] It follows then, if we all contain a partial thought of God, that we are in great need of each other. God welcomes us into an infinite relational dance, and it is in this space of belonging that we can listen to our own life, to each other’s lives, and together find our way towards home.
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*If you would be interested in your higher education institution hosting a Frederick Buechner Writing Competition, you can reach out to us here.
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey: a memoir of early days (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1991), 77-78.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: HarperCollins, 1953), 182.
[3] David F. Ford, Theology: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 27.
[4] Potgieter, Raymond. (2020). “Etty Hillesum: Esse Quam videri – Reformed Christian Perspectives on a Spiritual Journey.” In Die Skriflig / In Luce Verbi, 54(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4102/ids.v54i1.2470, 1.
[5] Etty Hillesum, Etty Hillesum: essential writings, ed. Annemarie S. Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 66.
[6] Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 105.
[7] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Toronto, ON: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 197.
[8] Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: the gift of contemplative prayer (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2015), 21.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 81, 90.
[11] Isaiah 61:3, NRSV.
[12] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 58.
[13] Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: a global history of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 98.
[14] Jules A. Martinez-Olivieri, “Quien Vive Christo! Christology in Latin American Perspectives,” Jesus without Borders: Christology in the Majority World. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 95.
[15] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: economics and Christian desire (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2009) 13, 15.
[16]Ibid, 14; Luke 1:52-53, NRSV; Matthew 11:28-30, NRSV.
[17] Frederick Buechner, Brendan: a novel (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 216.
[18] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York, NY: New Directions, 1961), 37.
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