I recently gave in to my curiosity and purchased one of the ANAVRIN Book Nook Kits that have been peppering my social media feed for more than a year. It’s a model diorama, about the size of a large brick, meant to sit between the books on a shelf. Though I’ve never done this kind of hobby work before, I thought it would be a treat for myself once I had submitted my PhD work. I chose a scene of a street in Kyoto and planned to give the completed piece as a Christmas gift to my son, who spent time last winter studying in Japan.
When I finished it, after learning how to handle the tiny bits of wood with tweezers and strategically placed dabs of glue, my son and I were both fascinated by it. I touched a tab that turned on the lights in the diorama — lamps overhanging the shops, streetlights lining the alley, and the illuminated Hōkan-ji Temple. It all came to life, with so much to see. The tiny scene has remarkable depth drawing you into it, deeper and deeper. Every time you look, you see a new thing. The red and white ramen bowls at the outdoor restaurant. The portrait drawings of lovely Japanese women on the walls, the cat on the roof, the steps sloping down into the alley. Each discovery, a new sense of wonder: There’s an owl! Never saw that before. A potted plant on the sidewalk. A birdhouse! Another tree! The cherry blossoms outside the temple suggest spring air.
This is what art does. It frames a vision or a view, and you’re invited to look and look again. Now look more deeply. Frederick Buechner spoke of such framing in The Remarkable Ordinary (2017), demonstrating how it works with different art forms starting with haiku. ‘The haiku settles for doing… one very simple but very crucial thing,’ he wrote. ‘It tries to put a frame around the moment. It simply frames a moment. Of course, as soon as you put a frame around anything, you set it off, you make it visible, you make it real.’[1]
The seeing is everything. Buechner is talking about going beyond sacrament, beyond a representation of divine presence to looking deeply into a frame to discern the visible and real Alpha and Omega at work. Many years ago, when I was a student in a Master of Fine Arts program studying fiction writing, a friend I met there suggested that I should study nonfiction as well and write essays, especially essays about faith. He thought the way I spoke about it in our conversations was interesting and specific and worth committing to the page. I didn’t believe him. My faith is personal and why would anyone care?
But I took his advice. I began muddling along in the genre and getting pieces published. They received positive feedback, but I didn’t necessarily understand why or what I was doing. Around this same time, I discovered and began reading Buechner after hearing him quoted by my pastor in a sermon. I connected with his plain-spoken, clear-eyed style. And there was something that I trusted about him and his observations that I couldn’t quite articulate.
There have been times in my life when I’ve been slowly making my way along on a dim road, and then I meet someone who shines a light on the path. The illumination has a fantastic effect. Suddenly I can see what I’m doing. I can walk a little more confidently, maybe even run. That’s what happened in 2021 when I heard the most bold and beautiful talk by the author Barbara Brown Taylor. She ruminated on the language of “beholding” versus the language of “belief” and the tension between the two and how they work together, but sometimes at odds, to communicate the complex experience of faith.
She explained how the language of belief is focused on “what is right” according to a community’s standards, doctrines, or shared values. It involves accountability to a group, the affirmation of shared truths, and living according to set principles or conceptual frameworks. This language can sometimes (well, too often these days) become restrictive or even divisive when used solely to define boundaries of rightness within a faith community.
The language of beholding, on the other hand, is about direct attention to real life — describing and engaging with what actually is, in its full complexity, even when it is strange or challenging. Taylor called it an observational language that aims to faithfully describe reality, whether personal, communal, or natural. In spiritual practice, beholding is closely linked to openness, wonder, and encountering the divine through experience. ‘In my lexicon,’ she said, ‘the language of beholding calls me to full attention to real life on earth, not just my life, but the real lives of other people as well, along with the lives of nations, oceans, creatures, trees...’[2]
There it was. The spotlight. Shining so bright that if it were a literal lamp, it would have popped my eyes open. Suddenly I saw what I did, and continue to do, as a faith writer. I’m a “behold” person. I’ll run around on the page all day saying, “Behold! Behold!” Or, really, “Look! Did you see that? It might be God at work. Look again. What do you think?” I find energy, hopeful energy, in the words, in the questioning. It’s exciting to consider the possibilities.
And it is why I love reading Buechner. In this, he and I are kin. We speak the same language.
‘It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else,’ he wrote, ‘it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.’[3]
Every cell of me responds: Yes. Yes. Yes. This is it. This is what we’ve all been waiting for. It’s happening here. Now. Are you going to miss it? Probably. We are so caught up with common life matters that we don’t notice these moments otherwise. But, Buechner goes on to say, writing and art in general, are saying, ‘Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this… See what’s there, not what you expect to see. See what is really present in your life. See yourself, see each other.’[4]
I’ve never been good with tying knots. (Actually, these days I study knots often because I’ve taken up fly-fishing. It’s a supremely “now” activity, requiring every ounce of my attention as I stand in the life-filled miracle that is a river.) But when it comes to spirituality, I believe there is a massive knot that we are unaware of, that we are not even trying to pull apart. So it binds us. And yet it is positioned in such a way that, if we can perceive it, and have the will to work at it, we can somehow untie it. It feels like thick fibers. I can barely get my fingers wrapped around it, let alone dig into the crevices to pry the knot open.
In telling, often repeating, the stories of his life, Buechner was, I think, presenting his knot. Sometimes he worked at it. Sometimes he seemed flummoxed by its existence. But he knew it well — knew how it kept him at a certain distance. Like how he knew that he wasn’t meant to be a minister with a parish. Or how he offered the story of the friend who called him just as Buechner was about to sit down to dinner with his mother. The friend’s parents and pregnant sister had been in a terrible, possibly fatal, car crash and he was at the airport waiting for his flight to the West Coast. Would Buechner, he asked, come and sit with him until the flight took off?
Buechner’s mother talks him out of it. Said the man was being childish and didn’t really need him to come all the way out to the airport. And here’s the fascinating thing: Buechner admitted, with some horror, that he’d been thinking the same thing. At the same time, he knew that to ‘play it safe, to stay home where the candles are lit and the meal is prepared was to have your life somehow diminished.’[5] He ended the anecdote with a kind of “no harm, no foul” equivocation, because the friend called back and told him it was okay, that his flight was taking off.
But I don’t believe that Buechner was settled with the outcome. He had to have known that he had missed something even if it was to make it to the airport and find his friend’s flight already taking off. People in general don’t know how to ask for help. It’s rare to get such a clear “ask.” I’m sure he felt there was a moment, a chance for something to crack open. It was gone.
This is the mystery of Buechner, how he stands before us, the knot in his hands, his fear of something being asked of him, his human vulnerability on raw display. He models how not only events, but also your fears — the very you-ness of you may be blocking the way, as he saw the same in himself. That is a stunning thought, one that I walk up to and away from every day: where am I drawing the knot tighter? I pay careful attention to the possibilities.
Why? Because they may be clues to where I am going, to where God is taking me, where I am resisting. Godric of Finchdale, in Buechner’s provocative 1980 novel, learns how we might send parts of our being ahead of where we’re going, though we may not realize it. He’s told that his shadow may have crossed a town before Godric even thought of it.[6] And then there he was. For Buechner, his knot seemed to be figuring out the dance of his writing — how it could keep him at a comfortable distance while still engaging the world. The engagement, though, had its own peril. He wrote,
You have to choose who to listen to because if you listen to everybody and you look at everybody—seeing every face the way Rembrandt saw that woman’s face—how could you make it down half a city block? You couldn’t. If you listened to what everybody says to you, how could you survive a day? But we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.[7]
He eventually came to this:
You’re not only called to be happy for your sake, but you’re called to be happy for everybody’s sake. How much more help I could have been to my anorexic daughter if I had been happy, at peace, whole, a rock, instead of a haggard, anxiety-ridden, doom-ridden cripple. I’m better than I used to be, but far from well. The journey continues; I do what I can. The great problem is to try to live in the present, not the past, not the future, but in the now.[8]
Look at him, this Buechner. I feel like we must, because it was so hard for him to do so himself. He has placed a plain, perhaps wooden, frame around his haggard, anxiety-ridden, doom-ridden being. I can’t help but feel there’s even more going on when Buechner repeats his stories, even sheepishly apologizing for doing so. Here’s a possible clue. Ross Gay, in his book, Inciting Joy, wrote:
…we are invited to help behold or carry someone through something difficult, which, because we, too, will go through something difficult—might not be setting yourself on fire, but it will be something awful, count on it, something that maybe feels like being on fire—our holding is also of ourselves. In our best witness, in our beholding, we carry each other, and ourselves, with regard, through the fire.[9]
Perhaps in telling us his story over and over again, Buechner is not just asking us to understand how to look at our own lives. He is asking us to behold him. Not for us. And yet it is for us. Not for him. And yet it is for him. We may all be carrying each other. In beholding him, we can somehow bear away some part of a universal pain. And through some alchemy we see ever deeper into ourselves, deeper into the scene. Work our way toward wonder.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: how to stop, look, and listen to life (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2017), p.21.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Language of Beholding and the Language of Believing” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH8wCmLBy3Y
[3] Buechner (2017), p.34.
[4] Buechner (2017), p.22, 26.
[5] Buechner (2017), p.97.
[6] Frederick Buechner, Godric (New York: Atheneum, 1980), p.36.
[7] Buechner (2017), p.41.
[8] Buechner (2017), p.105.
[9] Ross Gay, Inciting Fire (New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022).
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