My first encounter with Frederick Buechner was via an epigraph that prefaces John Irving’s great novel A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989). I knew nothing about the author when, at the age of twenty-one, I read this quotation:
“Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me."
These powerful words from Buechner’s The Alphabet of Grace (1970) are cited alongside lines from Paul’s letter to the Philippians (‘Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God’) and a less subtle admonition by Leon Bloy: ‘Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig’.
These epigraphs constitute an unusually theological triptych with which to begin a work of literary fiction in the late twentieth century. In the pre-internet era of the early 1990s, it was years before I learned that Irving had been taught by Buechner at Exeter Phillips academy, the model for his novel’s Gravesend Academy, and that the two writers were friends. In fact, A Prayer for Owen Meany’s most distinctive theological conversations are vividly animated by specific passages from Buechner’s work.[1] However, long before I became aware of any of these intriguing details, I was both troubled and fascinated by Buechner’s words on the relationship between revelation, uncertainty and self. He has been teaching me to think more carefully about the intimate relationship between spiritual longing and doubt ever since that initial, fragmentary introduction to his work.
One of the many ways in which Buechner’s writing has helped me is his persistent challenge to reevaluate what it might mean to offer praise. In a widely quoted passage from The Sacred Journey (1982), his ‘memoir of early days’, Buechner evokes the physical and emotional brutality of infantry training during World War II. In particular, he remembers the ravenous hunger he felt whilst sitting in a muddy field. Buechner, barely an adult, driven by famished craving, recalls picking up a filthy turnip, rations discarded by another soldier. For many, such an abject moment would discourage faith – indeed, it might suggest that religious belief is profoundly at odds with reality. Oddly, it echoes one of the tragi-comic exchanges between Samuel Beckett’s destitute double act in Waiting for Godot (1952) in which Vladimir and Estragon contemplate a meagre diet of root vegetables. Yet, for Buechner, apparent wretchedness elicits a joyful epiphany rather than scepticism:
Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.[2]
One remarkable quality of this experience is that it is not immediately framed as an encounter with divinity in a traditional sense. The young Buechner does not speak in tongues or start to quote scripture. However, it is an episode that, from his memoirist’s perspective, signified change: a quiet conversion that anticipated a life of following Christ, one in which struggle and sadness are understood in light of ‘the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest’.
Buechner’s recollection of this revelatory moment, in which an inhospitable landscape prompts delight, resonates with John Updike’s theology of writing. For Updike, writing is an attempt to ‘give the mundane its beautiful due’. [3] In his view, an ‘act of description’, even of an event that ‘is unpleasant or horrifying’ is also ‘an act of praise’, one that echoes ‘that Old Testament injunction to praise’ and which emerges as ‘a kind of hymning undercurrent’ in his work.[4] Buechner’s writing brings a similar impulse to the surface, making it more visible as an urgent priority. ‘If I was not yet ready to praise God for it all,’ he recalls, ‘I praised my lucky stars anyway for the simple reason that the praise rose up in me as fierce and unbidden as tears. I had no choice.’ [5] The language is Romantic – Wordsworthian even – in its insistence on the vividly affective experience of personal revelation.
Is this mode of spontaneous, irrepressible praise a common experience? Although I have attended public worship since childhood and endeavour, on my better days, to pray, I find the phenomenon of praise, in its most spiritual orientation, challenging. This is partly a linguistic difficulty: ‘praise’ itself is a term burdened with pious association. For me, it suggests syrupy songs, repeated cliché and a wilful unfamiliarity with suffering. I also realize that this is an unreasonable way to think about a fundamental aspect of Christian practice. Irritability is not, as far as I’m aware, a spiritual gift. We should, writes the author of Hebrews, ‘offer a continual sacrifice of praise to God’ (13. 15). These words are both inspiring and, for me, disquieting. My sense of inadequacy, of failure even, is anticipated by W. H. Auden who, in his ambivalent elegy for Yeats, petitions the late poet – or perhaps God – for instruction: ‘Teach the free man how to praise,’ he asks.[6] Humanity, suggests Auden, however ostensibly ‘free’ can feel incarcerated by the limits of ordinary time. Yet the poet also writes these lines in hopeful, possibly apocalyptic expectation of liberation through praise.
Buechner, in common with Updike and Auden, defamiliarizes the experience of praise: it is not a lofty, unworldly way of being but one bound up with the mundane. Whether thanksgiving is expressed in exalted, hesitant or melancholy mood is less relevant than the belief that life itself, in all its messy glory, might point towards a greater reality. In Godric (1980), his tenth novel, the twelfth-century hermit embodies aspects of this complexity, especially when reflecting on the imperative to give praise:
“Praise, praise!” I croak. Praise God for all that’s holy, cold and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death.[7]
It is a passage that parallels Buechner’s retrospective description of his youthful proclamation of praise on a cold and filthy Alabama field. Godric, by contrast, is an elderly man, known for his devout faith but whose memory of previous misadventures, marked by violence and transgression, sharpen a desire to find goodness amidst loss. His hymning of ordinary life is as urgent as the obligation to praise serendipitously discovered by Buechner. As the aging holy man faces death, praise is not, in his words, a sentimental idea but an act that signifies hope amidst ruin and loss.
The difficulties that we (or, at least I) experience in connecting our everyday life with the transcendent are illustrative of what Charles Taylor has memorably named the ‘immanent frame’ of modern life.[8] In contrast with the ‘transcendent frame’ of earlier eras including Godric’s medieval moment, today’s default worldview, dominated by individualism, sees meaning as internally generated rather than as a divine gift. This, for Taylor, is not a way of thinking we can simply escape by acts of will but neither does it necessarily signify the death of sacred perception.
In his gloss on Taylor’s concept, James K. A. Smith observes that ‘[s]ome inhabit [this worldview] as a closed frame with a brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open frame with skylights open to transcendence’.[9] Buechner’s sustained creative focus on the sacred nature of the everyday, for example, suggests that praise might pierce the invisible boundaries of the immanent. I have found The Sacred Journey, in particular, an encouraging way of thinking about the presence of the divine in ordinary events: in Buechner’s audaciously plain terms, ‘if God speaks to us at all in this world [ . . .] it is into our personal lives that he speaks’.[10] This kind of language has the potential to become solipsism but Buechner subverts any temptation to self-serving piety. One of the ways in which he resists a formulaic or trite form of theology is in his acknowledgement that words, despite his vocation as a writer, are inadequate to represent the way in which God communicates:
I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our own experiences.[11]
For Buechner, abstraction is superseded by the ordinary reality of God made flesh, the incarnational nature of divinity as it is expressed in everyday events: God is discernible in the ordinary events of our lives; attention to the mundane, the act of ‘listening to your life’ is a crucial form of spiritual practice. This view resonates with John Ruskin’s famous description of attention and observation. For the Victorian polymath, ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way [. . .] To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one’.[12] It strikes me that Buechner’s understanding of praise is similarly invested in the particular and in paying attention. To pray, to give praise, demands attention, expectation and a kind of hopeful watchfulness.
‘Even at our most believing,’ writes Buechner in A Room Called Remember (1992), ‘we have our serious reservations just as even at our most unbelieving we tend to cast a wistful glance over our shoulders’.[13] Such wistful glances might be acts of prayer, deliberate or otherwise. Buechner’s work is very good identifying the threshold position in which many of us, believers and sceptics, are found when asking ‘religious’ questions. His rich legacy includes his tenacious defence of patience; this is particularly valuable in a moment that seems determined by a cultural imperative to haste, impulsiveness, and inattention. For that, among many other gifts, I offer praise.
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Works cited:
[1] I discuss the connections between Buechner’s writing and Irving’s novel in more detail in Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 85-106. See also Stephen R. Haynes, ‘Footsteps of Anne Hutchinson and Frederick Buechner: A Religious Reading of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany’, Religion and Literature, 27. 3, 73-98.
[2] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), p.85. The passage is also included in the anthology of Buechner’s writing, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 18.
[3] John Updike, Early Stories: 1953-1975 (London: Penguin, 2004), xv.
[4] James Plath, Conversations with John Updike (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 253.
[5] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p. 86.
[6] W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939), Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1979), pp.80-3 (p. 83).
[7] Frederick Buechner, Godric (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), p. 96. This passage is also included in the anthology, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 8.
[8] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), p. 549
[9] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), p. 80.
[10] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p. 1.
[11] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p. 4.
[12] The Library Edition of The Works of Ruskin, ed. by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), V, p. 333.
[13] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), x.
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