For a long time, I did not know what to do with the past worlds and chapters of my life.
The small girl playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the child I was before the threat of sudden loss permanently changed my understanding of relationships and time, the student who once walked the sidewalks of Seoul trying to wrap her mind around her newfound faith: some chapters were so buried under intervening experience and eroded by change that they felt almost fictional. It seemed best not to dwell on them if I could help it; old fears still held some power, and old joys could not be retasted in any way that made the effort worthwhile. Those memories were useful chiefly as “before” scenes to the “after” of my present; upon the future I believed they had little to no bearing at all.
Mostly, I think, I didn’t know how to hold so many fragments without becoming a little more shattered myself.
My journey with Buechner’s work began with reading The Longing for Home (1996). I was working on a book about the kind of ache that prepares its bearers for their long home in eternity, and I expected that Buechner would address the Sehnsucht of German Romanticism and C.S. Lewis in theological or philosophical terms.
What I found instead were very specific descriptions of a childhood home — not even his own home, but his maternal grandmother’s — that were Buechner’s basis for thinking of the home that Christ-followers yearn to reach. “Where do you look for the home you long for if not to the irrecoverable past?” he asked.[1] The question was a foreign concept to me, but it led me to consider that I should at least take a longer look at my own past.
Meanwhile, I finished The Longing for Home and moved on to Telling the Truth (1977) and The Remarkable Ordinary (2017). I was drawn to the quiet grasp of the nearness of God that seemed to permeate his words, as when he wrote about Christ’s resurrection:
It has always struck me as remarkable that when the writers of the four Gospels come to the most important part of the story they have to tell, they tell it in whispers. The part I mean, of course, is the part about the resurrection. . . . The way the Gospel writers tell it, in other words, Jesus came back from death not in a blaze of glory but more like a candle flame in the dark, flickering first in this place, then in that place, then in no place at all.[2]
Buechner’s prose held a similar quality for me; it moved along for the most part without fanfare but gleamed out unforgettably here and there in a tumble of conversational words or the running stitch of an extended metaphor.
By the time I began reading the first of his memoirs, The Sacred Journey (1982), I had finished my book. But certain memories I had written about, especially ones that hinged on personal or cross-cultural experiences that few others shared, were somehow not finished with me. Despite my efforts to make them vivid for a reading audience, many of them remained a tangle of faces, lost names, demolished places, and a broken beauty deeper than any of these that seemed to be wasted on the scrapbook of a single mind. I didn’t know how to move forward with them. I was still unconvinced of the worth of delving into those bygone years, and even if I had been persuaded, I wouldn’t have known where or how to begin.
But in Buechner I was about to find an example.
In his nonfiction books, Buechner models a focused willingness to revisit his own past. The morning of his father’s suicide is one instance — the morning when his father looked in on Buechner and his brother in their bedroom before shutting the door and going downstairs.
The pacing of the telling is unrushed, the diction plain: we get a thorough look at the shiny spindle of the roulette wheel the boys are playing with and the “clickety clickety click” of the ball searching for a niche before the shout of terrible discovery comes up from below.[3] The passage makes room for the kind of thoughts that arise from years of viewing and reviewing a moment in one’s memory: “If he said anything to us, or if we said anything to him, we neither of us have ever been able to remember it. . . I have no idea how long he stood there looking at us. A few seconds? A few minutes? Did he smile, make a face, wave his hand?”[4] There can be no answer on this side of eternity, but the questions have a rightful place here. Buechner’s subsequent years in Bermuda are related just as patiently: like Dorothy coming into the Technicolor world of Oz, the pages fill with the fragrance of cedars and the sea and kerosene burning amid “sky blue and rose, lemon yellow and lavender and pastel green” houses.[5] The boy Buechner rides his bike to the beach, grows roots deeper than any he has ever put down before, and falls in love for the first time.
This account gripped my attention. Yet what startled me most was not so much the intricacy of the details as what Buechner saw in them. His father’s death, he wrote, made way for both grief and gift — the gifts of beauty and healing and a new comprehension of love in Bermuda — and these, in turn, eventually showed Buechner a “crazy, holy grace” at work, moving underneath and even through tragedy.[6]
Around the same time, I encountered a related idea in James K. A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time (2022). God is like a mosaic artist who chooses to work with the particularities he has given us, Smith posits: “he creates a work of art in which [our] history is reframed, reconfigured, taken up, and reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. . . Redemption is not an undoing, an effacing, or an erasing but a ‘gathering up of our histories, a taking up of what time has wrought.”[7] This idea, together with Buechner’s consciousness of a Giver behind all good gifts (James 1:17), helped me to gradually take up the pieces of my former selves and surroundings. I could see now that the “irrecoverable past,” with its silent storyline of a constant, half-hidden and ever-present grace, had something to tell me about what was ahead; the particularities through which I had glimpsed my Lord at work were the very ones I was going to carry Home to Him for fulfillment. The fragments were not simply fragments, but seeds of the New Creation to come.
Thus, by the time I came to Buechner’s instructions on how to enter the “Room Called Remember,” I was already in the room, and I knew what to look for. “[T]aking time to remember on purpose . . . means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding.”[8] From him I had learned to keep a readiness to be surprised even in the process of recollection, to recognize God where I might once have believed He was not.
I have been scribbling down the small and scattered features of my memories for a few years now, exploring not only the scenes that I previously thought had little to say, but the older ancestral and cultural and ecclesiastical memories that have flowed like tributary waters into my point in history. For where can He not be found? As we feel about in the half-remembered dark for an assurance of a presence that may bring us peace, is it possible that “he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27)? This open sense of wonder is present in all of Buechner’s works that I’ve read so far. It enabled him to be the sort of writer who could eventually see that — even when the door closed definitively upon his childhood on that morning of roulette-wheel play — neither the trauma nor the suppressed grief to follow could prevent him from being found by the resurrected Christ for whom a closed door is not an obstacle.
We need such wonder in our day more than ever, I think. In an age of algorithms, aggregate “intelligence,” and consequent cynicism, we are in need of people who help us to expect that at any moment we might yet see Jesus flickering in the corner of our vision or the face of the person we’re talking to or our unexplainable tears over an old photo album.
I am grateful to Buechner for calling me to pay attention to those clues even now. For they speak, each in their own way, of One in whom all things hold together, who has been and has pledged to be with us to the end of the age. It is He who keeps count of our tossings and puts our tears in His bottle (Ps. 56:7), and knows what we have been through better than we can often recall.
And it is He who has promised to go before us to prepare the many rooms of his Father’s house — among which, I have come to believe, is an antechamber called Remember.
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 Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p.21.
[2] Ibid., p.142-143.
[3] Frederick Buechner, Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1982), p.38.
[4] Ibid., p.38.
[5] Ibid., p.43.
[6] Ibid., p.57.
[7] James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), p.173-174.
[8] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p.6.
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