Last month, in the September edition of this publication, Russell Moore asked wryly what Frederick Buechner would have thought of his words becoming an Instagram meme, or a cliché from the pulpit.[1] For his opening example, he turns to one of Buechner’s most lapidary sentences, and one of his most quoted: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”[2] Moore is right to start here: this is one of the two or three most quoted of all Buechner’s statements, so much part of our vocational language that I recently heard it in a public lecture without attribution. At least in this case I avoided Moore’s “sigh of frustration” upon hearing the words “As a man named Frederick Buechner once put it…”[3]
Moore’s sigh is, of course, not at the sentence itself. There is a reason that we quote it so often, just like “Listen to your life…” or “Here is the world…,” which I suppose make their way into the memes and the sermons every bit as often. These are beautiful sentences from a master craftsman who cared intensely about telling the truth, and they are worthy of repetition.
But for all the good that it has done, “the place God calls you to...” has not often been read in the context of its original publication in Wishful Thinking (1973), let alone in the context of Buechner’s numerous novels, memoirs, sermons, and essays. The sentence presents a keen insight of Buechner’s based on his long pastoral and writing experience, but it expresses only a single dimension of a theme that occupied him throughout his career. The problem is not that we quote “the place God calls you to” too often, but that we do not seek out more of the deep wisdom that Buechner brings to vocation.
I have embarked on a longer project on Buechner’s career-long interest in calling, but for the present I hope to introduce a few of the many dimensions of Buechner’s understanding of vocation by turning to his book about it: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation.
Buechner published Now and Then in 1983, looking back on thirty years or so of his own vocational journey. However, he does not name the chapters for his vocations as such (seminarian, chaplain, writer) but rather for the places God had called him to: New York, Exeter, Vermont. The book begins in 1954 with the beginning of his studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, though with a look back to the years since 1950, when Buechner’s first novel, A Long Day’s Dying, was published. That year, at twenty-three, Buechner was featured in both Life and Time magazines, owing to the critical success of his first novel. Yet, four years later he was beginning theological study to prepare for work in ministry. Was he turning away from his calling, or toward it?
Entering seminary, Buechner knew that he would have to “give up my career as a writer for a time,” though in view of the poor reception that his second novel The Seasons’ Difference (1952) had received, he says that “it was not a difficult sacrifice to make, and I was richly embarrassed by the people who took the romantic view that I had done some selfless, noble thing.” But he remembered, too, the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, upon taking orders, had burned his poems, and Buechner knew that he might have to “give up writing for good.” [4]
So the call to seminary was at least a temporary call away from writing. But more importantly it was a calling to Christ. Buechner calls this “not unlike being in love,” something “crazy” that reminded him of St Francis, which others (and he) found “astonishing.”[5] George Buttrick, under whose preaching Buechner had found his newfound devotion, said that “it would be a shame to lose a good novelist for a mediocre preacher,” his old friend Peter thought him “bizarre,” and other friends “accepted it at least as an eccentricity.”[6]
Buechner’s call to seminary seems to have been as inexplicable to others as it was irresistible to him. It does not, however, seem to have involved explicit consideration of the world’s deep hunger or his deep gladness. Rather, here is another dimension of vocation: the call can be beautiful, compelling, and crazy. It must be a calling away from something else. It may baffle people, even those who know us best. These are themes that Buechner will explore elsewhere, and the old saint Godric certainly comes to mind.
In other respects, Now and Then reinforces some of Buechner’s famous definition. During these years, for example, he did come up against the guardrails that he would later describe in Wishful Thinking: “neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.”[7] Doing his field work in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, helping needy folks find jobs, he admired the “sad gaiety” of the full-time workers who persisted in the face of hopeless difficulties. But he “did not have either the stomach for it or the gift for it,” though the hair shirt that would have been work with the poor “haunts me still.”[8]
On the other hand, while it was not a “soft berth,” Buechner recalls that “there was the world calling me too.” He remained convinced at this stage that “either I was to be a writer, or I was to be a minister,” so to help shape his decision he took a year off from Union from 1955-1956. But he returned to seminary, graduated, and was ordained.
In Now and Then, Buechner will talk about other vocations: his marriage to Judith, his teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy, and his return to full-time writing in Vermont. Further dimensions of calling emerge in these accounts. To minister to students at Exeter, Buechner finds himself in the role of apologist. Through the readings he assigns them, he becomes frustrated by a lack of writing about grace, and so henceforth “it would be the presence of God rather than his absence that I would write about.”[9] Encountering the faith healer Agnes Sanford, he found his way into the practice of daily prayer and prayers for healing. Becoming chaplain at Exeter, he was called to preach, to administer the sacraments, to marry and to bury. Feeling too comfortable, he left Exeter for writing, and found that he was “as much a minister in the books I wrote as in the sermons I preached.”[10] The novels become callings themselves, each bringing Buechner to new insights and new truths. Visiting an elderly woman regularly, he plays games with her, prays with her, and finds the sacredness in the ordinary which will become an abiding theme in his writing (and which is lovingly mirrored toward the end of Brendan (1987)). And as Now and Then draws to a close, in passages of great beauty, Buechner returns to the call that started the volume, the call of Christ. “It is God’s way in Christ, and as we are called to participate with Christ in his suffering, so we are called to be partners with him in his work of redemption.”[11]
And at the very end, Buechner sends us right back to the introduction, to think through the whole book again. He’s carved a Latin motto into his walking stick: vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit.[12] Called or not called, God will be present. Wherever we go with that walking stick, God will already be there – but this time it is we who are doing the calling. Vocation and invocation share a root, and they share a pattern: God’s call and our response; our call and God’s response.
This twist at the end reminds us how much of this book is about prayer, and indeed at the end of the introduction, Buechner states it plainly: “autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.”[13]
Now and Then contains another of Buechner’s most beloved phrases: “Listen to your life.”[14] I quote this and its subsequent sentences fairly regularly myself, and have found them thoughtful and instructive. But when I read them as part of the whole of the memoir, they bring me to tears. Here is Buechner’s call to us, based on the idea that “if you tell your own story with sufficient candor and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story.”[15] The universal story is a story of calling, and that call goes both directions. As we all face “the same dark doubts, the same wild hopes,” we find that whether called or not, God will be present.[16]
In the spirit of that universal story, I find that Buechner’s vocation story has strong resonances with the calling of another writer who died as I was preparing this piece. Wendell Berry, like Buechner, cared a lot about calling, and it runs through his books with great richness. In light of his passing, I think it well to note some uncanny parallels between the lives of these two writers. In both cases, they found great success at a young age, Buechner with A Long Day’s Dying, Berry with an appointment at New York University and promising publications. Both, to the consternation of their peers, then found that a call to something was also a call away from something else. Buechner, called to Christ, left for seminary; Berry, called home to Kentucky, left New York University. Buttrick warned Buechner against this, as one of Berry’s professors warned him.[17]
Both recognized that the good that has come of their calling was not of their own making. Buechner wonders whether his writing has given much to anyone, and answers, “If I have, then it was by grace alone.”[18] Berry recalls his father, sitting one night on the porch, proclaiming, “Well, I’ve had a wonderful life. And I’ve had nothing to do with it.”[19] Both realized their calling in real places – the places God called them to – though Buechner’s knowledge of the land was, by his own admission, imperfect.[20] And by following a call to those places, far from the heart of the literary world, they found that the limitations imposed by vocation open infinite beauty. “There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it.”[21]
“Listen to your life,” says Buechner, and I find in myself some of these same vocational themes. I was not by any means a rising star in my mid-twenties, but I was in a graduate school that seemed to be taking me toward a comfortable position focused on research. Offered a job at a small college with a 5-4 teaching load and numerous committees, I accepted out of need, and without realizing it, I had been called away, permanently, from one thing toward another. What I did not share with Buechner and Berry was a strong calling to my new place; I would discover that as I began my career. I probably did not spend enough time in the practice of prayer, but even uncalled, God was present.
Frederick Buechner, in telling his own story of vocation, helps us understand our own. Our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger are helpful categories, but Buechner has a great deal more to say than that. The calling that pulls us away from the thing we planned, that seems crazy to others, that brings us into a life of calling back to God in prayer: these too are parts of the truth that Buechner continues to tell.
Thank you for reading the hundredth birthday edition of The Buechner Review. Should you wish to join the celebrations on your own social media pages by sharing a tribute to Buechner with the world, we would encourage you to do so beneath the hashtag: #fb100.
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Works cited:
[1] Russell Moore, “What Frederick Buechner has to say to a world bored by words,” The Buechner Review 4 (September, 2026).
[2] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), p.95.
[3] Moore.
[4] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), p.11.
[5] Ibid., p.5.
[6] Ibid., pp. 12, 22-23.
[7] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p. 95.
[8] Buechner, Now and Then, pp. 29-30.
[9] Ibid., pp. 48-49.
[10] Ibid., p. 80.
[11] Ibid., p. 104.
[12] Ibid., p. 108. Buechner cites Jung for this motto, but it is found in Erasmus’ Adages, and can be traced back to Horace in Latin and Thucydides in Greek.
[13] Ibid., p. 3.
[14] Ibid., p. 87.
[15] Ibid., p. 3.
[16] Ibid., p. 46.
[17] Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002).
[18] Buechner, Now and Then, p. 30.
[19] Amanda Petrusich, “Going Home with Wendell Berry,” The New Yorker, 14 July 2019.
[20] Buechner, Now and Then, pp. 77-78.
[21] Ibid., p. 87.
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