I sometimes wonder what Frederick Buechner would have made of his words living on as an Instagram meme.
By this, I mean, of course, the one statement of Buechner’s that one is apt to see while one scrolls through social media...I mean, of course, this line: “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[1] I need not ponder this long, though, because who can imagine Buechner — the real Buechner, not a fan — having Instagram?
Once, though, visiting a church not my own, I heard the preacher say, “As a man named Frederick Buechner once put it…” and I almost sighed in frustration. Not because I’m averse to a Buechner quotation (I rarely make it a day without making one myself), but because I knew exactly what it would be, and that it would be applied as though it were akin to the “Follow Your Heart” advice from a Disney movie or a high school commencement speech.
I tried to imagine what Buechner’s face would look like if he were there, in the pew next to mine, realizing that his words — shocking and disorienting when he wrote them — were, at least at that moment in that room, a cliché. But then I realized that this, too, was unlikely to ever have happened, even if Buechner were well and still among us. He hated, after all, to go to church, and clichés were the main reason why.
When a television reporter interviewed Buechner about preaching, he confessed that he tried to avoid it because it bored him. Of the preachers he often heard Buechner complained, “They are not telling me anything I haven’t heard before. They’re not moving my heart. They’re not touching me. And I think, what am I doing here? It’s all so verbal in the Protestant church. You’ve heard these words a million times before.”
“I am such a person of words. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off,” Buechner confessed.
It gives birth to the worst of me. I keep thinking how much better I could do it, and what a terrible thing to go to church and come away thinking, ‘God, I wish I’d gotten up there. I could have really told the way it is.’ So, the preaching is part of the reason I don’t go to church.[2]
Leaving aside whether sitting home is the right solution to the problem of a pulpit clamoring with clichés, the diagnosis gets at something much larger than one writer’s professional offense at the abuse of words. Indeed, some would argue that what Buechner was getting at was the fundamental spiritual crisis of the age. What does a religion of words do when words themselves, much less “religious” words, are exhausted?
“If the words that clothes Christianity is not dead, it is at least, for many dying; and what is really surprising, I suppose, is that it has lasted as long as it has,” Buechner once preached.[3] He called on his listeners to imagine the most commonplace word they could — he chose “umbrella” — and repeat it twenty times in a row: “umbrella, umbrella, umbrella—and by the time we are finished, umbrella will not be a word anymore. It will be a noise only, an absurdity, stripped of all meaning.” Imagine, then, he said, what has happened over two-thousand years to words that once startled and amazed: faith, sin, redemption, atonement, now, in many contexts, little more than “empty banalities.”[4]
Buechner was not the first to sense this problem. Novelist Walker Percy, for example, argued that, further, this kind of exhaustion-by-familiarity of Christian language represented one of most dangerous crises faced by the modern church. “The old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it is cashed in,” Percy wrote:
Even if one talks only of Christendom, leaving the heathens out of it, of Christendom where everybody is a believer, it almost seems that when everybody believes in God, it is as if everybody started the game with one poker chip, which is the same as starting with none.[5]
For Buechner, though, the danger was not just to a church culture for whom the old words have gone dead, but to the preacher himself. A preacher who glimpses into just how shocking the mystery of Christ is, is often tempted, he wrote, to stick to clichéd pulpit formulations. “Comparatively empty as they may be, hey are at least familiar,” he wrote. Congregations expect this because the skilled preacher can take these clichés and “move them around in various thought-provoking and edifying ways which nobody will feel unsettled or intimidated by because they have heard them so often.”[6]
But:
Ministers run the awful risk, in other words, of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives—let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to—of a living God who transcends everything they think they know and can say about him and is full of extraordinary surprises […]. [7]
One way, of course, that one could seek to avoid the deadening of the old words is by tossing them aside. One can see this in the mainline Protestant preacher, in the ecclesial world native to Buechner, contorted to say such things as “God said of Godself that God was faithful to God’s promises,” to avoid using personal pronouns that might sound politically insensitive. And one can see it in the much more numerous evangelical preachers who replace biblical language, much less biblical narrative, with the language of marketing or therapy or politics or even of point-by-subpoint-by-sub-sub-point theological polemics.
One can even see this in the pressure — in almost all church sectors — toward what, in a completely different context, a former U.S. president called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” A church that thinks that people cannot follow the biblical story — or who can’t be taught its relevance — minimizes that story and produces another generation who knows not Joseph. Or Jehoiakim. Or Jeremiah.
Buechner, though, did not go that way. “I keep plugging away at the same old words,” he said.
I keep on speaking the language of the Christian faith because, although the words themselves may well be mostly dead, the longer I use them, the more convinced I become that the realities that the words point to are very real and un-dead, and because I do not happen to know any other language that for me points to these realities as well.[8]
And, indeed, Buechner’s books — whether collections of sermons or essays or allusions in novels — used the “language of Zion” insistently and deeply.
The power of words relies on an interplay between familiarity and strangeness. The human being in any culture and in any age responds to stories, Buechner wrote, because in them “the hiddenness and utterance are both present, and that is another reason why they are a good way of talking about God’s truth which is part hidden and part uttered too.”[9]
Novelty without familiarity destroys the power of words. Part of what matters at a funeral is that the same words spoken of my father’s graveside — “The Lord is my shepherd…” — were also spoken at his father’s, and will be spoken at mine. Familiarity without strangeness also destroys the power of words. C.S. Lewis wrote that the “stained glass and Sunday school associations” of the words of the Christian gospel deadened the imagination. To awaken it, one need sneak past the “watchful dragons” that guard it.[10]
How, then, do the old Christian words come to life again? For Buechner, part of this was the transforming effect on the people who tell them. Part of the reason, he argued, that people aren’t surprised by the wonder of those old words is that preachers themselves are not. To regain the sense of mystery, one must not just dissect it, as Robert Louis Stevenson, put it, “the cold finger of a starfish.”[11]
Buechner advised, of course, “Listen to your life.” That requires a sense of the ordinary, but it also requires an awareness of how the ordinary is interrupted with the strange, with the tragic, even with the terrifying. After all, one’s life may become a cliché too. The interruptions, though, the crises can either pull us away from what’s familiar to us — recasting it and transfiguring it — or away from it. Andy Catlett in Wendell Berry’s fictional Port William community loses his hand in a farming accident, and loses with it his hold on the world. What changes all that for him is the moment when he stands in the quiet of his own family home. “He walks from room to room, entering each as for the first time, leaving it as if forever,” Berry writes. “And he is saying over and over to himself, ‘I am blessed. I am blessed.’”[12]
At his self-described “endpoint,” John Updike, a contemporary of Buechner’s, wrote, at different times from the same deathbed in his final months about both. Updike wrote about the Sunday School lessons they attended “surlily” in childhood. And yet, he wrote, for him: “The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas, saying, Surely—magnificent, that ‘surely’—goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, my life, forever.”[13] What transformed those too-familiar words into something, for him, with power? The strangeness they feel in the actual valley of the shadow of death. Updike wrote of the phone call he received in the hospital from his pastor: “A clergyman—those comical purveyors of what makes sense to just the terrified.”[14]
We live in what experts, from Marshall McLuhan on, have warned would be a “post-literate” society, in which, as other experts, from Jonathan Haidt on, have noted, we are not so much past the word as drowned in words, each disconnected from each other and from sustained attention. If Buechner could not bear the banality of what he heard from the pulpit, how could he speak to people who would respond even to pulpit clichés — much less to sustained thought — with “too long; didn’t read”?
I suspect that Buechner would tell us that all of that can change, and change suddenly. But it can only change through words, not without them.
In his novel The Storm (1998), Buechner imagined a pastor for whom Sundays in church still meant something “even if it meant giving up golf.” Buechner wrote:
Once in a while, he thought he could detect God’s presence even in one of his own homilies, which he usually delivered without a single note and not from the pulpit but down in the aisle where he would stand with his hands clasped over his swelling surplice or toying with his pectoral cross. Drawing his words more or less at random from his memory of innumerable homilies that he had delivered in the past, he would from time to time hear himself say something that sounded so unfamiliar and unexpected even to his own ears that he was tempted to suspect that the Spirit itself was for a moment speaking through him.[15]
Buechner’s power was not just that he made the Christian story beautiful but also that he was able, through words, to speak to both the bored and the overwhelmed. He was able to show us how what we think to be strange is actually quite familiar to us. We can think of eternity in relation to time, for instance, by recalling how a pinwheel spins until it blurs together into one single color.[16] And, at the same time, he could show us how what we take for granted as “normal” is a miracle.
Buechner reminded preachers about to be ordained:
You start moving through the world as the declared representative of what people variously see as either the world’s oldest and most persistent and superannuated superstition, or the world’s wildest and most improbable dream, or the holy, living truth itself…Often their lives touch yours at moments when they are most vulnerable, when some great grief or gladness or perplexity has swept away all the usual barriers we erect between each other so that you see them for a little as who they really are, and you yourself are stripped naked by their nakedness.[17]
These moments aren’t the normal state. They come suddenly, but they come. That requires a people who know the words, who know the stories, who know the way. And it requires those people to be broken enough to feel them for what they are. As Jesus told us, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn. 6:63). A person eventually feels mortality; at points, cultures do too. Slogans and mantras from those who want to market to us or to mobilize us can serve for a while, but they have nothing to say to one who knows he or she is about to die. Only a word that is both enduring — that the dead before us have known — and alien — that is speaking to us from somewhere outside of what we can see — can do that.
Buechner might have claimed that he found listening to preaching miserable, but it was listening to a preacher that upended his life. Buechner heard a sermon from George Buttrick at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, in 1953, a preacher that Buechner said was “never letting you guess what he was going to come out with next but twitching with surprises up there in the pulpit, his spectacles a-glitter in the lectern light.” The line from that sermon, which Buechner would quote countless times over his lifetime, spoke of Jesus as being crowned in the hearts of believers “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.”
“It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then,” Buechner wrote. “It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.”[18] Buechner may, for all we know, have been bored by the rest of the service, but, in that one moment Buttrick’s deep gladness and Buechner’s deep hunger met.
And maybe, for all we know, the same will happen with someone who sees that old Buechner quote in a social media meme, or a virtual reality hologram, or whatever comes next. A world for whom the Christian gospel is no longer known enough to be cliché might well be a world frozen in its own boredom. Or it might be a world hungry enough to be amazed, again, at the alphabet of grace.
Stranger things have happened.
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]Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperCollins, 1973, 1993), p.119.
[2]Bob Abernethy, “Frederick Buechner Extended Interview,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS, May 5, 2006.
[3]Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York: HarperCollins, 1966), p.110.
[4]Ibid., p.110-11.
[5]Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), p.116.
[6]Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p.37.
[7]Ibid., p.37.
[8]Ibid., p.111.
[9]Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p.131.
[10]Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), p.390.
[11]Robert Louis Stevenson, Pan’s Pipes (London: Forgotten Books, 1910, 2018), p.15.
[12]Wendell Berry, Remembering: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), p.98-99.
[13]John Updike, “Fine Point, 12/22/08,” in Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), p.29.
[14]John Updike, Hospital 11/23-27/08” in Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), p.24.
[15]Frederick Buechner, The Storm (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p.176-77.
[16]Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.26-27.
[17]Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p.148.
[18]Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), p.108-9.
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