Frederick Buechner (7/11/1926-8/15/2022)

Buechner Themes

Hope Through Grace
 

GRACE: A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody? A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. […] The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too. 

—    Wishful Thinking (1973)

With theologians throughout history, Buechner’s work asserts the centrality of grace to the Christian life, and to a true understanding of the universe. Buechner’s exploration of grace, however, is typically unique. Dale Brown writes that, “Buechner’s claim as a novelist is to demonstrate the flow of grace in a world unaware of or resistant to its operation, the grace of God in all the mire of worldly day-to-dayness”. 

Grace, in all of Buechner’s writings, is experienced chiefly through the ordinary; it is a “subterranean presence” that is everywhere present in the lives of human beings:

You get out of bed, wash and dress; eat breakfast, say goodbye and go away never maybe, to return for all you know, to work, talk, lust, pray, dawdle and do, and at the end of the day, if your luck holds, you come home again, home again. Then night again. Bed. The little death of sleep, sleep of death. Morning, afternoon, evening—the hours of the day, of any day, of your day and my day. The alphabet of grace. If there is a God who speaks anywhere, surely he speaks here: through waking up and working, through going away and coming back again, through people you read and books you meet, through falling asleep in the dark.

Along similar lines, Buechner also often turns to autobiographical writing in order to explain the nature of grace. “I cannot talk about God or sin or grace”, he writes in The Alphabet of Grace (1970), “without at the same time talking about those parts of my own experience where these ideas became compelling and real”: the “occasional, obscure glimmering through of grace”, the “muffled presence of the holy”, and the personally-experienced “images, always broken, partial, ambiguous, of Christ”.

As an author, preacher, and memoirist, Buechner often looks for grace in the most unlikely of places, finding it even in the pain and tragedy of his story, and, in doing so, encouraging his readers to find it in their own. In Telling Secrets (1991), he writes that grace “explodes into our lives”, “sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris, to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last”.

The centrality of the nature of grace to Buechner’s work best summarised by the author himself, in an oft-quoted passage from his second memoir, Now and Then (1983):

[I]f I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. What I started trying to do as a writer and as a preacher was more and more to draw on my own experience not just as a source of plot, character, illustration, but as a source of truth.

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