Listening to Your Life (1992)
Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner
Book Description
Listening to Your Life is an anthology of sorts: a collection of thought-provoking, original, and pithy snatches of prose carefully selected from the works of Frederick Buechner.
The 366 quotations—one for each day of the year with some spare change—cover a variety of topics, from faith, doubt, family, tragedy, joy, and the remarkable ordinary, to musings on theological conundrums, Biblical figures and stories, and the large and small questions that each of us face on the journey of life.
Redolent with the broad themes that run throughout Buechner’s work and thought, its central aim is as the title suggests—its daily meditations aim to provide readers with a space to stop, sit, and listen to their lives:
There are a lot of books like this floating around these days, and I own several of them myself. I keep them on my bedside table and am most apt to look at them at night just before I switch off the light. I open to the quotation for whatever day it happens to be and hope that it will turn out to be a good one to sleep on. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. The good ones, for me, are the ones that almost uncannily hit on something that I have been thinking about, often without realizing that I have. They are the ones that sound like a friend talking, like somebody who has been more or less where I have been and felt something more or less like what I have been feeling—about life, about myself, about the people I love and the people I am unable to love, about God. They are not so much the ones that tell me something new that will keep me awake, puzzling over it, as the ones that will help me see something as familiar as my own face in a new way, with a new sense of its depth and preciousness and mystery. Above all, I guess, the good ones, for me, are the ones that one way or another suggest that although the night is coming, it is not darkness but light that is the end of all things. I can only hope that the reader will find at least a few like that buried among all these pages. And that they will bring good dreams.
Reviews
"If Frederick Buechner subordinated his nature and chose to write on naughts and nothings, he would still exalt his readers. When he is in representative harmony and writes of the accessibility of God to humanity and of humanity’s agreement with its potential divinity, we, the readers, are lifted up, buoyed up, and promised wholeness. This book is meant to possess, and at the same time liberate, the heart. I’m happy to report it succeeds."
— Maya Angelou, poet
"Daily meditations taken from the works of an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and preacher who has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations."
— The New York Times Book Review
