The Longing for Home (1996)
Recollections and Reflections
Book Description
In The Longing for Home, Frederick Buechner offers a variety of meditations on a single theme: home.
In ‘Part 1: The Home We Knew’, the author brings together a number of autobiographical reflections on his own childhood, returning to the sights, sounds, smells, stories, objects, people, and places that combine together to form the memory of “home”.
‘Part 2: The Home We Dream’, contains a series of contemplative pieces that consider heaven as the home towards which we are all headed, and were, in large part, written to aid those whose task it is to preach of that place to their waiting congregations.
Through this anthology of published and unpublished essays, sermons, articles, and poetry, Buechner presents home as both a place of origin and an ultimate destination, a place in which human beings are formed and the place for which they were made, and a place that exists simultaneously in dreams and in ordinary, physical, mundane reality.
The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word be-long, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness […].
Reviews
"Journey on, Frederick Buechner. We need your stories to help us make sense of our own."
— New Oxford Review
"Extraordinarily personal…intimate, dignified, and wryly humorous."
— USA Today
"Buechner has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations."
— New York Times Book Review
"With profound intelligence, Buechner’s [work] does what the finest, most appealing literature does: It displays and illumines the seemingly unrelated mysteries of human character and ultimate ideas."
— Annie Dillard, Boston Globe
"In The Longing for Home, [Buechner] owns up to the possibility that his entire career has been a search for home, an attempt to fill that something missing in himself."
— W. Dale Brown, The Book of Buechner
