In the September following his ordination at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church (July 1st, 1958), Revd Frederick Buechner took a position at the Phillips Exeter Academy. The students, he recalls in his second memoir, Now and Then (1983), were ‘negative, against, anti, just about everything’:[1]
As card-carrying atheists, almost to a man, they saw religion in general […] as a holdover from the dark past and a roadblock to any hope there might be for a bright future. When it came to the Christian church in particular, and more particularly still when it came to the school church, which, whether they believed in God or didn’t, all students were required to attend on Sundays unless they chose a town church instead, their opposition was boundless and impassioned. It was the final outrage perpetrated upon them by the combined authority of school, parents, establishment, and the very God they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole even if it could be proved to them that he existed.[2]
Called to serve as school chaplain and the sole teacher in a fledgling Religious Studies department, Buechner describes these years as ‘embattled’.[3] ‘I was too occupied with my job’, he writes, ‘to think much about the next novel I myself might write’.[4] Should the itch ever return, however, one thing was clear: ‘it would be the presence of God rather than his absence that I would write about’.[5]
What emerged in time, and after a sabbatical in Vermont that anticipated his future retirement to Rupert Mountain, was a fourth novel: The Final Beast (1965). Once published, Buechner’s first fiction since taking orders was greeted with some caution. In an article for Book Week titled “Writing on cloth can be tricky”, fellow author, Julian Moynahan, concludes that ‘The Final Beast lodges itself at midpoint between the priest’s and the writer’s way of looking at things’.[6] The novel was all the more suspicious for its focus on the life of an ordained minister, Theodore Nicolet, and for its description of several experiences that can only be described as “spiritual” — among them a divine encounter, which concludes with the protagonist flat on his back in the grass behind a barn: ‘…oh Jesus, he thought, with a great lump in his throat and a crazy grin, it was an agony of gladness and beauty falling wild and soft like rain.’[7]
Though critics treated moments such as these as a departure from the norm, careful readers of Buechner would not have found it all that surprising. His earlier novels include numerous similar encounters. Consider, for example, Tristram Bone’s contretemps with the statue of a saint in A Long Day’s Dying (1950), where, having reached out to take the wooden hand, he found it would not let go. Or, Peter Cowley’s hillside experience in The Seasons’ Difference (1952):
The sun was getting low in the sky, but the light was coming through the leaves all around me, it seemed from all directions, and that's when I first began to know what was happening. I remember I kept thinking, Peter Cowley, Peter Cowley, are you dreaming, old Peter, but of course it wasn't that because I wasn't asleep, and I noticed the kind of things around me you don't notice when you're dreaming: I could feel the sun warm on my hand, and there was a fly sitting on a stone beside me rubbing his back legs against his wings the way they do.[8]
To these, we might add the barely disguised appearance of Dr James Muilenberg — Professor of Hebrew at Union Theological Seminary, and much-referenced in Buechner’s memoirs — as the volatile and oracular Dr Henry Kuykendall in The Return of Ansel Gibbs (1958):
"What are you, who, what are you?" he would ask, suddenly stopping in his erratic progress down the aisle of the large lecture hall and grabbing hold of some seated undergraduate by the shoulders. "Just a lump of flesh, a blob, a thing, until I find out…your name. Your name!" And he would raise his arms as if in the wonder of discovery. "Of course. Now I know who you are. You are…" and he would pause, perilously poised on the very brink of the ludicrous, "Harry!" his face wonderfully brightening, "or Peter or John. Israel understood that a person is his name.”[9]
The signs, it would seem, were there. But signs of what? What, for Buechner, does it mean when part of the cosmos becomes noticeably thick — too thick, too heavy, too holy to be ignored? What does it mean when the body and soul of a stranger are wed and made manifest to us in a name? What does it mean when reality squeezes back, and we realise that our hand is no longer doing the holding, but being held?
In The Final Beast, the moment of encounter comes at the half-way point of a long journey. Mrs Rooney Vail has abandoned home and husband without explanation, and so — leaving his children with the nanny, beset by grief at the death of his own wife and vicious rumours spread by a local journalist — the local minister goes after this latest lost member of the flock. Finding himself at his estranged father’s house, Nicolet walks outside in search of clarity, and lies down in the dappled sunlight beneath an apple tree:
“Please,” he whispered. Still flat on his back, he stretched out his fists as far as they would reach—“Please…”—then opened them, palms up, and held them there as he watched for something, for the air to cleave, fold back like a tent flap, to let a splendor through. […] “Please come,” he said, then “Jesus,” swallowing, half blind with the sun in his eyes as he raised his head to look. The air would part like a curtain, and the splendor would not break or bend anything but only fill the empty places between the trees, the trees and house, between the hands which he brought together now. “Fear not,” he thought. He was not afraid.[10]
To encounter the divine, in Nicolet’s vague imagining, is to be dislocated from the mundane, to witness matter being pulled apart, to see something unbelievable and extra-ordinary. It is this kind of “sign” that he is seeking, when,
Two apple branches struck against each other with the limber clack of wood on wood. That was all — a tick-tock rattle of branches — but then a fierce lurch of excitement at what was only daybreak, only the smell of summer coming, only starting back again for home. […] Just clack-clack, but praise him, he thought.[11]
Nicolet’s divine encounter occurs via a moment of clarity, a brief unveiling of the extraordinary nature of ordinary things in their mere existence. The word “exist” comes from the Latin: ex, “out of”, and sistere, “to cause to stand”. At the heart of this moment, and of many such moments in Buechner’s writing, is a barely-spoken revelation of that which we take most for granted: the marvellous procession of all things out from their first cause. The seed, found situated in friendly earth; the hidden germination of its heart; the slow and steady downward reach of its roots towards deep treasuries of moisture and nutrients; the upward search of the sprout until, finally, it scents air above and unfurls its face to the residual heat and light of a myriad hydrogen protons smashing into one another at the core of a sun that burns at twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit ninety-three million miles away. Radiating through the empty vestibules of space and terminating on the outspread palms of the seedling’s leaves, the light meets favourably with air that is itself the collective sigh of all plants everywhere, and with water droplets borne from distant seas along the secret pathways of the wind. Thus, seedling becomes sapling, and the sapling — grown to maturity, its wooden arms outstretched and bearing fruit — is the product and continuation of a miracle. As Nicolet searches between them for some vague ‘splendor’, it is the branches themselves that materialise in all their weightiness, and, stirred to song just at the moment of asking, become the means through which the entire cosmos rushes in and makes its cause known, ‘the dry clack-clack of the world’s tongue’.
He sat up, clasping his knees in his arms. Someone was calling “Nick oh Nick…oh Nick,” and as he watched, wooden-throated, a neat, dark figure appeared around the corner of his father’s house. “Denbigh!” It came out an unfamiliar croak and he tried again. “As I live and breathe.”[12]
The final revelation, then, is of a higher and holier reality, as Nicolet, beyond merely observing the miracle, is wrapped up within the song of the cosmos to its creator, ‘wooden-throated’ and full of wonder.
This theological principle, which runs throughout Buechner’s work, appears to have emerged more fully during his tenure at Phillips Exeter. It is the quiet apologetic of The Magnificent Defeat (1966), the first volume of collected sermons from this time. Standing in a pulpit before the “cultured despisers” of his day, the upturned faces of staff and students alike, he returns time and again to this message — the ordinary, for Buechner, is extraordinary enough to exhaust the mind with holy wonder at the work and presence of God. Tellingly, it is to this theme that he turns in his description of the miracle that, within the Bible, forms the very pivot about which history turns: the risen son of God, ‘staggering on broken feet out of the tomb’, ‘bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory’.[13] ‘[W]e try to reduce it to poetry’, he writes, and yet the Bible proclaims it as mere ordinary ’fact’.[14] One morning, a dead man was no longer dead, and in a way that is all the more extraordinary for its ordinariness. ‘[S]omehow he got up with life in him again’, Buechner proclaims, and with ‘the glory upon him’.[15]
Just as nature itself, by its sheer everyday existence, breaks the laws of nature — for only nothing can come from nothing, yet our senses are filled with things beyond measure — so Jesus of Nazareth broke, healed, but also typified the cosmos by his resurrection appearances, often ‘unglamorous’ and with ‘little fanfare’.[16] He ate, he drank, he sat down and walked around, and the soft footfall of his feet of flesh upon the earth left imprints in the ordinary way. He was ‘the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us’, and he ate meals ‘like any other meal’, and this was enough to flood the world with light.[17] Just as the disciples must have marvelled at these things, so Buechner invites his readers to marvel at the miraculous nature of the ordinary, and via the everyday to experience the ‘presence of God rather than his absence’. As the famous old quote from Now and Then says:
[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.[18]
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Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: a memoir of vocation (New York: Harper, 1983), p.44.
[2] Ibid, p.44.
[3] Ibid, p.46.
[4] Ibid, p.49.
[5] Ibid, p.49.
[6] Julian Moynahan, “Writing on cloth can be tricky”, Book Week, February 14 1965, p.6.
[7] Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p.177.
[8] Frederick Buechner, The Seasons’ Difference (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p.79.
[9] Frederick Buechner, The Return of Ansel Gibbs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p.83.
[10] Buechner, The Final Beast, p.176-7.
[11] Ibid, p.177.
[12] Ibid, p.178.
[13] Frederick Buechner, “The Magnificent Defeat”, The Magnificent Defeat (1966), p.18.
[14] “The End is Life”, The Magnificent Defeat, p.77-8.
[15] Ibid, p.80.
[16] “The Road to Emmaus”, The Magnificent Defeat, p.85.
[17] “The Road to Emmaus”, The Magnificent Defeat, p.87-88; “The End is Life”, The Magnificent Defeat, p.81.
[18] Buechner, Now and Then, p.87.
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