Like Buechner, my life has been a long reverberation of a father who left me in childhood. Not, it should be said, by suicide, as Buechner’s father; mine is still “out there” somewhere, though I’m not sure if it makes the absence better or worse. Comparing grief seems like a grim, misbegotten game. I mention this common absence, instead, because it explains the deep recognition that gripped me when, in The Sacred Journey (1982), recounting his search for a father, Buechner looks back to see that he ‘found fathers galore.’[1] It is in this context that he gives us this wonderful, expansive vision for All Saints’ Day:
On All Saints’ Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.
Very much like Buechner, I have been fortunate to find fathers in some of my teachers, but I have also been parented and loved and helped by some teachers from afar, whom I’ve never met except in their books. Teachers who have wended their way into my heart and helped me to feel a little less alone. Fred Buechner is one of those sorts of teachers to me.
And so I perhaps inordinately treasure the fact that we share an affinity for a sacred place called Laity Lodge. Discussing a pivotal encounter he experienced at the Lodge in a talk he gave to the Chicago Sunday Evening Club in 1991,[2] Buechner captures some of the magic of this retreat center nestled in the Frio River Canyon, amidst the rugged beauty of the Texas Hill Country. The geography of the site is its own spiritual architecture: to reach the Lodge, visitors drive through the river as it flows gently over ochre caliche. One imagines crossing a moat to an enchanted island, a vehicular baptism the rite of passage to every retreat. Like Buechner, I have found this crossing to be an Exodus-like liberation from the tyranny of modern distraction as well as a “promised land” entrée to an environment primed for contemplation and spiritual encounter.
The Lodge is a unique place for “soul work” because of its ethos of vulnerability. In its DNA is a tradition of people “sharing their stories,” giving testimony—in the best spirit of Augustine’s Confessions—to the way God has been at work in their lives. But in contrast to the pat narrative arcs of testimonies of victory, the Lodge has always made room for people to share the messiness of a life lived with God. This is what Buechner prized about the place, and in this talk in Chicago, he recounted a transformative moment there.
After Buechner had shared an upsetting, heart-rending scene from his childhood, Howard Butt, the founder and benefactor of Laity Lodge approached Buechner and said to him, “You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it.” ‘That phrase caught me absolutely off guard,’ Buechner testified. And yet it also crystallized something for him. The moment was an epiphany of self-understanding. Here was a new way to understand his calling: the stewardship of pain.
I suggest that this is also a helpful hermeneutic lens for understanding what Buechner is doing in his memoirs, particularly The Sacred Journey, focused on his earliest years.
In his talk on the stewardship of pain, Buechner says there are at least two ways to fail to be a steward of one’s pain. Like the fearful servant in the parable of the talents, one might simply bury the pain. This is a defense mechanism, an act of fear. We imagine that if we can bury the pain we can avoid it. But we don’t realize how much we are burying parts of who we are. We become alienated from ourselves, and the pain has a tendency to emerge, zombie-like, devouring.[3] Conversely, Buechner says, one could make a spectacle of pain, displaying it as a way of centering attention on oneself. Neither of these responses to pain steward it. To steward pain is to face one’s own suffering for the sake of others.
This, I think, explains a remarkable feature of Buechner’s prose in the memoirs: its restraint. At precisely those moments where a lesser writer would leverage emotion for mere sympathy, Buechner, like a method actor, plumbs the depth of the pain but then expresses it with a restraint that is more powerful than any emotional spectacle. The emotional spectacle alienates a reader or audience; we become observers of someone else’s emotion that is, in a sense, unavailable to us. But in the artful expression of restraint, the emotion is present in a way that invites the reader’s or audience’s own response. Consider the acting advice offered by Maria Ouspenskaya, one of the early teachers of Stanislavski’s “system”: ‘Always establish the mood within you, and don’t show more than you have, or it looks false. Always show less, and the imagination of the audience will magnify it.’[4]
To steward one’s pain is to enter into it for the sake of others, to be an occasion and catalyst for the reader to grapple with their own pain in ways that are restorative and redemptive.[5] Buechner’s style, I suggest, is an embodiment of this conviction. He wades into emotional waters while resisting sentimentality. To take just one, if obvious, example, consider the way Buechner recounts his father’s suicide in The Sacred Journey.
With the skill of a novelist, Buechner takes us into the world of the child that he was at the time. The boys are playing games in their room on an early Saturday morning. We can picture the scene; we’ve been there. But we are also invited to see the world from their perspective. It is worth noting that throughout this passage, as in much of his corpus, Buechner’s diction is simple and straightforward. Adjectival flourishes and lexical fireworks would ruin the directness of the scene. The simplicity of the diction is a sign of Buechner’s aesthetic mastery, not the lack thereof.
We are veritably playing on the floor with these two boys when the fiftysomething memoirist recognizes something of portent: ‘our bedroom door opened a little, and somebody looked in on us. It was our father’.[6] This door that would open, then silently close, is the door through which an entire life will pass. This door is a crucible.
The door closes, the games continue, and when the boys next open that door they step into a different world, one without their father, a world of abandonment. Their mother, ever the repressed Yankee, ‘told us to go back to our room. We went back. We looked out the window.’ These sentences evince a Hemingwayesque terseness that are nonetheless pregnant with emotional valence. In the restrained simplicity of the prose, space is made for us to feel something of the horror.[7] At the end of recounting this episode, Buechner cites his father’s note without commentary: ‘“I adore and love you,” it said, “and am no good....Give Freddy my watch. Give Jamie my pearl pin. I give you all my love’’.’[8] The absence of commentary here speaks. The silence that follows this citation is an artistic decision.
This is prose that has passed through the via negativa; this is the feat of a writer who understands the power of absence. In short, Buechner’s style echoes some of his deepest theological convictions. Later in The Sacred Journey, Buechner finds a vocation: ‘By the time I was sixteen, I knew as surely as I knew anything that the work I wanted to spend my life doing was the work of words’.[9] But there was much that he still didn’t know: ‘What I had not found, I could not name and, for the most part, knew of only through my sense of its precious and puzzling and haunting absence. And maybe we can never name it by its final, true, and holy name, and maybe it is largely through its absence that, this side of Paradise, we will ever know it’.[10]
The power of Buechner’s voice as a memoirist is the wedding of vulnerability with a prose style that knows the power of restraint. In a way that might be lost in our age, Buechner understood that vulnerability should not confused with mere emotional display. One can make a spectacle of oneself without actually being vulnerable. The display can become its own armor, a persona adorned to garner attention while hiding from readers. Buechner, in contrast, embodies a paradoxical reticence that seems to make him more available—a restraint more authentic than the oversharing of our day.
Vulnerability also shouldn’t be confused with weakness. This, of course, is what the young Buechner admires in Frank Baum’s “King Rinkitink” on the borderlands of Oz: ‘Like a tree that has been blown for many years from so many directions by so many winds that none of them can ever quite blow it down, he seemed strong in his very vulnerability’.[11] Indeed, far from vulnerability being tantamount to weakness, Buechner illustrates how true vulnerability is only possible because of strength. Only the strong can be vulnerable.
This twining of vulnerability and restraint both explains, and is enacted, by Buechner’s style in his memoirs. The memoirs, he says, are an act of discernment, an exercise in listening to his life in order to hear the echoes of God’s footsteps within it. ‘What I propose to do,’ he tells us, ‘is to try listening to my life as a whole, or at least to certain key moments of the first half of my life thus far, for whatever meaning, of holiness, of God, there may be in it to hear’.[12] But the whole point, akin to Augustine, is to do so in a way that is an invitation for us to listen to our lives in the same way. Speaking to his readers, Buechner says he hopes that when he has put his own photo album away, ‘you may in the privacy of the heart take out the album of your own life and search it for the people and places you have loved and learned from yourself, and for those moments in the past—many of them half forgotten—through which you glimpsed, however dimly and fleetingly, the sacredness of your own journey’.[13]
Buechner’s memoir is not an exercise of “Look at me!” but rather an invitation wrapped in a testimony: “Here’s how I did it.” The telos of The Sacred Journey is not disclosure of Fred Buechner as much as catalyzing introspection that has been attuned to look and listen for ‘crazy, holy grace’.[14] The whole of the memoir resolves to an exhortation: ‘Listen. Your life is happening’.[15]
Buechner loved the magic of words, not merely for what they could say but what they could do. His English teacher, Mr. Martin, kindled an appreciation ‘for what words are, and can do, in themselves’—the power they have ‘to make things happen’.[16] The Sacred Journey is a well-wrought speech act that is bent on making a dent on the world. The beauty and literary power of Buechner’s memoirs are rooted in a wisdom that knows when to remain silent and make room for us.
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Footnotes:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey: a memoir of early days (New York: HarperOne, 1982), p.74. I explore a similar theme, with a similar testimony, in a chapter on “Fathers” in: James K. A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2019), p.201-202.
[2] A video of the talk is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hdH1_z2ps
[3] Or, to use the metaphor of one of my father-teachers, Jim Olthuis, we try to bury the pain and lock it away in our emotional basements, only for it to come back, knocking, battering, haunting us. See: James H. Olthuis, The Beautiful Risk: a new psychology of loving and being loved (Cascade, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), p.83-84 (‘What begins as a survival strategy turns into deepened alienation as we act as if we do not have basements filled with the discarded shards and fragments of hurt.’).
[4] Quoted in: Isaac Butler, The Method: how the twentieth century learned to act (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), p.133.
[5] This is also Augustine’s goal in his penning his Confessions: not merely disclosure of secrets but a testimony that engenders a similar wrangling in his readers. See: Confessions 10.1.1-10.5.7. For further discussion of this dynamic, see: Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.160-162.
[6] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.38.
[7] In a sense, The Sacred Journey is Buechner’s return to this room once again, not to hide from the reality (as his mother wanted) but to face it and step out through the door with a story to share for the sake of others.
[8] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.41.
[9] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.74.
[10] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.75.
[11] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.16.
[12] In another context, I might unpack why I think this is a Hegelian impulse, something echoed in Paul Tillich.
[13] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.7.
[14] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.57.
[15] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.77.
[16] Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.68.
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