Frederick Buechner

Buechner Themes

Faith despite Doubt
 

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, but 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. Just clack-clack, but praise him, he thought. Praise him. Maybe all his journeying, he thought, had been only to bring him here to hear two branches hit each other twice like that, to see nothing cross the threshold but to see the threshold, to hear the dry clack-clack of the world's tongue at the approach of the approach perhaps of splendor.

—     The Final Beast (1965)

In his second memoir, Now and Then (1983), Frederick Buechner places the interplay between faith and doubt at the very heart of his work. “As a novelist no less than as a teacher”, he writes, “I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope”.

The significance of this particular theme within Buechner’s oeuvre has been recognised by a number of literary critics and scholars. Dale Brown writes of the author that, “Skepticism, doubt and unbelief will have their say in Buechner”. He continues: “Throughout his fiction and nonfiction, and even in preaching, the issue of doubt is never far away from the surface”. Agreeing with Brown’s assessment, Jim Munroe puts it another way, writing that “Buechner wades into the experience of God’s silence”. In doing so, he concludes, the author “reveals much about the nature of faith”.

Throughout his work, Buechner presents doubt as part and parcel of faith. In Wishful Thinking (1973), he suggests that faith itself is “better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than a possession […] it is an on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all”. With theologians such as Paul Tillich, Buechner reasons that if faith is “not being sure where you’re going but going anyway”, or “a journey without maps”, then doubt must surely be “an element of faith” rather than its opposite.

Buechner finds many ways to express the reality of faith despite doubt. In Secrets in the Dark (2006), he addresses the theme head on, writing that: 

Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them. But faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for. Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it. And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?

In Godric (1980), the author approaches the same theme via a different route, gifting its mystery to us via the croaking voice of the aged saint:

"Be fools for Christ," said the Apostle Paul, and thus I was thy bearded Saxon fool and clown for sure. Nothing I ever knew before and nothing I have ever come to know from then till now can match the holy mirth and madness of that time. Many's the sin I've clipped to since. Many's the dark and savage night of doubt. Many's the prayer I haven't prayed, the friend I've hurt, the kindness left undone. But this I know. The Godric that waded out of Jordan soaked and dripping wet that day was not the Godric that went wading in.

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