Buechner Themes
Listening To Your Life
[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.
“...the persistent presentiment that Something is trying to get through in the midst of the muddle of our day-to-day lives.”
Scholars, critics, and readers of all backgrounds have located this theme throughout Buechner’s works, fictional and non-fictional, autobiographical and homiletical. “Theology, fiction, and memoir”, writes Dale Brown, “become one pursuit in Buechner’s theory of writing, because they are each about paying heed to the passing moments, probing them for some ‘mightness’, some fertile possibility.” At the core of Buechner’s exhortation to his readers, “pay attention”, Brown argues that there is a simple idea: “developing a sensitivity to one’s own experience may lead to a deeper perception of spiritual matters”.
In Telling Secrets (1991), Buechner suggests that there are multiple aspects to this idea. “God speaks through the hieroglyphics of the things that happen to us”, he writes. In addition to this, “God also speaks through the fathomless quiet of the holy place within us all which is beyond the power of anything that happens to us to touch”. Allowing that “many things that happen to us block our access” to this internal space, and that we might “forget even that it exists”, Buechner concludes that it must always remain somewhere buried deep within each and every human being:
Even when we have no idea of seeking it, I think various things can make us fleetingly aware of its presence – a work of art, beauty, sometimes sorrow or joy, sometimes just the quality of a moment that apparently has nothing special about it at all like the sound of water over stones in a stream or sitting alone with your feet up at the end of a hard day.
Buechner scholar Jeffrey Munroe agrees with Brown that, throughout his work, Buechner presents memory as having a “sacred function” within the lives of all human beings. For Buechner, our task as human beings is, “to pay attention, to stop, look, and listen for what God is doing”. This, Munroe surmises, is because in Buechner’s estimation “our lives have a similar plot as the Bible: God creates, we get lost, and God works to bring us and the rest of creation back to himself”.
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What OTHERS HAVE TO SAY
“Frederick Buechner surprises and delights (and – very softly – teaches) us….He has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations.”
“In a myriad of commonplace activities, he finds the presence of the divine, and he elegantly describes these persons, events, and observations, nimbly transporting readers into these realities. With his masterly crafted prose, Buechner edifies, inspires, and offers a timeless model for approaching our human experience.”
