Frederick Buechner

Buechner Themes

Our Shared Story
 

And my story and your story are all part of each other too if only because we have sung together and prayed together and seen each other's faces so that we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other's stories. In other words, all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here. Does the story point beyond itself? Does it mean something? What is the truth of this interminable, sprawling story we all of us are? Or is it as absurd to ask about the truth of it as it is to ask about the truth of the wind howling through a crack under the door? Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn't mean a damn thing.

—    Secrets in the Dark (2006)

Charlie Blaine was a hypochondriac, and it always surprised me that he had as much time left over as he did for his educational TV. What kept him busy was not so much his various sicknesses themselves—as far as I know, not one of them ever seriously incapacitated him—but trying to work out in his mind how to describe his symptoms to the doctor. He told me once that to put a pain into words for somebody who has never felt that pain is as much of a challenge as to put the colors of a sunset into words for somebody born blind. I suppose that trying to put his pain into words was the story of his life. Maybe it is the story of all our lives.

—     Love Feast (1974)

In his literary critical work, Reading Buechner (IVP, 2019), Jeffrey Munroe retells the story of an exchange between Frederick Buechner and Maya Angelou at a series of Trinity Institute lectures. When the emcee of the event claimed in his introduction of the poet that her story was “a far cry” from that of the author, Angelou corrected him, saying: “I have exactly the same story to tell as Frederick Buechner”. Munroe notes that “Buechner was delighted, because her words affirmed one of his core convictions”.

Buechner states and re-states that conviction throughout his memoirs, his non-fiction, and his novels. In the introduction to his first autobiographical work, The Sacred Journey (1982), he reveals his “assumption” that “the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all”. He expands upon this idea in his second memoir, Now and Then (1983), commenting on the writing task that: “I do it because it seems to me that no matter who you are, and no matter how eloquent or otherwise, if you tell your own story with sufficient candour and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story.” In his third memoir, Telling Secrets (1991), he further notes that:

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way […]. 

For Buechner, the significance of this idea is ultimately theological. Influenced by the work of Paul Tillich and James Muilenberg—both of whom taught him at Union Theological Seminary, New York—Buechner sees the centring of story as a fundamentally important task for each human being. This is because, as he argues in Now and Then, “[i]f God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us”.  

Reading the Bible itself, Buechner argues, is an act of sharing and participating in one another’s stories. Remembering the words of his Old Testament tutor, he writes in Now and Then: “Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, Muilenberg said, you have not really understood it. The Bible, as he presented it, is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings”.

Buechner takes a similar approach to the life of Christ, arguing that the Incarnation represents the joining of our story with that of God’s: 

Two stories then—our own story and Jesus's story, and in the end, perhaps, they are the same story. […] Our stories are at best a parody of his story, and if, as Paul says, we are the fragrance of Christ, then it is like the fragrance of the sea from ten miles inland when the wind is in the right direction, like the fragrance of a rose from the other side of the street with all the world between. Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives we know who he is and who we are and who we are not. 

The divine significance of stories, Buechner argues in Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say) (2001), gives special import to the task of the author. By “listening” to the work of great authors, he suggests, “we may possibly learn something about how to bear the weight of our own sadness”. Beyond sadness, however, he concludes elsewhere that in paying attention to such authors, to our own stories, and to the stories of one other, we can learn how to walk through the mysteries and joys of life, in all its extraordinary ordinariness. In The Clown in the Belfry (1992), he puts it like this:

Page by page, chapter by chapter, the story unfolds. Day by day, year by year, your own story unfolds, your life's story. Things happen. People come and go. The scene shifts. Time runs by, runs out. Maybe it is all utterly meaningless. Maybe it is all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention. What it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we are in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us—any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is as far as I am concerned religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The odd coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Maybe even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

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