Buechner Themes
Sinners as Saints
Who wants to be holy? The very word has fallen into disrepute—holier-than-thou, holy Joe, holy mess. And "saint" comes to mean plaster saint, somebody of such stifling moral perfection that we would run screaming in the other direction if our paths ever crossed. […] And yet we have our moments. Every once in a while, I think, we actually long to be what out of darkness and mystery we are called to be; when we hunger for holiness even so, even if we would never dream of using the word. There come moments, I think, even in the midst of all our cynicism and worldliness and childishness, maybe especially then, when there is something about the saints of the earth that bowls us over a little. I mean real saints. I mean saints as men and women who are made not out of plaster and platitude and moral perfection but out of human flesh. I mean saints who have their rough edges and their blind spots like everybody else but whose lives are transparent to something so extraordinary that every so often it stops us dead in our tracks. Light-bearers. Life-bearers.
— The Clown in the Belfry (1992)
Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.
Dale Brown notes that, throughout his novels, Frederick Buechner often locates grace in the most unlikely people and places. “Buechner’s claim as a novelist”, he writes, “is to demonstrate the flow of grace in a world unaware of or resistant to its operation, the grace of God in the mire of worldly-day-to-dayness”. The scholar goes on to point out that this idea is articulated in many of Buechner’s central characters, including Saint Godric, Leo Bebb, Tobit, and Kenzie Maxwell; these are characters, he concludes, who “embody the proposition that grace can work in even the least likely vessels”.
Buechner himself acknowledges that a good part of his writing career has been given over to working out what exactly a saint is. “Imagine setting out consciously to write a novel about a saint”, he writes in The Clown in the Belfry (1992):
How could you avoid falling flat on your face? Nothing is harder to make real than holiness. Certainly nothing is harder to make appealing and attractive. The truth, of course, is that holiness is not a human quality like virtue. If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them if there is such a thing as God. It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.
“For Godric, ‘nothing human’s not a broth of false and true,’ a line I early on understood as pivotal to both Buechner’s novelistic career and his theological position.”
In the same work, Buechner asks a similar question from another angle: “Who wants to be holy?”. Citing phrases such as “holier-than-thou”, “holy Joe”, and “holy mess”, he argues that “the very word has come into disrepute”, and that saint has come to mean “somebody of such stifling moral perfection that we would run screaming in the other direction if our paths ever crossed”. Buechner answers his own question by suggesting that, rather than being a person who has reached a certain moral standard: “A saint is a life-giver […] a human being with the same sorts of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us”. Yet, “if a saint touches your life”, he concludes, “you become alive in a new way”.
This same idea is present in the author’s very early work. In “To be a Saint”, a sermon published in The Magnificent Defeat (1966), he argues that, ‘To be a saint is to be human because we were created to be human.” He continues:
To be a saint is to live not with the hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and to receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.
Buechner closes this sermon by wondering if, despite the fact that “the word ‘saint’ makes our gorges rise”, it is saints that we “most want to become”.
This question occupies many of Buechner’s creations. Both Leo Bebb and Godric of Finchdale reject the title; indeed, the latter attempts to bite the monk that honours him with it. If Buechner works out the actions of the saint via his leading lights, then he narrates their sainthood via the characters surrounding them. Perhaps most telling of all is Antonio Parr’s reflections on Bebb in the final installment of the tetralogy, Treasure Hunt (1977):
I thought, if you can call it thinking, of Bebb as venerable, a saint-in-the-making, and of the reputation for sanctity he enjoyed—would he have enjoyed it?—and what it rested on if it could be said to rest on anything. God knows there had been other saints before him who were queer as Dick's hatband, and a whole flock of them went cackling through the night like Bert's chickens—flagpole-sitters, leper-lovers, middle-aged celibates in barbed wire underwear, virgins floating in the air like birthday balloons, grown men preaching to yellow-bellied sapsuckers or naked and cruciform in subzero cells. So why not Bebb with his penchant for baring something maybe not all that unlike his soul […]. I angled for the heroic qualities of Bebb's virtues that were moving drowsily, like carp, just below the surface. He hated heights, but I have a movie of him eating an ice cream cone on top of the Eiffel Tower as if it was his own back stoop. I remember how when old Herman Redpath lay dry and brown as a smoked herring in his coffin […] Bebb spoke of him getting back on his feet again like Gene Tunney after the Long Count, and when I said to him, "Do you believe it, Bip?" he said, "Antonio, I believe everything," and when I said, "The way you say it, you make it sound almost easy," he said, "Antonio, it's hard as hell." So he was heroic in that department too, hoisting his faith off the ground grunt by grunt like an overweight weightlifter, the eyes bulging, the sweat rolling down. There was hardly anything worth believing that Bebb did not believe.
What Others Have to Say
“In the character of Leo Bebb, Buechner has created a wild and canny charlatan who might also be a genius.”
“Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.”
