The Hungering Dark (1968)
Book Description
In his second sermon collection, Frederick Buechner dives deeper into complex matters of life, faith, doubt, and the mad possibility of hope.
In the namesake address, ‘The Hungering Dark’, the preacher explores man’s inhumanity to man, the presence of good and evil within the hearts of human beings, and the search of every individual for the face of God in the midst of the darkness.
Like its predecessor, The Magnificent Defeat (1966), the sermons in The Hungering Dark were first written and delivered while Buechner was chaplain at the Phillips Exeter Academy.
Preaching to a congregation of apathetic faculty members, ‘often jaded, skeptical, sometimes even quite openly negative about the whole religious enterprise’, and antagonistic students, many of whom were ‘against almost everything – the Vietnam war, the government, anybody over thirty including their parents, the school, and especially religion’, Buechner strives with skill and daring to defend the Christian faith, and present it new to his unwilling listeners:
Lord Jesus Christ, Help us not to fall in love with the night that covers us but through the darkness to watch for you as well as to work for you; to dream and hunger in the dark for the light of you. Help us to know that the madness of God is saner than men and that nothing that God has wrought in this world was ever possible. Give us back the great hope again that the future is yours, that not even the world can hide you from us forever, that at the end the One who came will come back in power to work joy in us stronger even than death.
Reviews
"Combines an acute sensitivity to the biblical word with a keen awareness for what is relevant for his contemporaries."
— Choice
"Frederick Buechner is a poet and master of English prose."
— The Living Church
"This pastor-novelist-essayist is a master of graceful writing."
— Concern
"Frederick Buechner’s style is ostensibly prose, yet so compressed are the ideas and so vivid are the images that the writing often seems to be free verse."
— Presbyterian Life
