The Remarkable Ordinary (2017)
How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life
Book Description
An important new collection of previously unpublished material, The Remarkable Ordinary represents a vital piece in the puzzle of Buechner’s oeuvre.
Composed of essays drawn from two series of talks—the 1987 Norton lectures and 1990 Laity Lodge lectures—this anthology opens a new window into the life, thought, and vision of Frederick Buechner.
With original reflections on faith and art, the wondrous nature of “ordinary” things, the eternal importance of each life story, and on how to read your life and see within it the workings of God, the message that runs through The Remarkable Ordinary is applicable to each and every human being: your life is sacred, and in each moment there waits an opportunity to connect with the divine.
Additional insights into the life of Buechner, including the story of his friendship with Maya Angelou, will ensure that readers leave enriched with previously undisclosed and fascinating details into the biography and thought-life of their favorite author.
The great problem is to try to live in the present, not the past, not the future, but in the now. The trees are waving outside in the breeze, an emblem of what I try to do now, try to notice that there are trees. They’re waving right now. Try to bless your demons and let them go away. Demons, anxiety, desire, things you never did, let them go, and think about things you did do. Try to let go and let God, that wonderful old slogan. And to listen for God, that still, small voice, so still that maybe sometimes you wonder if there’s any God there at all. I wish God would talk sometimes so I could hear him. […] But just enough whispers in the wings, the strange coincidence, the miraculous happenstance, the right saint coming at the right time, to me means that the stillness of God is the stillness he has to preserve, because if he were to speak, it’d blow everything sky high.
Available now, from Zondervan Publishers.
Order it here in paperback, e-book, and audio.
