The Sacred Journey (1982)
A Memoir of Early Days
Book Description
Buechner’s first memoir charts the turbulent early years of his life: an idyllic childhood shattered by suicide, the flight of the family to Bermuda, and his road back to the United States and adulthood, which ran through New Jersey’s Lawrenceville School to Princeton.
As the Second World War rumbles on towards its climax, we join Buechner in his bivouac in a training camp near Anniston, Alabama, before following him back to Princeton where he finishes his degree and begins to write his first novel, A Long Day’s Dying. Into the midst of these heady days of literary acclaim comes an unexpected presence, a nagging ache for truth and meaning and a quiet suspicion that somewhere they might exist, which leads the young author finally to the door of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and to the fateful words of Rev George Buttrick:
Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness, Buttrick said, but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, "among confession, and tears, and great laughter." It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then. It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.
Reviews
"A singularly graceful synthesis of memoir and theological explanation... Entrancing... poetically rich."
— Washington Post Book World
“Tells the story of one person’s journey into faith. In doing so, it nudges its readers to explore [their] own sacred journeys.”
— Sojourners
"Fascinating... striking... a beautifully successful experiment."
— New York Times Book Review
"A candid self-portrait of a devout man."
— Philadelphia Inquirer
