Frederick Buechner died last week. I can probably say along with many others that I am a Christian still because of him. As Russell Moore so rightly describes him and his writing, he is one of the authors “who kept me Christian, who upended the way I think or feel about everything.” Or, as Justin Ariel Bailey puts it,
He was not interested in getting me to question my belief. Whatever he was trying to do, it didn’t feel like deconstruction.
If he challenged my unexamined certainties, he did so gently, by painting more beautiful pictures of the life of faith. He wrote so honestly about how it feels to be human: the loneliness, the confusion, the clumsy struggle to receive the love we are given or to give love in a way that can be received.
That was Buechner’s special ministry—saying the quiet part out loud. Giving language to the inarticulate murmurings of the heart. Speaking what we all felt rather than what we were supposed to say. Teaching us to tell the truth.
But what Buechner did better than almost anyone was holding the door ajar for grace to come bursting in, when it is least expected and least deserved.
Given how little of him I have read, I think it’s fair to say that few people have had a more disproportionate effect on me. Reading various profiles during the week, I was constantly reminded of the sense of his writing, something that you can catch much better than you can explain—“a light unutterable“. As Julie Mullins wrote, his legacy is a “testimony to an understated kind of faith.” All the profiles of him I’ve seen have caught this too, but what I think I enjoyed reading the most this week is Philip Yancey’s 1997 profile of Buechner in Books and Culture:
At times Buechner has been tempted to interpret his conversion experience in Freudian terms as a search for a missing father, or in existentialist terms as a self-validating response to anxiety and failure. He resists that temptation. Instead, he sees in it an exemplar of the “crazy, holy grace” that wells up from time to time “through flaws and fissures in the bedrock harshness of things.” As Buechner has noted, many modern writers have plumbed the depths of despair in a world where God seems largely absent, but few have tried to tackle the reality of what salvation, of what God’s presence, might mean.
In his own writing, Buechner has never forgotten that Christ was crowned in the presence of laughter. Beyond the shadows in which we live and move there lies, in a phrase from Tolkien he often quotes, “joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief.” Buechner writes of a magic kingdom, like Oz, of an end to our weary journey, of a home that will heal at last the homesickness that marks our days. “I have been spared the deep, visceral look into the abyss,” Buechner says. “Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike put it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent nor the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage.”