Julie Mullins, in an excellent review/summary of reasons why I appreciate Frederick Buechner so much:
In many passages, Buechner’s prose rises into lyricism, as in his sermon “Hope”:
“I think if you have your ears open, if you have your eyes open, every once in a while some word in even the most unpromising sermon will flame out, some scrap of prayer or anthem, some moment of silence even, the sudden glimpse of somebody you love sitting there near you, or of some stranger whose face without warning touches your heart, will flame out—and these are the moments that speak our names in a way we cannot help hearing.”
Buechner revels in the beauty of the ordinary. Any fragment of experience is worthy of his attention. Christ’s indwelling seizes us in the kindness of a friend who sits with us for a while, the return home after a long journey, the smell of breakfast, a weathered tree, rush-hour traffic. Even a betrayal of friendship, the failure to be Christ to one another, can reveal Christ in some mysterious, apophatic way.
Those flashes of second sight, coming on suddenly and gone as soon as they came, are Buechner’s testimony to an understated kind of faith. For me, Buechner’s sermons are impossible to dismiss, first of all because he does not hold them hostage to their own obviousness. We are free to see or not. He confesses that moments of unveiling often slip past us, obscured by our own distraction and worry. In the title sermon, he says that revelation comes in a barely audible whisper. No wonder we miss it. Secondly, I know that when I have been awake enough, in my own secret betrayals and visions, I have experienced just what he describes.