It is impossible for me to assess Frederick Buechner’s impact on readers without assessing his impact on my life, which remains profound. Thus, I will start there. At age 16, I chose to take my Christian faith seriously. For a Southern Baptist teenager, that meant not cursing, hanging out with the “right” crowd, and other pieties. I began to pay attention at church more, especially at our youth group meetings, and began to pay more attention to my schoolwork.
I possessed a high degree of freedom as a youth. My father, an ambitious engineering professor, commuted one hour to-and-from work every day and worked every evening. My only sister had an intellectual disability, and my mother spent much of her waking hours keeping the house clean and taking care of her. I had few people to look after me, so I learned to take care of myself. I was independent if a bit lonely.
And I was very curious. After ten grades of school, I excelled especially at math and loved reading history out of the encyclopedia. I would compete with the all-state math team every summer and was occasionally pulled out of class to engage in competitive testing.
Despite all this – or perhaps because of all this – I was very lonely and in need of attention. Like most youth, I coveted love and affection. Unlike a lot of youth, I found my peers to be an unreliable source of attention. Having to take care of myself and my sister regularly, I learned self-reliance and adult ways to a level that most kids don’t.
The choice to take my faith seriously at age 16 provided me with an element of stability that was sorely needed – the church. Youth counselors were always there to listen and talk to. They didn’t always have the best advice – something I will get to later – but it gave me a place to know others and be known by others. These experiences helped me value being socially well-adjusted more than a lot of my academic friends.
The church encouraged me to read the Bible, and I did. Over my eleventh-grade year, I ended up reading almost the entire Old and New Testaments. I especially loved Jesus’ odd perspective, Paul’s ideological passion, and the Hebrew Prophets. However, at this point, I found that I knew the content of the Bible much better than youth volunteers and even a bit better than my pastors. I found that I was asking philosophical and existential questions at a level that my church simply did not support. I found myself in a lonely position once again.
The summer before my senior year, I went on a church-sponsored mission trip to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. We drove almost 20 hours from South Carolina to the border town. A youth leader who aspired to become a Baptist pastor often had conversations with me. He was fresh from Samford University and read a lot of books on religion. He was recently accepted to Harvard Divinity School and was a black sheep on Southern Baptist pastures.
On the trip down, he handed me a book and encouraged me to read it. It was entitled Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC by someone named Frederick Buechner. Like a small dictionary, it defined theological terms, often in one or two paragraphs. However, he described these terms in more interesting ways than most. Instead of providing an authoritative sounding exposition, he was reflective and contemplative in tone. He clearly had command of the English language – a trait I respected – and sought to inspire further thought instead of having the final word on things.
To give you a taste of this book, I will share an example definition of the word “Word:”
In Hebrew the term dabar means both “word” and “deed.” Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do, but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something that lay hidden in the heart is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.
Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.
When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light where before there was only darkness. When I say I love you, there is love where before there was only ambiguous silence. In a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it give it reality.
At church, concepts like “absolute truth” and “literal interpretation” were drummed home, but Buechner seemed more interested in grey areas than black-and-white and right-and-wrong. And he was a nerd about the Bible and unearthed nuances that I never noticed. The Baptist pastors I was used to focused on practical ethics. Buechner, though practical, was a bit more bookish than them. I read through the entire book in about two hours, and that experience was the highlight of my trip.
When I came home, I soon went to the local bookstore to look up this author. I soon bought and read every book that they had of his. His books were in the religion section, but he also wrote fiction alongside his theology. Some people love Buechner’s fiction, but I preferred his non-fiction writings, which ranged from theological memoir to reflective theology.
He proved a “gateway drug” to other forms of literature. I started to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, those prolific Russian writers who disagree about so much. I read so much theological works that I won a prize my senior year at an academic competition for the best religion student in Greenville County of South Carolina. I took pride in this because I beat out students of several elite private Christian schools. I had never taken a formal religion class in my life! (Never to neglect math, I also took home first prize in the Algebra 2 test.)
Perhaps this also began my independent streak with religion. I found most “Sunday School” answers to life’s persistent questions unsatisfying. I was always asking “why?” at a deeper level. I still do. I don’t always fit into churches because of that, but can have a philosophical conversation in a coffeehouse much better. I came to understand that not everybody – ok, most people – do not interact with life this way, but I also came to understand that I do and that’s what matters to God. With Buechner, I found my small but intense tribe.
Buechner’s writings soon became the standard by which I gauged any Christian writer. He mastered both the concepts of the Bible and the concepts of life. Writers tend to focus either on the inner life or on an active outer life. Buechner was introspective but still well-grounded in reality. He was focused on the moment, on the thing ahead of him. He was not driven by any agenda other than portraying life as it is and God as a part of it.
Wishful Thinking was joined by two other works in a trilogy – Peculiar Treasures and Whistling in the Dark. Peculiar Treasures described characters in the Bible but in a very earthy way. Whistling in the Dark was closer to Wishful Thinking in that it talked about concepts, but its topics were more about doubt.
Even 25 years later, after having studied religion formally at university and at two seminaries, I still look back to Buechner as a brilliant combiner of theology and life, not outdone by any other writer. He died recently, and fittingly, in addition to the customary obituaries, his writings were remembered by two distinguished editorial writers, one at the Washington Post – Michael Gerson, an evangelical and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush – and one at the New York Times – David Brooks, raised a Jew and perhaps the leading conservative writer on the Times’ op-ed staff. They both saw him as a refined writer who appealed to a religion of the heart, as a CS Lewis of another generation.
Who was Frederick Buechner? He was born in 1926 in New York City. In what would become the Depression era, his father was in and out of work frequently. The family migrated frequently. Then at age 10, his father tragically committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning, seemingly convinced that his life had been a failure. The only suicide note left behind was a couple of sentences written in a book and expressed love for his son and his wife.
In response, his family moved to Bermuda, where young Fred grew up until World War II prompted an evacuation of the island. As his memoir Telling Secrets put it, there he experienced “the blessed relief of coming out of the dark and unmentionable sadness of my father’s life and death into fragrance and greenness and light.”
During World War II, Buechner attended the prestigious Lawrenceville Prep School outside of Princeton, New Jersey. There, he became friends with other talented youth and grew into the ambition of becoming a writer. He then attended Princeton University for two years before joining the U.S. Army for two years of “very undistinguished service.” Then he returned to Princeton to finish an A.B. in English. His first job was teaching at Lawrenceville Prep School, where he began writing his first novel A Long Day’s Dying, published in 1950. This book was a huge success.
However, this seemingly bright future soon changed course as Buechner faced some adversity. His second novel in 1952 was a complete failure. (I tried to acquire this book while in college to check out its quality, but was unable to find it anywhere.) He quit his teaching job during this time and moved to New York City in anticipation of great success… success that never came. He tried to write about interesting things, but could find no stimulation to prime his output.
Buechner was raised in an irreligious family. However, he walked around the city in hopes of finding a muse. Eventually, he was drawn into Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church around the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The famous pastor George Buttrick was doing pulpit duty at the time. Buechner was obviously religiously curious at the time, but would not describe himself as a Christian. He describes himself as basically ignorant of Christian beliefs.
However, Buttrick, as he often did with flowery language, said that just as the Queen was coronated with great pomp and circumstance, so Christ is crowned in the Christian’s heart “with confession… and tears… and great laughter.” Then a careful student of language, Buechner was caught off guard by the phrase “great laughter.” He says that something in him was bound up with that phrase, and this began his Christian pilgrimage that lasted the rest of his life. Though not an evangelical, he points to this as a sort-of conversion experience.
Soon, he met Buttrick and asked how he could learn more about the Christian faith. Buttrick suggested taking some courses at nearby Union Theological Seminary. So Buechner soon enrolled on a fellowship. This was during the great days of Union, with theological greats like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenburg on faculty. As Buechner tells the story in Now and Then:
I wanted to learn about Christ – about the Old Testament, which had been his Bible, and the New Testament, which was the Bible about him; about the history of the church, which had been founded on the faith that through him God had not only revealed his innermost nature and his purpose for the world, but had released into the world a fierce power to draw people into that nature and adapt them to that purpose … No intellectual pursuit had ever aroused in me such intense curiosity, and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. In the unfamiliar setting of a Presbyterian church, of all places, I had been moved to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them, I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment.
Buechner soon found the muses again. He took a year off from seminary to write and wrote a third novel. He met and married Judith. He was ordained as a minister in 1958 by Buttrick, but did not take a call at a church. Instead, he returned to teaching, to form a religion department at the well-known Exeter School. There, he taught elite New England schoolboys who thought religion backwards, and they pushed him to refine his talents to the highest degree possible. This was the crucible of experience that formed Buechner’s vocation as a writer.
To borrow a term from the great liberal theologian Freidrich Schleiermacher, Buechner was presenting to “cultured despisers” of religion – people who thought they had outgrown religion somewhere along the way, either personally or culturally. He was trying to argue that you can’t escape God, that faith is a part of life, for better or for worse. And our everyday experience was his prism, the fulcrum that changes everything and gives us insight. This message spoke to me, an academically precocious youth, far louder and with much more relevance than anything my church was spitting out. Indeed, it still does.
After nine years, Buechner moved into a farmhouse in Vermont and took up writing full-time. Soon, however, fate or providence or luck took its course. The chaplain at Harvard Chapel invited Buechner to give the 1969 Noble Lectures. Mentors like Buttrick and Niebuhr had given these lectures before, so the challenge was ripe and appealing if a bit humbling. The chaplain, as part of the educated elite, suggested Buechner write about “something in the area of ‘religion and letters.’” “Letters” presumably meant writings, but Buechner took this charter and this word quite literally.
These lectures were published in the book The Alphabet of Grace. His basic idea was that through the everyday events of life (the alphabet), God spells out God’s own meaning of life (the words) to us. He further describes that in God’s alphabet (Hebrew), the vowels are missing. The Hebrew language only has consonants, and the vowels were inserted thousands of years later as a best guess. Similarly, we make our best guess to interpret God’s meaning in our lives. But they are just that – a best guess. Only God can tell us how it is to be properly pronounced. Thus, for Buechner, everyday life became the channel through which God speaks to us.
If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitements and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Buechner continued to write fiction that illustrated this basic theme and wrote theological works (sermons, reflections, and memoirs) that communicated this motif to readers. This beautiful chorus all sharing the same story moved me deeply as a 16-year-old and still brings out my admiration. God speaks to us through life, not just through ancient writings that spell out an unchangeable moral code. Rather, the ancient writings record how God spoke then – somewhat muddled, often confusing – and how he speaks to us now if we would but listen.
His 1980 novel Godric was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This book was inspired by a short entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Godric was a medieval saint who lived, committed incest with his sister, yet somehow became beatified as a saint after his death. Buechner was fascinated by these juxtapositions and wrote this novel to flesh out how these contradictions in character might exist within one person. Buechner testified later, “If I were to be remembered by only one book, this is the one I would choose. In every way it came unbidden, unheralded, as a blessing.”
Buechner has always had a unique concept of what it means to be a saint.
To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy.
Godric, however, convinced Buechner that saints are not born outside of the muck as much as emerge from the muck of life with a sense of life. Saints were life-givers, and perhaps that’s how Godric emerged from such horrific sinful guilt with such respect.
As for me, you can see how Buechner converted me from fundamentalism to a position I find far better. The Scriptures are respected and valued, but not deified. Our lives, the subjects of our many learnings, are similarly respected. At the time, my parents, who were deeply committed to evangelical causes for decades, would not allow me to attend a different church to explore my personal religious views, so I stayed active in the Baptist church and among Baptist friends. Yet I read all that I could get my hands on by Frederick Buechner and searched for other religious writings that would move me similarly. That search took me through religion classes, divinity classes, hundreds of books, a few languages, and a few denominations. I learned a ton, but found few authors quite as interesting as Buechner. He remains, to me, the standard of the expression of how I approach faith in general and the Christian faith in particular.
Although I never met him, I did give some thought to finding his house in Vermont. I never took that trip. I can honestly say that I loved him for all that he taught me and am deeply indebted for his influence on my life. He taught me to read the events of my life and find God there.
In the world of English literature, Buechner’s influence is massive. He particularly impacted writers. Whenever I read an author writing about the craft of writing, I’ll often run across a reference to “Fred Buechner.” Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Philip Yancey, and many others profess undying love for Buechner. He’s kind of like the go-to guy on religion in contemporary life among the literary community.
Though he had little exposure to evangelical-style religion (like CS Lewis), he found a particularly huge following among evangelical writers. Princeton Seminary has a writer’s workshop named after him. King University in New York City has an institute named after him exploring faith and culture. Wheaton University, the leading evangelical university, houses his letters. He’s received nine honorary doctorates, including from our nearby University of the South. He’s not considered an academic theologian, but more as a refined scribe of the intersections of faith and life.
For me, it was interesting that Buechner was deeply religious but did not encounter evangelicals (like my family) until much later in life. Evangelical religion is all over the South; it’s hard to escape. Nonetheless, he had a real conversion, much deeper than most people who profess faith within evangelicalism. His conversion did not take the form of a religious tract, like you’d see at a Billy Graham event, but it was real and lasting. He was open to love in homosexuality in an era that relatively few were. He defended the position of women. He was open-minded and charitable.
In the middle of his life, he was invited to conduct a teaching course at Wheaton in Chicago, Illinois. This leading university is home to the Billy Graham Center and all sorts of evangelical activities. Buechner wrote about his experience here in a memoir. He says that it was one of the best experiences of his life. He encountered large groups of people genuinely interested in his writings, something he rarely saw in New England. He was uncomfortable, however, at the casualness by which people spoke of God. One’s “personal relationship with God” often was lunchtime conversation. This also contrasted with his New England experience where God was only mentioned at big events. He was worried that some reverence of the Deity was lost in this type of culture.
Some Wheaton students said that his writings contained a great deal of meaning to them, a sentiment I would share and Buechner appreciated. They said that his writings spoke of a faith that they longed for, perhaps better even than the Bible. Buechner is not a huge Bible guy. As a minister, he read it, but not every day. He found value in other literature, too. But he thought that the Bible’s classic and timeless nature was something that should be appreciated when looking at the faith. Perhaps this speaks more towards the inwardness of the evangelical world more than the quality of Buechner’s pen.
Buechner’s memoirs also spoke of the loneliness and pain of losing a father so young. His family didn’t talk about it much, if at all. For better or for worse, they let life be their therapy. It seemed that writing these memoirs also became Buechner’s therapy as well. Writers often have painful events in their past that provide them with a unique perspective on human nature. Certainly, Buechner had just that. I appreciated his introspection and willingness to comment on the inner life of an intellectual. So much of the religious world around me was focused on taking over the world for Christ; I had enough trouble taking over just me for Christ, and Buechner helped me in that process.
Frederick Buechner died peaceably at his home in Vermont on August 15, 2022, at the age of 96. He was remembered in numerous publications, ranging from the Princeton Alumni Magazine and Christianity Today magazine for evangelicals to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Prepared for and delivered to the June Ramsey Sunday School class at First Presbyterian Church of Nashville on September 18, 2022.