Who is fred buechner

Woe to those not brave enough to tell the dark truths, including our experience of the absence of God. In the end, though, the gospel is indeed great news—a laugh-out-loud comedy and, more than that, a happily-ever-after fairy tale full of magic and mystery too good not to be true. Telling Secrets. As Buechner tells his secrets, he points out that what we desire most—to be fully known—is also what we fear most.

To tell the truth of our lives is sacred, holy work, and along the way we ultimately discover that the story of one of us is the story of us all. One of a series of lexical books, Peculiar Treasures contains sketches of biblical characters from Aaron to Zaccheus. To unlock this article for your friends, use any of the social share buttons on our site, or simply copy the link below. To share this article with your friends, use any of the social share buttons on our site, or simply copy the link below.

Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. As long as there are bones to set and drains to unclog and children to tame and boredom to survive, we need doctors and plumbers and teachers and people who play the musical saw; but when it comes to the business of Christ and his church, how unreal and irrelevant a service that seems even, and at times especially, to the ones who are called to work at it.

God is foolish to choose for his holy work in the world the kind of lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffed shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists as are vividly represented here by you and me this spring evening. God is foolish to send us out to speak hope to a world that slogs along heart-deep in the conviction that from here on out things can only get worse.

To speak of realities we cannot see when the realities we see all too well are already more than we can handle. To speak of loving our enemies when we have a hard enough time of it just loving our friends. To proclaim eternal life in a world that is as obsessed with death as a quick browse through TV Guide or the newspapers or the drugstore paperbacks make plain enough.

God is foolish to send us out on a journey for which there are no sure maps. Such is the foolishness of God. And yet. Praise him. If I were braver than I am, I would sing you a song at this point. If you were braver than you are, you might even encourage me to. But let me at least say you a song. It goes like this.

The road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone, And I must follow if I can, Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. I am the road.

And in some foolish fashion, we are all on the road that is his, that is he, or such at least is our hope and prayer. That is why we are here at this turning of the road. There is not a single shoe in this place that does not contain a foot of clay, a foot that drags, a foot that stumbles; but on just such feet we all seek to follow that road through a world where there are many other roads to follow, and hardly a one of them that is not more clearly marked and easier to tramp and toward an end more known, more assured, more realizable.

But we have picked this road, or been picked by it. From time to time, when we have our wits about us, when our hearts are in the right place, when nothing more enticing or immediate shows up to distract us, we have glimpsed that truth. Who knows what the mysteries of our faith mean? Who knows what the Holy Spirit means? Who knows what the Resurrection means? Who knows what he means when he tells us that whenever two or three are gathered together in his name, he will be with them?

But what at the very least they seem to mean is that there winds through all we think of as real life a way of life, a way to life, that is so vastly realer still that we cannot think of him, whose way it is, as anything less than vastly alive. By grace we are on that way.

By grace there come unbidden moments when we feel in our bones what it is like to be on that way. Our clay feet drag us to the bedroom of the garrulous old woman, to the alcoholic who for the tenth time has phoned to threaten suicide just as we are sitting down to supper, to the laying of the cornerstone of the new gym to deliver ourselves of a prayer that nobody much listens to, to the Bible study group where nobody has done any studying, to the Xerox machine.

We go in fear of the terrible needs of the ones we go to. We go in fear of our own emptiness from which it is hard to believe that any word or deed of help or hope or healing can come.

But we go because it is where his way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow his way, we never go entirely alone, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring.

Is that true? Is it true in the sense that it is true that there are seven days in a week and that light travels faster than sound? Maybe the final answer that faith can give to that awesome and final question occurs in a letter that Dostoevski wrote to a friend in Perhaps there was no single moment but rather a series of moments that together started us off.

For me, there was hearing a drunken blasphemy in a bar. As I lay on the grass one afternoon thinking that if ever I was going to know the truth in all its fullness, it was going to be then, there was a stirring in the air that made two apple branches strike against each other with a wooden clack, and I suspect that any more of the truth than that would have been the end of me instead of, as it turned out, part of the beginning.

Such moments as those, and others no less foolish, were, together, the door from which the road began for me, and who knows where it began for each of you. But this much at least, I think, would be true for us all: that one way or another the road starts off from passion -- a passion for what is holy and hidden, a passion for Christ.

It is a little like falling in love, or, to put it more accurately, I suppose, falling in love is a little like it. The breath quickens. Scales fall from the eyes. A world within the world flames up. If you are Simeon Stylites, you spend the rest of your days perched on a flagpole.

He interrupted his studies to serve with the U. Army from to , returning to Princeton in and completing the A. Buechner taught English at Lawrenceville School from to , during which time he also wrote his first two novels: A Long Day's Dying , begun while he was still at Princeton; and The Seasons' Difference Most of the small groups of main characters in his first novels occupy a typically modern-affluent spiritual and moral vacuum, deeply isolated from one another beneath their genteel pleasantries and polite deceptions.

Upon its publication A Long Day's Dying was both a critical and a popular success. Some literary critics of the s included Buechner among the most promising of the new generation of American writers, sometimes extravagantly comparing him to Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Bowen and pairing him with Truman Capote among his contemporaries.

After his initial success Buechner lived in New York City from to , trying for awhile unsuccessfully to work as a fulltime writer. Having had an almost completely secular upbringing, Buechner had long experienced a kind of spiritual emptiness and restlessness. While living in New York he started attending regularly the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, whose pastor was the celebrated preacher George Buttrick. During one of Buttrick's sermons Buechner had a conversion experience. The following week he talked with Buttrick about attending seminary and entered Union Theological Seminary in New York in the fall of Among his distinguished teachers, he was particularly influenced by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Muilenberg.

Buechner decided to take the academic year off to work on another novel. Henry Prize , and he courted and married Judith Friedrike Merck. Buechner returned to Union Seminary and graduated in His third novel, The Return of Ansel Gibbs, a story about a former statesman called out of retirement to be nominated for a Cabinet post, appeared in and received the Rosenthal award that year.

In Ansel Gibbs and succeeding novels, Buechner's intense preoccupation in his earlier fiction with the hidden and labyrinthine complexities, the coincidences, and the might-have-beens of human behavior and relationships became increasingly enlarged and embraced within a wondering and finally comic vision of the elusive strangeness of both the self and the world. He chaired the department from to and served as school minister and teacher of religion from to