A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
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When pain is real, why is God silent?
Frederick Buechn...)
When pain is real, why is God silent?
Frederick Buechner has grappled with the nature of pain, grief, and grace ever since his father committed suicide when Buechner was a young boy. He continued that search as a father when his daughter struggled with anorexia. In this essential collection of essays, including one never before published, Frederick Buechner finds that the God who might seem so silent is ever near. He writes about what it means to be a steward of our pain, and about this grace from God that seems arbitrary and yet draws us to his holiness and care. Finally he writes about the magic of memory and how it can close up the old wounds with the memories of past goodnesses and graces from God.
Here now are the best of Buechners writings on pain and loss, covering such topics as the power of hidden secrets, loss of a dearly beloved, letting go, resurrection from the ruins, peace, and listening for the quiet voice of God. And he reveals that pain and sorrow can be a treasurean amazing grace.
Buechner says that loss will come to all of us, but he writes that we are not alone. Crazy and unreal as it may sometimes seem, Gods holy, healing grace is always present and available if we are still enough to receive it.
The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life
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Your remarkable life is happening right here, right now...)
Your remarkable life is happening right here, right now. You may not be able to see it – your life may seem predictable and your work insignificant until you look at your life as Frederick Buechner does.
Based on a series of mostly unpublished lectures, Frederick Buechner reveals how to stop, look, and listen to your life. He reflects on how both art and faith teach us how to pay attention to the remarkableness right in front of us, to watch for the greatness in the ordinary, and to use our imaginations to see the greatness in others and love them well.
As you learn to listen to your life and what God is doing in it, you will uncover the plot of your life’s story and the sacred opportunity to connect with the Divine in each moment.
The American novelist Frederick Buechner was also a Presbyterian minister and theologian whose novels and essays after his conversion explored the grace and healing which "now and then" surprisingly and even comically penetrate the everyday darkness of human estrangement.
Background
Carl Frederick Buechner was born on July 11, 1926, in New York City, the older of two sons of Carl Frederick and Katherine Kuhn Buechner. Although both of Buechner's parents' families were wealthly and connected with the upper-class, his immediate family was never more than modestly well situated. His father, a Princeton graduate and minor executive who moved from job to job and place to place on the East Coast during the Depression years, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning when Buechner was ten. The event had a lasting impact on Frederick, who with his brother James saw the body on the driveway as their mother and grandmother tried frantically to revive their father. Relationships between parents and children are important in all of Buechner's novels, and the father-son relationship of which he was early deprived dominates several of them.
Education
Buechner graduated from Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1943 and entered Princeton the same year. He interrupted his studies to serve with the U. S. Army from 1944 to 1946, returning to Princeton in 1946 and completing the A. B. degree in 1948.
He has been awarded honorary doctorates by a number of universities including Virginia Theological Seminary, Lafayette College, Lehigh University, Cornell College, Yale University, Susquehanna University, Wake Forest University, and King College.
Career
Buechner taught English at Lawrenceville School from 1948 to 1953, during which time he also wrote his first two novels: A Long Day's Dying (1950), begun while he was still at Princeton; and The Seasons' Difference (1952). 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 1950s 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 1953 to 1955, 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 1954. Among his distinguished teachers, he was particularly influenced by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Muilenberg.
Buechner decided to take the 1955-1956 academic year off to work on another novel. During that period his New Yorker short story "The Tiger" won the O. Henry Prize (1955). Buechner returned to Union Seminary and graduated in 1958. 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 1958 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.
Ordained to the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States, Buechner was invited to develop a department of religion at Phillips Exeter Academy. He chaired the department from 1959 to 1960 and served as school minister and teacher of religion from 1960 to 1967.
In 1965 Buechner's fourth novel, The Final Beast, appeared. It is about a young minister and widower in a small New England town and the woman the local newspaper editor tries to link together with him in a scandal. During this period Buechner also published his first theological work, a collection of school sermons entitled The Magnificent Defeat (1966).
In 1969 he published a second book of sermons, The Hungering Dark. That same year he was the William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard. His lectures were published in 1970 as The Alphabet of Grace, a kind of theological autobiography which examined a day in his life. All of Buechner's theological works are short, highly literary productions in most of which he draws explicit links with fiction writing generally and his own fiction in particular. He also published his fifth novel, The Entrance to Porlock in 1970, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz.
In 1971 Buechner published Lion Country, the first of what was to become a tetralogy of novels whose main character is a remarkable Southern evangelist named Leo Bebb. Lion Country was nominated for the National Book Award, and the succeeding novels in the tetralogy followed rapidly: Open Heart (1972), Love Feast (1974), and Treasure Hunt (1977).
During the 1970s and 1980s Buechner continued to write theological books. Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC and The Faces of Jesus, a book of pictures with text by Buechner, both appeared in 1974. In 1977 he was the Lyman Beecher Lecturer at Yale, and his lectures were published the same year as Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. In 1979 Buechner published Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who, with illustrations by his daughter Katherine. Godric, a historical novel about the 11th century English hermit-saint who may have been England's first lyric poet, appeared in 1980. In 1982 Buechner published the first volume of an autobiography, The Sacred Journey; the second volume, Now and Then, followed in 1983. Later, he continued his autobiographical work with Telling Secrets (1991) and The Longing For Home (1996).
Other works during the 1980s and 1990s consisted of several novels, including Brendan (1987), Wizard's Tide (1990), and The Son of Laughter (1996). The latter met with mixed reviews, some feeling that his retelling of the Biblical story of Jacob was a bit thin. On the whole, however, Buechner's fiction was lauded by critics.
Achievements
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, Buechner received the O. Henry Award for ‘The Tiger’, the Rosenthal Award for ‘The Return of Ansel Gibbs’, and the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize.
Recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letter, he was honored, in 2007, with the Lifetime Achievement award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
Quotations:
"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. "
"One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can. "
"You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. "
"Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need. "
"We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The pastor and author Brian D. McLaren says:
"I have no desire to analyze what makes Buechner's writing and preaching so extraordinary. Neither do I want to account for Bob Dylan's raspy mystique, the peculiar beauty of a rainbow trout in a riffle, or a thunderstorm's magnetic terror. I simply want to enjoy them. They all knock me out of analysis and smack me clear into pleasure and awe. "
Alan Davis wrote that Wizard's Tide, " … is not merely inspirational, which suggests an unacceptable sentimentality, but is part of a dialogue with the mythic unknown that fiction at its best always pursues. "
Connections
Buechner was introduced to Judith while he was a student at the Union Theological Seminary. They were married, in 1956, by James Muilenberg in Montclair, N. J. The couple has 3 daughters– Katherine, Dinah, and Sharman.
