(Second of three parts; click here to read part 1)
Buechner recommends reviewing this more intimate news during the nightly interval when you first turn out the light and lie in the dark waiting for sleep to come. That is when the events of the day-an unanswered letter, a phone conversation, a tone of voice, a chance meeting at the post office, an unexpected lump in the throat-hint at other, subterranean meanings. In these most humdrum events God speaks, and Buechner demonstrates through his writing how to listen.
The same discipline of listening, Buechner claims, also drives his fiction:
“Be still and know that I am God,” is the advice of the Psalmist, and I’ve always taken it to be good literary advice too. Be still the way Tolstoy is still, or Anthony Trollope is still, so your characters can speak for themselves and come alive in their own immortal way. If you’re a writer like me, you try less to impose a shape on the hodgepodge than to see what shape emerges from it, is hidden in it. If minor characters show signs of becoming major characters, you at least give them a shot at it because in the world of fiction it may take many pages before you find out who the major characters really are just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to for half an hour once in a railway station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your closest friend or your psychiatrist.es into prose that keeps awake the reader as well as the rememberer. He succeeds primarily by attending to his words as acutely as he attends to the events themselves. Raised in a nonreligious home, he got baptized “less from any religious motive, I think, than from simply a sense that like getting your inoculations and going to school, it was something you did.” The vaccination worked in a paradoxical way. Baptism during a time when Christianity represented to him all symbol and no substance inoculated him against the cozy imagery of stained glass and statues, against the trappings of church for church’s sake, against the repetition of stale words long since desiccated of meaning.
“I’m sick of religious language,” Buechner once told an interviewer. “I’m sick of sermons right now.” Because he kept agreeing to preach despite the illness, he sought out new carriers for his beliefs. He looked to King Lear and the Wizard of Oz to make his points, as well as to Jacob and to Paul. Most of all, Buechner the prose stylist stuck to a lesson he had learned in writing fiction: nothing alienates an audience faster than a slight note of falsity or unrealism. If he was to write or speak about the Christian life, he must do so with undiluted honesty.
A time came, a difficult time in his personal life, when Buechner made a decision to write about saints. For more than a decade he had been trying to rid himself of Leo Bebb, the flasher-evangelist, an oddball saint and subject of four of his books. He kept on writing sequels, unable to let Bebb go. With no conscious thought of what to write next, he picked up the Penguin Dictionary of Saints, hoping to find some historical saint of the past, perhaps a truly holy man. The book opened to Godric, an eleventh-century English saint and a figure unknown to him. As he read, suddenly it occurred to him that Godric was Bebb in an earlier incarnation: yes, a holy man, a missionary, a body-torturing ascetic who kept two pet snakes, a rough man who became perhaps England’s first great lyric poet; but also a man who took his own sister to bed and who waged a lifelong war against lust, the “ape gibbering in his loins,” as Buechner would later put it.
Giving careful attention to language as usual, Buechner strove in Godric to purge all Latinate words, keeping only the harsher, guttural Anglo-Saxon derivatives. He abandoned his usual cadence in favor of the lyrical style of medieval English. Few readers recognized what was different about the language, but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, they felt drawn into another world.
Buechner emerged from this book with a new definition of saint: a “life-giver,” one through whose life the power and the glory of God are made manifest, even though the saint himself may be standing up to his ankles in mud. That definition, of course, applies potentially to all of us-which is precisely why Buechner urges us to look to the ordinary, to listen to our lives and seek out God in the most unexpected places, for there is God most likely to be found. When Buechner chose to write about a biblical character (Son of Laughter), he settled on Jacob, the one who physically wrestled with God. Is it any accident that God identified his chosen people as Jacob’s children, the offspring of one who had grappled so fiercely in the night? If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and . . . great laughter.
-The Return of Ansel Gibbs
A minister, says Buechner, has two stories to tell: Jesus’ story and the minister’s own. In Buechner’s case, the writer’s own story illumines how he tells the other, for a few defining events in his life provide background lighting to virtually everything Buechner has written.
At the age of ten, Fred and his younger brother Jamie watched from their upstairs bedroom window as their mother and grandmother tried to revive a motionless body lying on the driveway. It was their father, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. A few years later the father’s younger brother, Fred’s uncle, also took his own life. Out of consideration for his mother, who insisted on guarding family secrets, Buechner did not write directly of his father’s suicide for decades, though scenes of suicide haunt his novels. Finally, Buechner decided that he had as much right to tell his father’s story as his mother had not to tell her husband’s story. His book Telling Secrets exercises that right.
Buechner was, in his own words, “a bookish, rain-loving, inward-looking child,” and the deaths of his father and uncle awoke in him a sense of his own mortality that never faded away. For a time he wondered if the family was afflicted with some fatal suicide gene. The tragedy also reinforced Buechner’s intuition that most of us are shaped less by the big forces described each night on the television news than by the intimate forces of family, friends, and shared secrets. He learned, like every good novelist, that human behavior cannot be explained, only rendered.
Another great disruption occurred when he reached the age of 27. With two novels under his belt, one (A Long Day’s Dying) extravagantly praised, Buechner moved to New York to try his hand at writing. He hit a wall, found himself unable to write anything, and contemplated other careers-in advertising, or even working for the CIA. Uncharacteristically, simply because the building sat a block from his apartment, he began attending the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, pastored by the celebrated George Buttrick. At the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, Buechner heard a sermon that changed his life. Buttrick was contrasting Elizabeth’s coronation with the coronation of Jesus in the believer’s heart, which, he said, should take place among confession and tears. So far so good.
And then with his head bobbing up and down so that his glasses glittered, he said in his odd, sandy voice, the voice of an old nurse, that the coronation of Jesus took place among confession and tears and then, as God was and is my witness, great laughter, he said. Jesus is crowned among confession and tears and great laughter, and at the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.
-The Alphabet of Grace
(Second of three parts; click here to read part 3)
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 7
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