(Third of three parts; click here to read part 2)

A week later the young novelist was talking with Buttrick about what seminary he should attend. Buttrick drove him to Union Theological Seminary, and the following fall Buechner enrolled there as a student, to learn from the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, James Muilenburg, Paul Tillich, and John Knox.

At times Buechner has been tempted to interpret his conversion experience in Freudian terms as a search for a missing father, or in existentialist terms as a self-validating response to anxiety and failure. He resists that temptation. Instead, he sees in it an exemplar of the "crazy, holy grace" that wells up from time to time "through flaws and fissures in the bedrock harshness of things." As Buechner has noted, many modern writers have plumbed the depths of despair in a world where God seems largely absent, but few have tried to tackle the reality of what salvation, of what God's presence, might mean.

In his own writing, Buechner has never forgotten that Christ was crowned in the presence of laughter. Beyond the shadows in which we live and move there lies, in a phrase from Tolkien he often quotes, "joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief." Buechner writes of a magic kingdom, like Oz, of an end to our weary journey, of a home that will heal at last the homesickness that marks our days. "I have been spared the deep, visceral look into the abyss," Buechner says. "Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike put it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent nor the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage."

The Episcopal priest and author Robert Farrar Capon sketches two contrasting models of how God interacts with history. The traditional model shows a God "up in heaven" who periodically dispatches a lightning bolt of intervention: the calling of Abraham and of Moses, the Ten Plagues, the prophets, the coming of Jesus. Capon prefers a model that shows God "under" history, constantly sustaining it and occasionally breaking the surface with a visible act that emerges into plain sight, like the tip of an iceberg. Anyone can notice the dramatic upthrusts (Pharaoh certainly had no trouble), but the life of faith involves a search below the surface as well.

Buechner has spoken of his quest for the "continuing dim spectacle of the subterranean presence of grace in the world." He writes of an anxious moment in an airport (Buechner battles a fear of flying) when suddenly he notices on the counter a tie pin engraved with his initials, "C.F.B."; and of a good friend who dies suddenly in his sleep and then visits Buechner in a dream, leaving behind a strand of blue wool from his jersey, which Buechner finds on the carpet the next morning; and of sitting parked by the side of the

road in a moment of personal crisis when a car barrels down the road with a license plate bearing the simple message "T-R-U-S-T." Each of these occurrences, Buechner grants, is open to a more "scientific" interpretation. Perhaps nothing happened beyond a cat dragging in a wool thread, or a passenger leaving a tie pin on a counter, or a trust officer of a bank driving down the highway. Buechner, though, prefers to see in such chance occurrences messages upthrusts-of an underlying Providence. For example, when the car drove by, "Of all the entries in the entire lexicon it was the word trust that I needed most to hear. It was a chance thing, but also a moment of epiphany-revelation-telling me, 'trust your children, trust yourself, trust God, trust life; just trust.' "

In ways like these-ambiguous, elusive, and open to different interpretations-God edges into our lives. Were there no room for doubt, there would be no room for faith, either. For Buechner, such random events present a kind of Pascalian gamble: he can either bet yes on a God who gives life mystery and meaning, or no, concluding that whatever happens happens, with no meaning beyond. The evidence either way is fragmentary and inconclusive, and demands faith.

Faith is different from theology because theology is reasoned, systematic,

orderly whereas faith is disorderly, intermittent, and full of surprises.

Faith is different from mysticism because mystics in their ecstasy become

one with what faith can at most see only from afar. Faith is different from

ethics because ethics is primarily concerned not, like faith, with our

relationship to God but with our relationship to each other. . . . Faith

is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position

on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.

Faith is journeying through space and through time.

If someone were to come up and ask me to talk about my faith, it is exactly

that journey that I would eventually have to talk about-the ups and downs

of the years, the dreams, the odd moments, the intuitions. I would have to

talk about the occasional sense I have that life is not just a series of

events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in pool causes

the billiard balls to careen off in all directions, but that life has a plot

the way a novel has a plot, that events are somehow or other leading somewhere,

that they make sense.

-From an unpublished speech at Wheaton College

A novel and a life of faith-the two, Buechner concluded, have much in common. Faith and fiction both rely on the concrete and particular far more than the abstract and cerebral, both deal with seeming contradictions, and both involve a sustained process of reordering those particulars and contradictions into some pattern of meaning. Yet Buechner found it very difficult at first to talk of his personal faith. Raised in a nonreligious home, living in a nonreligious part of the country, he felt reticent and embarrassed, as if faith should hide in a closet, one of those family secrets no one mentions in public. The change came about, appropriately, through an odd coincidence.

Buechner was going through a dark time, something approaching a nervous breakdown. He had just moved his family to an isolated farm near the town of Rupert, Vermont, leaving a comfortable position with a private school in order to write full-time. Before long he had written himself into a blank wall. The muses would not show up on schedule. Everything he wrote made him so depressed he could not continue. Then came a letter from Harvard inviting him to deliver the school's Noble Lectures on theology. Perhaps, suggested the chaplain, Buechner could do something on "religion and letters."

The chaplain no doubt meant the phrase in the sense of letters as literature. But as he stared at the invitation, Buechner saw the word in its most basic, literal essence: the letters of the alphabet, building blocks of all language. The more he thought about it, the more he saw that faith consists of God using the "humdrum events of our lives as an alphabet," the building blocks of a language that, if listened to properly, can convey God's self to us. His eye turned inward. Out of those musings came The Alphabet of Grace, an adaptation of the Noble Lectures in which Buechner picks one by one through the fragments of a single day of his life.

At last Buechner had found a "voice" for his nonfiction. He need not be a theologian like his teachers at Union. He need not be a preacher of sermons. He could simply fashion stories and meaning out of the material of his own life, just as he already did in his fiction. The next decade was one of his most fruitful. The Leo Bebb novels emerged, as if Buechner were testing the alphabet of faith in a coarser version. As a counterpoint, he began producing his own quieter, more subtle "letters" of faith (The Alphabet of Grace,

Telling the Truth, A Room Called Remember), as well as a series of memoirs (The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, Telling Secrets). Sometimes he would experiment with other forms, such as collected sermons or the "theologized ABC" books (Peculiar Treasures, Wishful Thinking, Whistling in the Dark). Even these more formal structures, though, served as carriers for Buechner's personal voice, a voice characterized by the hunt for the subterranean, the mining of the ordinary for the hidden message of God.

Once I was being interviewed for a job and somebody said, "If you think of

a Christian spectrum with William Sloane Coffin on one hand and Simon Stylites

on the other hand, where would you put yourself?" I said, "Much closer to

Simon Stylites." I sit on a mountain writing books.

-From an interview in Radix, July/August 1983

[T]here are really two frontiers: the outer-concerned with issues such as

civil rights, the peace movement and poverty, the frontier where justice

does battle with injustice, sanity with madness, and so on-and the inner,

where doubt is pitted against faith, hope against despair, grief against

joy. It's this inner frontier that I live with and address myself to. And

when I feel like justifying myself, I say that ultimately the real battle

is going to be won there.

-From an interview in the Christian Century, November 16, 1983

Nearly 30 years have passed since the Buechners moved to the house in rural Vermont and Fred settled into his writing routine. The house had passed down to Fred's wife, and she domesticated it with outdoor things: flowers, a huge vegetable garden that feeds the deer as well as the family, horses, chickens, a pig "who grew to the size of a large refrigerator," goats, some cattle. To the household, Fred mainly contributed books, "which, unlike people, can always be depended upon to tell the same stories in the same way and are always there when you need them and can always be set aside when you need them no longer." He converted part of a barn into a kind of library to hold his many volumes, and for years that barn served as his writer's refuge where he would retreat to fashion his own books.

Eventually, Buechner added a study onto the back of the house, a bright, airy room looking out onto a pond, a jagged line of stone fences, a stand of birch, a valley, a 3,000-acre preserve of hardwoods. "I call it my 'magic kingdom,' " he says, and little wonder. Here are displayed Buechner's most valuable books, many rebound in oiled leather and gold leaf. It takes several shelves just to hold the many first editions, in various languages, of Buechner's cherished Oz collection. Shelves by the windows hold other objects of delight and whimsy: a kaleidoscope, paired magnets that "suspend" in air, Dorothy's ruby slippers, a model of Humpty-Dumpty, a gargoyle.

In this room he sits in an upholstered chair by the fireplace, feet propped on an ottoman, and writes on unlined notebook paper with a felt-tip pen. "If you made a video of a writer's life, it would be hopelessly boring," he says. "I sit in this chair and make marks on a page. That's all you can see. I am sinking into my self, of course, into the place where dreams and intuitions come from. It is a holy place. But to an observer, I am not doing much at all."

Not a single other dwelling is visible from Buechner's study: leaning on an invisible pulpit, he addresses an invisible audience. Likewise, the results of Buechner's labors remain mostly invisible to him. He sells thousands of books, but hears from only a small sampling of readers. Some tell him his books saved their faith, or that he was the first Christian writer who seemed honest. I was present at Wheaton College when a troubled young student stood in a large hall and said into a microphone, "Mr. Buechner, I would like to say that your novels mean more to me than the cross of Christ itself." Buechner was flustered and embarrassed-how could anyone reply to such a remark? What the student probably meant was that Buechner's novels had presented truth in a more penetrating way than he had ever heard before, especially in church.

Once, upon returning to Vermont after a winter holiday, Buechner found this message on his answering machine: "You don't know me but I am a fan of yours. I just wanted to tell you I have twice in the last six weeks contemplated suicide, and it was because of your books that I didn't do it." Given Buechner's family history, that message lodged like an arrow: hearing it, he said, "meant more to me than winning the Nobel Prize."

Because of scattered responses like these, Buechner does not downplay his ministerial role by elevating the "art" of his fiction and dismissing his nonfiction as somehow less valuable. Writing is his ministry: vicarious, indirect, mediated, perhaps, but ministry nonetheless. "I used to hang my head at such responses and say, 'God, if you only knew who I am.' Now I'm more likely to say, 'Yes, I'm a fool, hypocrite, weirdo, but God in his mercy chose me to present himself to you.' We have this treasure in vessels of clay. . . . Mine is a disorganized, unstructured kind of ministry, but it is, I hope, a legitimate one."

Still, apart from these few messages from readers, Buechner remains largely disconnected from the people to whom he ministers. He has not found a satisfying church nearby. "I've found that most ministers preach out of their shallows more than out of their depths," he says. "I rarely go to hear them, and when I do, I feel guilty about my negative reaction. So many churches remind me of dysfunctional families, full of loneliness, buried pain, dominated by an authority figure. Except for a marvelous Episcopal church I attended near Wheaton, I have found no church that truly ministers to me. Al-Anon support groups come closest to what I wish the church would be."

Most battles of faith, therefore, Buechner fights alone. He has no community of Christian friends nearby. Devotional writers others admire-Kathleen Norris, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton-for the most part fail to move him. He finds spiritual nourishment in poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but as a source of artistic inspiration he tends to turn to other novelists: Graham Greene, William Maxwell, Flannery O'Connor. Increasingly, he struggles with melancholy.

"I had my seventieth birthday last year, and it was the only one that really made an impression," he says. "Forty, fifty, sixty-those birthdays slid right by. This one made me feel shadowy and sad, geriatric. My great friend the poet James Merrill died last year. We knew each other for 55 years. We wrote our first books together one summer in Maine. Yet I don't want to write out of the shadowy part of myself, but out of the part that is still young and full of joy. I think of the lovely fairy-tale plays Shakespeare wrote in his old age: The Winter's Tale, The Tempest. I think of the last self-portraits of Rembrandt, suffused with golden light.

"One project, a novel based on Mary Magdalene, depressed me so badly that I abandoned it. And then one day came a miracle of grace. I was reading the apocryphal Book of Tobit, a Hebrew fairy tale about a dog and a journey and a fish, a tale full of magic. Joy welled up. That night, or early the next morning about 4:45 a.m., I got out of bed and began my next project, a retelling of the story of Tobit and his son Tobias. Nothing I have written ever gave me such pleasure, and I finished it in a month and two days. It is called On the Road with the Archangel, to be published this fall.

"Every once in a while a book comes along like that, a gift of grace. Like an artesian well, almost all you have to do is let it flow out under its own power. At least for yourself, the writer, it comes with such life of its own that it almost bowls you over. When that happens, I feel as if the book is gathered in the palm of my hand. It is there, I am holding it. Of course you have to work very hard to get the language and the form right,

but the one thing you don't have to do is struggle to bring it to life. The gift comes first, and then the labor."

Philip Yancey is the author is many books, including most recently The Jesus I Never Knew, winner of the 1996 ECPA Gold Medallion Book of the Year award.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture

Magazine.

Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 7

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