LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR

'To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, to really see somebody, you have to love somebody.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.39.

ART STOPS US IN OUR TRACKS

'...art is saying Stop. It helps us stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.23.

TIME HEALS?

'...time heals all wounds or at least dresses them, makes them endurable.'

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.55. 

WHERE BEAUTY TAKES YOU

'It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful and beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.52.

DEATH CANNOT HOLD THEM

'How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond  doubt that they still live in us.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.21. 

READING AS A CHILD

'I suppose it is partly because you read so much more slowly as a child that the books you come to then seem as endless as summer and richer, fuller, more inexhaustible than anything you are likely to read later on.'

Frederick Buechner, A Sacred Journey, p.15.

SIN & GRACE

'What about sin itself as a means of grace? What about grace, when misappropriated and misunderstood, becoming an occasion for sin?'

Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, p.3

CHILD-LIKE FAITH

'...within the child-self that is part of us all, there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'All's Lost - All's Found' in A Room Called Remember, p.190. 

LITERARY HYPOCONDRIA

'I have never had an ache or pain that wasn't fatal or an illness that wasn't terminal. One of the occupational hazards of being a writer of fiction is to have an imagination as overdeveloped as a blacksmith's right arm.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'All's Lost - All's Found' in A Room to Remember, p.185. 

FAITH IS WAITING

'Faith is a way of waiting - never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy thing lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them. But faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing worth waiting through. Faith waits - for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed, so long that there are times when you all but give up hoping of ever hearing it. And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, the one voice of all voices.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'Delay' in A Room Called Remember, p.130. 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IS ABOUT WAITING

'There is a kind of high comedy about our faith. There is a kind of high comedy about our seeing and not seeing, about waiting, about being human but not quite human. We wait for him to come - more than we know, each of us waits for our heart's desire - and he comes only in metaphors, in shadowy glimpses through the tall and bleeding trees; in long silences through which some words should be spoken and are spoken but never quite audibly enough for us to be sure we've heard them right: "The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee preserve they body and soul unto everlasting life" 

Body and soul, we wait for the new life to make us everlastingly alive, new blood to flow through our dusty and sorrowing world, soft as rainwater and almost without taste but with the faintest tinge of sweetness to it. He was a fine man, our Lord and General. He was everything a man should be. He was everything we all should be and from the deepest part of ourselves yearn to be - loving, brave, just - but are not yet, not by a long shot.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'A Little While' in A Room Called Remember, p.103. 

THE SORROW OF NOT YET SEEING JESUS

'"Truly, truly, I say to you, ...you will be sorrowful," Jesus said. Well, ...we're sorrowful about lots of things, you and I, God knows. It goes with the territory, sorrow. We carry it about with us the way a snail carries it shell; it is one of the homes we live in - sorrow about our country and about our pillaged earth, sorrow that youth grows old and beauty fades. Sorrow about death - about all the undone things the dead leave behind them as we will leave undone things behind us too when our time comes, like a pair of old shoes broken in to to take us on some blessed journey we never got around to taking, maybe the most crucial journey of our lives. But as Christians we inherit this special refinement of sorrow that Jesus speaks of, this sorrow for connoisseurs - which is the sorrow of not seeing plainly the One we need most to see.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'A Little While' in A Room Called Remember, p.99. 

WE GO TO CHURCH ON OUR SEARCH FOR JESUS

'Sunday after Sunday we go to church because we are looking for Jesus in some uncertain way or another - of all the reasons we have, I think this is the heart of them. We go to church looking for him because not just maple woods and silence and the occasional testimony of his saints speak to us of him, but becuase the spirit of him is so at large in the air we breathe that almost anything we see can turn into the shadow of him if we're not careful or if we are creaful - a piece of bread, a glasss of wine. We go to church looking for Jesus in some uncertain way because in some uncertain way we have seen him, have seen enough of him to suspect that if there is anyone who can lighten the dimness of us, he is the one who can - the Light of the World; the light, if we could only see him, even of our own dim inner worlds.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'A Little While' in A Room Called Remember, p.98. 

THE TOPSY-TURVY INCARNATION

'When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One who inhabits eternity comes to dwell in time. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'Emmnauel' in A Room Called Remember, p.61. 

INTIMACY AVOIDANCE

'When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces, p.5. 

HAPPINESS VS. JOY

'Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us. Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening but every once in a while rises up out of simply being alive, of being part of the terror as well as the fathomless riches of the world that God has made.'  

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home, p.128. 

OUR DESIRES LEAD US HOME

'Sometimes, I suspect, the search for home is related also to the longing of the flesh, to the way in which, both when you are young and for long afterward, the sight of beauty can you set you longing with a keenness and poignance and passion, with a kind of breathless awe even, which suggest that beneath the longing to possess and be possessed by the beauty of another sexually - to know in the biblical idiom - there lies the longing to know and be known by another fully and humanly, and that beneath that there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at last where you fully belong. "If ever beauty I did see, / Which I desir'd and got, 'twas but a dream of thee," John Donne wrote to his mistress ("The Good Morrow"), and when I think of all the beautiful ones whom I have seen for maybe no more than a passing moment and have helplessly, overwhelmingly desired, I wonder if an the innermost heart of my desiring there wasn't, of all things, homesickness.'  

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home, p.23. 

HOME

'What the word home brings to mind before anything else, I believe, is  a place, and, and in its fullest sense not just the place where you happen to be living at the time, but a very special place with very special attributes which make it clearly distinguishable from all other places. The word home summons up a place - more specifically a house within that place - which you have a rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well even if things aren't going all that well at any given moment.' 

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections, p.7. 

CREATION & RECREATION

'The first home foreshadows the final home, and the final home hallows and fulfills what was most precious in the first.' 

Fredrick Buechner in John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p.140. 

THE HOLY SPIRIT

'The Holy Spirit has been called, "the Lord, the giver of life," and drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.'

Frederick Buechner in Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.57.