By Frederick Buechner
Honesty, mystery, and certainty share a warm embrace in Buechner's The Sacred Journey.
Buechner, now 95, wrote The Sacred Journey in his early fifties, a decade after The Alphabet of Grace. Whereas The Alphabet of Grace gives us a "day in the life of," The Sacred Journey attempts to "make something out of the hidden alphabet of the years." This is important. Because God is at work in our lives, we are not simply marking time, but are on a sacred journey.
Buechner is looking back in order to look ahead. He searches memories and moments, some shocking (his father's suicide) and some seemingly mundane and forgettable (the garbled blessing of a monk); he searches and listens for the voice of God.
He speaks not just through the sounds we hear, of course, but through events in all their complexity and variety, through the harmonies and disharmonies and counterpoint of all that happens.
Buechner gives us his life story in three movements: "Once Below a Time" (the period of childhood when timelessness reigns), "Once Upon a Time" (the moment and days when the fragility and temporality of life takes hold), "Beyond Time" (hearing the voice of God in the listening to one's life happening as part of [God's] plot for one's life).
I mentioned that The Sacred Journey is honesty, mystery, and certainty. Here are examples:
Honesty: "Concern for myself was the hallmark of those years. . . . I do not think that it occurred to me to me then to wonder much about the kind of person I was becoming or not becoming. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I had no clear idea what I wanted to write about . . . I believe, apart from simply the great fun of it for me, [becoming a writer] was as much as anything to become famous enough not to have to explain to strangers how to pronounce my difficult last name. To be famous, it seemed to me, would be no longer to have to worry about explaining who I was even to myself because what fame meant was to be so known that in a sense I would no longer be a stranger to anybody." (pp. 89-90)
Mystery: "I choose to believe that, from beyond time, a saving mystery breaks into our time at odd and unforeseeable moments . . . " (p. 96). The Sacred Journey is a chronicle of the mysteries of life, seemingly unknown, but never to God, and less to ourselves as we learn to listen to them.
Certainty: "God was addressing me out of my life as he address us all" (p. 6) ... and "here at the end [of his memoir] I am left with no other way of saying it than that what I found finally was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter which. . . . I am reduce to the word that is his name because no other seems to account for the experience so fully." (pp. 110-111)
Where Buechner has me scratching my head:
I appreciate the ponderings of Buechner, I always glean from his writings, but some lines give cause for pause -- and a little concern:
It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks." (p. 1)
Certainly, Buechner points us to Scripture (albeit vaguely) from time-to-time, and I want to believe he does not elevate personal ponderings to the level of holy writ, otherwise he leaves me scratching my head as I did when a young college student told me years ago, that God told her what to wear -- every day. Happily, such is missing from the reflective "life pondering" of Frederick Buechner.
My evaluation and recommendation:
The Sacred Journey did not change my life, but it certainly get me thinking about my life -- about how God uses everyday moments, even seemingly benign moments, à la the pondering of Augur the pondering of Augur in Proverbs 30, to "speak" into my life. And the fact that God is intricately involved in every facet of life makes mine -- and yours -- a sacred journey. Should you read it? Of course. It's Buechner!
Delightful passages:
The weak power of self: "You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own." p. 48. This entire page is worth a re-read.
Buechner's descriptive powers: "And Grandma Buechner came too--like the Inspector General, we feared--came to run her white gloved finger over the upper edges and lower sills of our lives, checking for unreality and extravagance, came to dust off a Scharmann maxim or two." p. 51
The book in a sentence: "'For all thy blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks,' runs an old prayer, and it is for the all but unknown ones and the more than half-forgotten ones that we do well to look back over the journey of our lives because it is their presence that marks the life of each of us a sacred journey." p. 57
On words and vocation: But if a vocation is as much the work that chooses you as the work you choose, then I knew from that time on that my vocation was, for better or worse, to involve the searching for, and treasuring, and telling of secrets which is what the real business of words is all about."
On memory: Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still." p. 21
His "Mrs. Everest" (an early and powerful influence on Winston Churchill): "[Mrs. Taylor] was my mentor, my miracle-worker, and the mother of much that I was and in countless unrecognized ways probably still am, yet I don't know where she came from or anything about her life apart from the few years of that she spent with us." pp. 13-14.
Authors and books that shaped him: Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory,Donne, the Apostle Paul, Thomas Craven's A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, Gerald Manley Hopkins, writers of the 17th century: Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Jeremy Taylor and John Doone; Paradise Lost