I don’t turn to my Frederick Buechner books often any more. But I treasure how they accompanied me and guided me through a challenging decade of my life — from about 1985 – 1995. They sit on my shelf as trusted friends — friends who pointed me again and again to mystery, to faith, to scandalous grace . . . to God.

Here’s a taste:

“Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves . . . Deep within history, as it gets itself written down in history books and newspapers, in the letters we write and in the diaries we keep, is sacred history, is God’s purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, in the history, in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own. A child is born. A friend is lost or found. Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding. We are awakened by a dream. Out of the shadowy street comes a cry for help. We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths.”

I loved his spiritual biographies: The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. As I read through them, I realized that his assumption was correct: “that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.” His honesty taught me to look for the joy, the sorrow, the God-ness of my life (that is now reflected in my journals through those years). I learned this: “There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.”

I appreciated the wisdom of Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC and Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized. (They’re full of these pithy insights: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”)

Then there’s the gift to every single preacher: Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. “The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn’t see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn’t see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high, unbidden, hilarious thing it is.”

There are wonderful sermons — and some exquisite ones — among the collections in The Magnificent Defeat, The Hungering Dark, and A Room Called Remember. Add to this the profound insights of The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife and The Son of Laughter.

Admittedly, I tried his fiction and it didn’t work for me. But that probably says more about me than about Bebb/Buechner.

Thanks, Frederick Buechner, for opening my eyes, for teaching me this:

“Strange things happen. Again and again Christ is present not where, as priests, you would be apt to look for him but precisely where you wouldn’t have thought to look for him in a thousand years. The great preacher, the sunset, the Mozart Requiem can leave you cold, but the child in the doorway, the rain on the roof, the half-remembered dream, can speak of him and for him with an eloquence that turns your knees to water.”

“What man and woman, if they gave serious thought to what having children inevitably involves, would ever have them? Yet what man and woman, once having had them and loved them, would ever want it otherwise? . . . To suffer in love for another’s suffering is to live life not only at its fullest but at its holiest.”