The Search

...One way or another the journey through time starts for us all, and for all of us, too, that journey is at least in one sense the same journey because what it is primarily, I think, is a journey in search. Each must say for himself what it is he searches for, and there will be at least as many answers as there are searchers, but perhaps there are certain general answers that will do for us all. We search for a self to be. We search for other selves to love. We search for work to do. And since even when to one degree or another, we find these things, we find also that there is still something crucial missing which we have not found, we search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.

-Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 58.

Reeking of Holiness

...Holiness is not something hazy and elusive that we know apart from the earth but something we can know only as it wells up out of the earth, out of people even as clay-footed as Jacob, the trickster crook, out of places as elemental as the river Jabbok, where he wrestled in darkness with a Stranger who was no stranger, out of events as seamy as the time he gulled his half-blind father out of Esau's blessing. "See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed," old Isaac says as he lays his hands upon Jacob, and there it is all in a moment: Jacob betrays his brother, dupes his father, all but chokes on his own mendacity, yet the smell of him is the smell of blessing because God, no less than Isaac, has chosen to bless him in spite of everything. Jacob reeks of holiness. His life is as dark, fertile, and holy as the earth itself. He is himself a bush that burns with everything, both fair and foul, that a man burns with. yet he is not consumed because God out of his grace will not consume him.

-Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, 19-20.

Living or Dying

For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

-Romans 14:7-8

All Saints

On All Saints' Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.

-Frederick Buchner, The Sacred Journey, 74.

The Thick of the Battle

The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive. It was not a conclusion that I came to in time. It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me. God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling.

-Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 107

Evergreen

The righteous flourish like a palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the LORD;
they flourish in the courts of our God.
They still bear fruit in old age;
they are ever full of sap and green,
to declare that the LORD is upright;
he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Psalm 93:12-15

So Then

If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

-Romans 14:8

In Praise of Spoilers!

And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage...

...And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta, of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will ready my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please—learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.

Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.

-Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Semper Gumby

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions—but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

-Helmust Thielicke's sermon on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, H/T Alan Jacobs

A Little Region to Wander in

...Why endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer - Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which may be food for a Weeks's stroll in the Summer?

- John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 10/8/1817

Father Christmas

Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him, they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

-C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Uncles and Aunts

It is in the offering of uncles and aunts that we first use our priestly powers. Long before we can see our parents, we look with gladness upon their brethren. There is no greater historical gift than a brace, a set—a baker's dozen, if at all possible—of uncles. (Dutch uncles will do as well as blood uncles; indeed the inequities of nature make them alsmost indispensible. No boy's priesthood should be imperiled just because his grandparents failed to have enough children.)

...Any ten-year-old boy who would not rather live with his Uncle Henry is a boy to be watched with the gravest suspicion: his priesthood should have been operative long since. He will not be able to choose his own father for years, but, if he cannot offer his uncles now, we may well have an unhistoric monster on our hands. Such a boy should not, of course, be banished. He needs help, therapy, treatment. Accordingly, he should be provided, perhaps at the government's expense, with a deluxe set of uncles for oblation. A 210-pound water skier, for a start, and a 140-pound model locomotive builder to go with him. And, if available, a poetry reader, a crane operator, an amateur violinist and a judge of good whiskey. And, above all, an uncle who can tell jokes which will grow hairier as the the boy grows taller. His cure would not be long coming. The therapy is well-nigh infallible.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 131-132.

The Emergence of a Priestly Agent

The portrait of a young couple with their first baby is still an elegant one. But the snapshot of a pair of beaten forty-five-year-olds surrounded, overshadowed and stymied by a handful of teen-agers and a clutch of elementary school pupils has less to recommend it on the level of intelligibility. Somewhere in between, elegance left by the back door. Around the end of toddling and the beginning of talking, a second and unnoticed pregnancy began; another and quite painless delivery was accomplished. A person was born. A piece of history began to distinguish itself and quietly proceeded to start a history of its own. A new priest was ordained sub rosa and sent back to his old haunts, with no collar and no letters of ordination, but with all the powers of the priesthood of Adam.

From there on, the story of childhood is the classic story of the unrecognized prince in his rightful kingdom. His poor parents are totally unprepared for his claim. With immense good will, they struggle like peasants and villagers to find out what is going on, but they are always several episodes behind the story. The pains of childhood—the agonies of the teens—are due precisely to the emergence of a priestly agent among beings that are not ready to have him arrive so soon.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 125-126.

Fellow Priests

The approach of man to man is precisely a dance, and a courting dance at that. None of my meetings with another man is a mere event, either in his life or mine. Every introduction is an invitation into each other's meaning, a terrible opening of one history to another. In friendship, love or alliance we enter inexporable exchanges, rendering death and forever at each breathing.

Needless to say, we do not commonly see the kind of care we should expect in such meetings. Even in the most deliberate invitations—when we invite love, when we propose marriage—we act frighteningly off the cuff. We come at each other as casually as we approach watermelons. We hold each other in careless, calloused hands. We see those we should offer only as beings to be used. We grasp them, but we watch ourselves.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 113.

What to Do with Bits of String

We are expert at extraction, making
something out of something else;
a cat's cradle for the kids. A rag rug.
A torn loaf for turkey stuffing, or Eucharist.
We take traces of a fractured dream
and fashion a plot for a new novel.
Old tires make for resilient highways.
My friend rips out worn sweaters
for new scarves. Women in Africa
roll old magazine pages into beads,
varnishing them for sale in other worlds,
jewels from junk. I rescue river stones
and beach shells for ornaments
along my window sill. They cost nothing.

Try it yourself. See what lovely new thing
God can make from what is common
and discarded. Including your own life.
Call it recycling. Call it renewal
and you're getting at the heart of it.

-Luci Shaw

Not Just a Laundry List

All who read scriptures know this story well...Absalom instigated a palace coup and David fled for his life to the wilderness. Civil war followed, father fighting son, son fighting father. David won back his throne at a terrible cost, the death of his son, over which he mourned magnificently. The life of David is full of incidents like this. Everyone’s life is. Not a palace coup for most of us and, hopefully, not the treachery of a son, but conflict and failure and fear, love and betrayal, loss and salvation. Every day is a story, a morning and evening ending that are boundaries for people who go about their tasks with more or less purpose, go to war, make love, earn a living, scheme and sin and believe. Everything is connected. Meaning is everywhere. The days add up to a life that is a story...We are not always aware that we are living a story; often it seems more like a laundry list. But story it is.

- Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall

A Poem Can Be Like

A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist, 212.

Even Rocks

There’s an organic interconnectedness in the comprehensive totality of creation, visible and invisible, “heavens and earth,” by which everything seen and heard, tasted, touched and experienced, if only followed far enough and deep enough, brings us into the presence of God. Even rocks.

-Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 207.

The Devil's Work is Abstraction

The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities—which, of course, is why “David’s heart smote him after he had numbered the people” (2 Samuel 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the “acceptability” of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, 279.

Things Must Be Met for Themselves

But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults: it is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 19-20