Memorable

 

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."  Simone Weil

I like what Dr. Jeffrey Munroe writes about Fredrick Buechner. I resonate with this thinking of Buechner as Munroe writes of it.

‘ […] Buechner is a theologian, but he does not structure his thoughts or writing like a typical theologian. He does not put forth a series of propositional truths, and he deals more in doubt than in certainty. What matters most is the experience of God’s presence, not the objective proof of God’s existence; Buechner contends in several places that presence, not proof, is the miracle we’re after. This is a cornerstone of his theology. Revelation is personal: if God speaks at all, he speaks into our personal lives, and all systems of theology start first as personal experience.’ (p.11-12)

A Memorable Woman by Fredrick Buechner

AND PART OF ME will always be homesick, too, for a person I came to know, also in Manchester, during those same years. When the Baptist church, of which she was a member, was without a minister one winter, I took the services every Sunday for a few months, and that was how we met. She was a woman well on into her seventies, very thin, very stooped. She had been married a number of times, and for years, as a widow, had been living alone, on welfare, in the one small apartment left inhabitable in a house that had been gutted by fire a few years earlier. Shaking hands at the church door after the service one Sunday morning, I had said to her—neither expecting nor much caring about an answer—"How are you?" and she looked up at me out of her wry, beleaguered old face and said, "As well as can be expected." Just that and no more, then made her way down the steps and out into the cold.   I am as deaf as the next one and usually deafer when it comes to calls for help, but I was all she had by way of a minister just then, after all, and I was not so literary and detached and specialized as not to know that every once in a while, if only to keep their hands in, Christians are supposed to be Christs to each other for Christ's sweet sake, so I steeled myself and went to call on her one winter afternoon. I expected the worst, of course, because that is my nature. I expected a long, dreary monologue. I expected plenty of complaints with some tears to go with them. I expected to feel awkward and inadequate. I expected to be bored and hoped to get away as soon as I decently could. And I couldn't possibly have been more wrong on every count. None of the things I expected to happen happened, and none of the things I expected to feel did I feel, neither on that first day I went to see her nor on all the other days I went to see her from that time on until finally, around Saint Valentine's day some seven or eight years later, she died, and I conducted her burial service before a little knot of family and friends under a gray Vermont sky with the wind flapping my black robe around my ankles.   Call to Prayer from F. Buechner   BECAUSE THE WORD that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word—a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see—the chances are we will never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.