A friend pointed me to a David Brooks column devoted to Frederick Buechner — The Man Who Found His Inner Depths. Buechner, who died in 2022, is best known as a writer about humans. His novels have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was also an active Presbyterian minister.
In his column, Brooks quotes Buechner: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
I bought one of Buechner’s books: Listening To Your Life: Daily Meditations, which is comprised of 365 short entries. In the Introduction Buechner acknowledges there are a lot of books like this, and goes on to say:
”The good ones, for me, are the ones that almost uncannily hit on something that I have been thinking about, often without realizing that I have. They are the ones that sound like a friend talking, like somebody who has been more or less where I have been and felt something more or less like what I have been feeling—about life, about myself, about the people I love and the people I am unable to love, about God. They are not so much the ones that tell me something new that will keep me awake, puzzling over it, as the ones that will help me see something as familiar as my own face in a new way, with a new sense of its depth and preciousness and mystery.
“Above all, I guess, the good ones, for me, are the ones that one way or another suggest that although the night is coming, it is not darkness but light that is the end of all things.”
I also found a short (12 minute) YouTube video of a talk by Buechner. In it, he discusses being stewards of our pain. As an example, he refers to the sharing that takes place in AA and Al-Anon meetings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hdH1_z2ps.
I am adding Buechner to my list of people who are, proverbially, guiding me to “know myself” and to “lead an examined life.”
The Wikipedia article about Buechner is here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Buechner.
The David Brooks column is here. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/opinion/columnists/frederick-buechner-inner-depths.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.
Buechner’s obit is here. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/books/frederick-buechner-dead.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article.
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