Frederick Buechner on
Listening to Your Life

Please read and react to this before we meet on September 28

If I were to state the essence of everything I was trying to say, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, and 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. (Frederick Buechner Now and Then, 87)

If you tell your story with sufficient candor and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and, in some sense, a universal story… Autobiography becomes a way of praying. (Buechner, Now and Then, 2,3)

Buecher's own story connected with me so deeply that it drew me out of hiding. The way he tells his story exemplifies the candor and concreteness he recommends. He began the narrative of his childhood with this incredible sentence:

One November morning in 1936, when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my younger brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat down on the running board to wait for the exhaust to kill him. (Buechner, Telling Secrets, 7)

Wow! One sentence, eighty words, with no emotions directly named. And yet, it evoked a constellation of powerful emotions in me. I was a ten-year-old again, in different circumstances, yes, but taken back to that vulnerable age and how death intrudes.

Buechner went to tell of his family's response to the tragedy:

Within a year of his death, I seemed to have forgotten what my father looked like except for certain photographs of him, to have forgotten what his voice sounded like, and what it had been like to be with him. Because my mother, brother, and I never talked about how we had felt about him when he was alive or how we felt about him now that he wasn't, those feelings soon disappeared too and went underground along with the memories. In almost no time at all, it was as if, at least for me, he had never existed.

Don't talk, don't trust, and don't feel is the unwritten law of families that, for one reason or another, have gone out of whack, and certainly it was our law. We never talked about what had happened. We didn't trust the world with our secret, hardly even trusted each other with it. (Telling Secrets, 9-10)

We all create our own realities as we go along,” he would later write. “Reality for me was this. Out of my father’s death there came, for me, a new and, in many ways, happier life... I cannot say the grief faded because, in a sense, I had not yet, unlike my brother, really felt that grief. That was not to happen for thirty years or more. But the grief was postponed.”

Decades later, he realized: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.” (Buechner, The Sacred Journey, 46,54)

“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else… It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are…because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier…for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”  (Telling Secrets, 2,3)

The Buechner pattern is a familiar one. A person is hit by a blow. There is a period when the shock of the loss is too great to be faced. Emotions are packed away. The person’s inner life is held “in suspension.” But then, when the time is right, the person realizes that he has to deal with his past. He has to excavate all that was packed away. He has to share his experience with friends, readers, or some audience. Only then can he go on to a bigger, deeper life.

David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (164-167).

We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds we have both suffered and inflicted. But through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, and imagining our way back through time, we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people.

The sad things that happened long ago will remain part of who we are, just as the good things will. But instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of strength for the journey that still lies ahead.

It is through memory that we can reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years, God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing, which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later. (Telling Secrets 32,33)

Buechner was able to forgive his mother for her repression of the trauma. He was able to forgive himself for hiding his secrets and gradually found healing, though it did not begin until he was in his fifties. His example moved me deeply because I, too, when I was in my fifties, was still detached from my childhood wounds. As I took in Buechner’s story, tremendous hope was kindled in me. My past was no longer a curse, nor was my failure in ministry.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

·       How did Buechner’s story and his reflections on it affect you? What stood out to you?

·       Is there a sense in which Buechner’s story is everyone’s story? Your story?

·       What are the high points, low points, and turning points of your life?

·       Have you tried “autobiography as a way of praying?”

·       Is God inviting you into “possibilities of new life and healing, which, though you missed them in the past, can still enter and be healed all these years later?”