Frederick Buechner died on August 15. He was a well-known writer about matters of faith and was famous for such quotations as these:
“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.”
“It is about as hard to absolve yourself of your own guilt as it is to sit in your own lap.”
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
It is said that during the 1980s and 1990s, Buechner was quoted from American pulpits more often than anyone alive at the time; he was a writer whose work appealed to both evangelicals and mainline Protestants.
In writing about Buechner his good friend Martin Copenhaveer wrote: Fred “never stopped searching his own life for clues to the presence of God. This quest became one of his overarching themes: 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, 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.” **
Surely, that is good advice: never stop searching your life for clues to the presence of God. May the search bear much fruit!
Grace and peace,
Pastor Mary
**Martin Copenhaver, “Frederich Buechner’s Many Benedictions” in Christian Century, August 16, 2022.
