“I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else,” writes Frederick Buechner in the prologue to The Alphabet of Grace. He is of course one of the most important theologians and beautiful writers of the 20th century. The Alphabet of Grace is a small book chronicling a day in his life. It’s about not much of anything, and everything. I wanted to share one passage with you today…

From The Alphabet of Grace, p. 74:

“At its heart, I think, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan: each of them responds to something for which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid, alphabetic souvenirs. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” Religion as institution, as ethics, as dogma, as social action – all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky.

As for the man in the street, any street, wherever his own religion is a matter of more than custom, it is likely to be because, however dimly, a doorway opened in the air once to him too, a word was spoken, and, however shakily, he responded. The debris of his life continues to accumulate, the Vesuvius of the years scatters its ashes deep and much gets buried alive, but even under many layers the tell-tale heart can go on beating still. Where it beats strong, there starts pulsing out from it a kind of life that is marked by, above all things perhaps, compassion: that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin and for knowing that there can never really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy finally for all…

Religion as a word points essentially, I think, to that area of human experience where in one way or another man happens upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage, a come-all-ye; where he is led to suspect the reality of splendors that he cannot name; where he senses meanings no less overwhelming because they can only be hinted at in myths and rituals, in foolish, left-handed games and cloudy novels; where in great laughter perhaps and certain silences he glimpses a destination that he can never know fully until he reaches it. To the many in the world who wistfully or scornfully would deny ever having had such an experience, the answer, I suspect, is that we are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe… We have seen more than we let on, even to ourselves. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of our lives, through some horror of the twelve o’clock news, some dream, some breakfast on the first and last of all our days, we catch glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by. Only then, unlike the saints, more pigs than heroes, we tend to go on as though nothing has happened. To go on as though something has happened even though we are not sure what it was or just where we are supposed to go with it, is to enter that dimension of life that religion is a word for.

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From my mother’s garden…

 

 

 

 

 

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