And the World Echoes with His Absence
Copyright: Christiansay
Last week, one of my literary and life-heroes died.
He was known to a lot of people in a fairly narrow niche—fiction with a religious twist. Not those sappy Hallmark-channel Christian dramas, nor the preachy kind of fiction that makes you want to stay out of churches forever; Frederick Buechner wrote more in the style of a Tolkien or a C.S. Lewis—not coincidentally, other favorites of mine.
Buechner’s medium was storytelling, but his love was clearly for humanity, whose antics he viewed with sorrow, joy, and compassion—something along the lines of Lord, what fools these mortals be. He observed people at their best and at their worst, constantly surprising and baffling those who tried to fit him into one political or philosophical box or another, and reminding his readers always of truths that are not only eternal but also universal. Alice Munro said that Buechner wrote for “the religiously indifferent reader,” and his novels featured people struggling with complex choices, dealing with paradox.
Along with Tolkien and Lewis and another of my favorites, G.K. Chesterton, Buchener’s work affirmed that faith and doubt live alongside each other; that you cannot have the one without the other.
One of my favorite passages reads,
Mysticism is where religions start. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the water of the Jordan, each of them is responding to something of which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid souvenirs. Religion as ethics, institution, dogma, ritual, Scripture, 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 a bush going up in flames, a rain of flowers, a dove coming down out of the sky. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.”
Most people have also seen such things. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning in their lives, most of them have caught glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by. Only then, unlike the saints, we tend to go on as though nothing had happened.
Right. We tend to go on as if nothing had happened.
And now perhaps the world will go on as if nothing has happened. As if he hadn’t been here at all. As if he hadn’t written words that could move souls. As if he hadn’t created characters and stories that stay in readers’ minds and hearts. Perhaps, in time, his name won’t be as well-known as it is now, his books as well-read as they are now. We do tend to go on—even after our lives have been touched, enchanted, changed, enriched—as if nothing has happened.
I hope I won’t. I hope I will live differently because of the stories he gave me. I know that the world is better for having had him in it, and poorer by far now that he’s gone.