Laughing with God

I think when I first read Buechner, I didn't get it. Oh I thought it was good in an earnest, po-faced kind of a way. I think was too young, I came to it at a time when I knew everything and had a system that I was able to slot everything into and neatly file away for future recall.

Well, I'm older now. And I've just read the chapter on the gospel as comedy, sitting the garden in the afternoon sunshine and laughed and laughed - and cried - and thought that for the first time I've seen things about God that I've known to be true in theory but have never felt rumbling in the depths of my oh so serious and sorted soul.

What a joker God is! And how blessed I am that he is. because the biggest joke is that I can join him at his table, share his food and laugh along with him.

There's no point quoting any of the chapter. You need to get this book and consume it, feast on it, relish every morsel of it and find your soul nourished by it like nothing you've experienced for such a long time.

His retelling of parables - especially the prodigal son - is like hearing them for the first time and in a way that makes you realise that they are telling you your life story, including the moment when God accepts and embraces you, welcomes you into his kitchen and shares what he's just cooked for himself.

Finding reasons to be a preacher

Thanks for Jim Gordon over at Living Wittily - one of the most consistently thought-provoking and spirit-lifting blogs around - I've started re-reading Frederick Buechner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale.

I'd forgotten just how good it is. Buechner's prose is sublime. His portrait of Pilate in the first chapter is breath-taking and his reflection of Pilate's question to Jesus - 'what is truth'? - dazzling and unsettling and just right.

Having the sielnce that greeted Pilate's question from the lips of Jesus, Buechner says: 'What is truth? Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are. The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us; by whatever gifts he or she has of imagination, eloquence, simple candour, to create images of life through which we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives. Before the Gospel is good news, it is simply news that that's the way it is, whatever day it is of whatever year.' (p17)

Suddenly I am aware of wanting to be a preacher again. Not a purveyor of finely crafted spiritual homilies but someone who allows the truth to take shape on my lips. Buechner's book is is his Beecher Lectures on preaching delivered at Yale in the mid-70s. And yet they could have been written yesterday, such is their prescience.

Of the preacher, he says, concluding his first chapter, 'So let him use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions.'

Yes please!