My first exposure to Frederick Buechner was a recorded sermon that was assigned for an independent study in homiletics. I don’t remember anything about the sermon except that I didn’t like it and thought his vision of the Christian life was less than it should have been.
A few years later I read Lion Country, the first of four novels centered around Leo Bebb, and my reaction to that was about the same. Leo Bebb and his associates are not very impressive people, to say the least, and God doesn’t intervene in their lives to turn them around; they just go on in the same way throughout the series. I had heard and read of God doing extraordinary things in people’s lives, dramatic, overwhelming things. Like in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, by Jonathan Edwards, or the story of DL Moody experiencing the Holy Spirit and asking God to stop because he felt like he couldn’t take any more. My expectation, at this point, was that this is the way God normally works in the lives of His people, by making His presence known in overwhelming and unmistakable ways, and I was disappointed, maybe even offended, by what I took to be Buechner’s low expectations.
But I’ve changed my mind since then. My outlook when I was younger was colored by some measure of youthful idealism, I think. And I didn’t pay enough attention to Edwards’ description of this work of God as “surprising.” What he saw happening was not the norm; it took him by surprise, which led him to report at length on it.
Buechner has a very good description of what he is doing, in both his sermons and novels, in one of his memoirs: “I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living… opened up onto extraordinary vistas…. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly…. If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, 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 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” (Now and Then).
Buechner’s character Leo Bebb is not an attractive person, certainly not someone to follow as an example, but he is also not a charlatan. I think Bebb is a good illustration of the fact that people are not one-dimensional, that there is very often more to them than we can see on the surface and that it is a mistake to write them off too easily. God’s grace is compatible with large inconsistencies in the lives of His people.
Sonny, in the movie “The Apostle,” with Robert Duvall, is similar to Bebb. He genuinely believes the things he preaches, but he is very deeply flawed; things don’t go well in his life, but he continues preaching the gospel till the end. Roger Ebert says this in his review: “Sonny is different from most movie preachers. He's not a fraud, for one thing; Hollywood tilts toward the Elmer Gantry stereotype. Sonny has a one-on-one relationship with God, takes his work seriously, and in the movie's opening scene, the preacher pauses at an auto accident to ask one of the victims to accept Jesus Christ, “who you're going to soon meet.” Sonny is flawed, with a quick temper, but he's a good man, and the film is about his struggle back to redemption after his anger explodes.” A deeply flawed character, but not a charlatan. Not quite the hero we might hope for, but, if we’re honest, much closer reality than we’d like. And with all his faults, God uses him to bring people to Himself.
When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple, most of those who were present missed it, because it was just an ordinary everyday event. Buechner exhorts his readers to pay attention, because God often appears in ways that are easy to miss. And because of this, God’s presence always appears hiddenly in Buechner’s novels, sometimes disturbingly so, but I think this is a good thing. It might teach us to be more attentive and recognize when God appears in hidden and unexpected ways in our own lives.
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