LISTEN TO YOUR LIFE

Image by Vanessa Pike-Russell

"What's important is to carry in your heart some sense of what the word God means." So states a mediocre attendee of church and a less than religious observer of prayer. Frederick Buechner, (pronounced Beekner) as an ordained Presbyterian minister has expressed his ministry more through writings and guest sermons. Never having held a pastorate, he seems to communicate best through the expressed word. Having written 32 novels and memoirs, it is through the written page that Buechner builds faith community. 

The opening statement above regarding what is important to carry in your heart is a response to what is not important in religion, according to Buechner, "formal adherence to traditional beliefs is not what matters most."

Interviewed in 2006 by Religion and Ethics Weekly, and the next to last interview from our Life of Meaning text, some of Buechner's other responses are expressed below.

"I've had glimpses of things that made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate"

"Listen to your life. Pay attention. Observe. That wonderful phrase 'religious observance' means observe religiously. Observe deeply."

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is an element of faith." (from Paul Tillich)

"What's lost is nothing to what's found."

"The religion that is for me the closer to being 'true' is one (that speaks)...most meaningfully about what I take to be the heart of reality. And that is ultimately, love."

On sporadic church attendance: "Very often when I go I'm bored out of my wits...They're not moving my heart. They're not touching me. And I think, what am I doing here?"

"I think writing is a kind of praying, in both what I'm really doing is listening...for what meaning may be there."

"What makes you in the deepest sense happy? That's what you should be doing. And the vocation for you is the one in which your deep gladness, and the world's deep need meet."

Walter Morton for Terra Incognita