The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife

by Frederick Buechner

but his passion was in his oddly ragged eloquence and in the way he could take words you had heard all your life and make you hear them and the holiness in them as though for the first time.

it’s not another great pal that I go to church looking for, but a prophet and priest and pastor.

took me and continues to take me every now and then to people in the thick of one kind of trouble or another who, because they know of my ordination, seek me out for whatever they think I may have in the way of comfort or healing, and I, who in the old days would have shrunk with fear from any such charged encounter, try to find something wise and hopeful to say to them, only little by little coming to understand that the most precious thing I have to give them is not whatever words I find to say but simply whatever, spoken or unspoken, I have in me of Christ, which is also the most precious thing they have to give me.

“To touch me and to feel my touch they come. To take at my hands whatever of Christ or comfort such hands have. Of their own, my hands have nothing more than any man’s and less now at this tottering, lame-wit age of mine when most of what I ever had is more than mostly spent. But it’s as if my hands are gloves, and in them other hands than mine, and those the ones that folk appear with roods of straw to seek. It’s holiness they hunger for, and if by some mad chance it’s mine to give, if I’ve a holy hand inside my hand to touch them with, I’ll touch them day and night. Sweet Christ what other use are idle hermits for?”

But what I am beginning to discover is that, in spite of all that, there is a sense in which they are also right. In my books, and sometimes even in real life, I have it in me at my best to be a saint to other people, and by saint I mean life-giver, someone who is able to bear to others something of the Holy Spirit, whom the creeds describe as the Lord and Giver of Life. Sometimes, by the grace of God, I have it in me to be Christ to other people. And so, of course, have we all—the life-giving, life-saving, and healing power to be saints, to be Christs, maybe at rare moments even to ourselves.

I would like to hope this passage might be true in my life for others. I'm reading this on my first day of giving up two of my classes while dealing with chemotherapy. 10-21-2013

believe that home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it.

YES!

I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that our stories in their fullness will always be hidden from each other and that all those whiskered old men and bonneted old women looking out at us from their photographs in the family album will always remain mysteries to us even if, like me, they happen to have written their memoirs. And yet I believe that all is not lost. Maybe we can never know each other’s stories in their fullness, but I believe we can know them in their depth for the reason that in their depth we all have the same story.

do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live. I sense a growing restlessness

Generally speaking, the threads that bind us to each other are no less real for being mostly invisible, no less important and precious. In the long run, each of our stories turns out to be the story of us all, and the home we long for has in all likelihood been home to others whose names we don’t even know and will be home again to still others when the ever-rolling stream of things has long since borne us away.

There was a room inside her which was neither dark nor little, and in that room she continued to be—how to put words to it without tarnishing it?—full of wit and eloquence to the end. It is a glimpse of at least some important aspect of wholeness that I carry with me

When we sentimentalize about things, we see not so much the things themselves as we see the flood of feeling, of sentiment, that the things occasion in us, with the result that sentimentality becomes a form of blocking out the world.

Instead it would be more accurate to say that she lost sight of her own predicament by focusing on us, and I believe that the capacity for doing that is another mark of her wholeness.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors.

The peace that Jesus offers, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the things that are going on at the moment he offers it, which are for the most part tragic and terrible things. It is a peace beyond the reach of the tragic and terrible. It is a profound and inward peace that sees with unflinching clarity the tragic and terrible things that are happening and yet is not shattered by them.

There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.

It is our business, as we journey, to keep our hearts open to the bright-winged presence of the Holy Ghost within us and the Kingdom of God among us until little by little compassionate love begins to change from a moral exercise, from a matter of gritting our teeth and doing our good deed for the day, into a joyous, spontaneous, self-forgetting response to the most real aspect of all reality, which is that the world is holy because God made it and so is every one of us as well. To live as though that reality does not exist is to be a stranger in a world of strangers. To live out of and toward that reality is little by little to become whole. Part 2 THE

Several winters ago my wife and I and our then twenty-year-old daughter, Sharmy, went to that great tourist extravaganza near Orlando, Florida, called Sea World. There is a lot of hoopla to it—crowds of people, loud music, Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and so on, but the main attraction makes it all worthwhile.

This is the beginning of a wonderful meditation on Jesus' meeting with the disciples on the sea, providing breakfast and asking Peter, "do you love me?" Deals with joy and beauty at the heart off life.

To believe that Christ is risen and alive in the world is to believe that there is no place or person or thing in the world through which we ourselves may not be made more alive by his life, and whenever we are made more alive, whenever we are made more brave and strong and beautiful, we may be sure that Christ is present with us even though more often than not our eyes, like the two disciples’ eyes, are kept from recognizing him.

Good meditation on Job, suffering, our unanswered questions, and the absence/presence of God.

There they lie, and if not in the Abbey, the chances are, then most surely somewhere else, we too will someday lie because just as they all came to face at last that eloquent, just, and mightie foe, so we also will come to face him, and in the meantime—although we have much to rejoice in and much to hold fast to and many days, we hope, still left ahead of us to live—we must somehow come to terms with the darkness not just of death but also of life. And that is of course the darkness that our two texts speak to and confront us with.

Is there anything in our faith to strengthen us against such an adversary as that—not just against death but against the whole deadly side of things like suffering and sorrow and loss and growing old that foreshadow death’s coming? Everybody knows Job’s story. He was “a blameless and upright man who feared

If God is all he’s cracked up to be, then for God’s sake, for Christ’s sweet sake, where is he?

Part of an author’s genius, which one might say is also part of God’s genius, is never to manipulate his people like puppets to be what he wants them to be but to leave them continually free to become whatever they have it in them to become in the world he has created for them so that they may rise out of his creating heart and spirit with their own rich measure of his truth the way you and I rise out of God’s heart and become forever part of it.

He was on his way down into the world, and I was on my way up out of it into God only knows what unimaginable world awaits every one of us if indeed any world beyond this one awaits us at all. On

of theological explanation of the problem of suffering, which would have left him wiser than he was before but suffering still. I believe instead that what Job was really after was

answer but God’s presence.

And that was what Job needed above all else—not an explanation of suffering but the revelation that even in the midst of suffering there is a God who is with us and for us and will never let us go.

It was a few miles outside the city of Damascus that Paul made the same overwhelming discovery. He was on his way to bring back to Jerusalem for punishment members of the heretical sect who called themselves Christians when Christ himself appeared to him and called him by name and gave him a new faith to live for and die for, a faith that led him to write years later, “I am sure that neither death, nor life…nor things present, nor things to come…nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

They were carried away because they believed, as you and I believe, or at least some of the time believe, or wish we could believe, that the one who came clip-clopping his way toward the city was indeed the one they hailed him as being.

We are not saints. Much of the time our faith is weak and the God we have faith in seems far away if not absent altogether. But we go to church nonetheless in hope—hope that God is truly God even so, hope that God will mend us where we are broken, and forgive us where we have a hard time forgiving ourselves, and breathe into us new life when the lives we are living seem empty and increasingly diminished by age and in the last analysis doomed.

This is a wonderful reflection on faith. I wish I had written it for it so expresses the nature of my faith journey. 8/7/2014 dwd (read while on the front porch at Jane's Mom'S place).

I have faith that there is an all-loving, all-powerful God in spite of the fact that I have no sure way of knowing that there is. Not knowing for sure means that maybe I am wrong. That is where doubt comes in. Many wise and good people have believed that there is no such God. Maybe they were right. There is much evidence to support them, most notably perhaps the perpetual presence of suffering in the world.

There are times when all our explanations ring false even as we make them. There are times when it is hard to see how any honest, intelligent person can look at the world without concluding, like Macbeth, that the whole show is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Many of us have faith in God and yet have doubts too, and in the long run perhaps it is just as well that we have them.

Existential doubt is something you reach not by a process of reasoning but by looking into the abyss itself, and there are few who can do that without being devastated.

At the heart of all their hoping is the hope that God, whom all the shouting is about, really exists.

And at the heart of the heart is Christ—the hope that he really is what for years they have been saying he is.

because not to speak from the heart of where their faith comes from is to risk never really touching the hearts of those of us who so hungrily listen.