CHAPTER 1

The Sacred Journey: Seeking the Abundant Life

Simplicity of living, if deliberately chosen, implies a compassionate approachto life. It means that we are choosing to live our daily lives with some degreeof conscious appreciation of the condition of the rest of the world.

—Duane Elgin

The call to simplicity and freedom for Christians is the call to move fromachievement oriented spirituality to a life centered on a shared vision ofrelatedness to people and things, a relatedness of gentleness, of compassion, ofbelonging to one another.

—Richard Bower

Introduction to The Sacred Journey

by Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner is the highly celebrated author of many works of fiction andnonfiction, including his autobiographical trilogy The Sacred Journey, Now andThen, and Telling Secrets. His novel Godric was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize(1981) and he has been honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts andLetters. Buechner was born on July 11, 1926. He attended Princeton Universityand Union Theological Seminary in New York, after which he was ordained in theUnited Presbyterian Church. Through his own story, including his father'ssuicide and, to hear him tell it, his unlikely conversion, he invites us toreflect on our own stories. Buechner and his wife Judith live in rural Vermont.They have three grown children.

Buechner's writing is profoundly honest and revealing. It is through listeningfor God's voice in his own life that Buechner gently invites you to listen to,and discover the sacredness of, your own story.

* * *

About ten years ago I gave a series of lectures at Harvard in which I made theobservation that all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography,and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as hecan the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, itsmysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truthsabout human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there.More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, Idetermined to try to describe my own life as evocatively and candidly as I couldin the hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsedin it would shine through my description more or less on their own. It seemed tome then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world,if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone welove dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart ormakes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we areappalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in ourlives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all—just oneday following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep anddream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed.And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the mosthumdrum of our days, God speaks. But what do I mean by saying that God speaks?

I wrote these words at home on a hot, hazy summer day. On the wall behind me, anold banjo clock was tick-tocking the time away. Outside I could hear the twitterof swallows as they swooped in and out of the eaves of the barn. Every once in awhile, in the distance, a rooster crowed, though it was well past sunup. Severalrooms away, in another part of the house, two men were doing some carpentry. Icould not make out what they were saying, but I was aware of the low rumble oftheir voices, the muffled sounds of their hammers, and the uneven lengths ofsilence in between. It was getting on toward noon, and from time to time mystomach growled as it went about its own obscure business which I neitherunderstand nor want to. They were all of them random sounds without any apparentpurpose or meaning, and yet as I paused to listen to them, I found myselfhearing them with something more than just my ears to the point where theybecame in some way enormously meaningful. The swallows, the rooster, theworkmen, my stomach, all with their elusive rhythms, their harmonies anddisharmonies and counterpoint, became, as I listened, the sound of my own lifespeaking to me. Never had I heard just such a coming together of sounds before,and it is unlikely that I will ever hear them in just the same combinationagain. Their music was unique and unrepeatable and beyond describing in itsfreshness. I have no clear idea what the sounds meant or what my life wastelling me. What does the song of a swallow mean? What is the muffled sound of ahammer trying to tell? And yet as I listened to those sounds, and listened withsomething more than just my hearing, I was moved by their inexpressibleeloquence and suggestiveness, by the sense I had that they were a music risingup out of the mystery of not just my life, but of life itself. In much the sameway, that is what I mean by saying that God speaks into or out of the thick ofour days.

He speaks not just through the sounds we hear, of course, but through events inall their complexity and variety, through the harmonies and disharmonies andcounterpoint of all that happens. As to the meaning of what he says, there aretimes that we are apt to think we know. Adolph Hitler dies a suicide in hisbunker with the Third Reich going up in flames all around him, and what God issaying about the wages of sin seems clear enough. Or Albert Schweitzer renouncesfame as a theologian and musician for a medical mission in Africa, where he endsup even more famous still as one of the great near saints of Protestantism; andagain we are tempted to see God's meaning as clarity itself. But what is Godsaying through a good man's suicide? What about the danger of the proclaimedsaint's becoming a kind of religious prima donna as proud of his own...