Yes, You Can! Touch Another's Life

Two weeks ago I opened the small book that had laid on the table all summer (except for when it was in my pack at the Boundary Waters). The first time I had read it, I didn't realize the author had also penned these words:

“The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done... The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”i

When I first read Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner (pronounced Beek-ner) I was at a crossroads. For months an awareness had been growing in me which I felt would be wrong to ignore. I knew that as a clergyperson I was expected to respond in a certain way yet in my bones I felt myself being let in another direction. I had made a habit in recent years of following such leadings but, mindful of how easily we can be swayed toward our own preference, I was cautious. I prayed… I journaled… I listened and watched… I prayed some more...Then, one momentous day in April, as the city readied itself for a snowstorm, I began reading. But not for long. I stopped short on page 3. 

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition – that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.”ii

It's important, the author explained, to tell the secret of who we are, even if only to ourselves, lest we begin to accept the version we show the world. Telling our secrets helps us to see where we've been and where we're headed. Our telling also encourages others to share their secrets with us. Such exchanges are “what being human is all about.”

Opening my journal, I began to write, copying those first two sentences and then composing my response. As I worked, I found peace and knew what was next for me. My life’s path was shaped, in part, by these words which confirmed what I already knew but wasn’t ready to believe on my own. I would live my truth – whether it worked out well, whether I faced repercussions, or not. 

We each have the potential to affect another’s life. It’s not just preachers and writers (though Buechner was both.) I began posting here again not because of the “Rev.” that precedes my name but because I have things to say that could lend others courage or temporarily lighten their load.

“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.”iii

That said, Buechner's art is part of what has kept me from pursuing a long-held dream. Although sometimes more florid than I prefer, he wrote as I’d like to write. I can’t compete. My writer-daughter would say I don’t need to – I just need to write my story. True, yet it’s hard to see past his ability to shape words into ideas. (Don’t even get me started on Victor Hugo!) 

Only after I began rereading Keeping Secrets on August 15th, did I realize Buechner's contribution to this incapacity. 

On that day, I read again that he was ten in 1936. “Hm, that’s the year Daddy was born.” And then “This was published in 1991. Thirty years ago. He’d be 96 today. He’s probably dead.” This thought left me sad. And surprised at the sadness. 

I too believe that “Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention” and found it an odd coincidence that – as I learned a few days later – Frederich Buechner died on August 15th. 

It seems strange that he’s gone when he had only recently come alive for me. I empathized when he wanted to fix his daughter’s illness. Sat with him in the cramped space of Little Ease, knowing that a place of torment can become home. Nodded when he said that a rustly license plate propped on the bookshelf was “as holy a relic as I have ever seen.” And I’m thankful, because my life is better for having known him, even just a little.

“One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.”iv

i   Found at frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2021/7/18/vocation on August 26, 2022, originally published in Wishful Thinking, 1973.
ii  Found at frederickbuechner.com/telling-secrets on August 26, 2022, originally published in Telling Secrets, 1991.
iii Found at frederickbuechner.com/listening-to-your-life on August 26, 2022, originally published in Now and Then, 1983.
iv Found at libquotes.com/frederick-buechner/quote/lbd4a2z on August 26, 2022, originally published in The Hungering Dark, 1981.