Gardener

In Frederick Buechner’s first of three short autobiographies, The Sacred Journey, he writes, “Deep within history . . . is sacred history, is God’s purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, is the history, in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own.   A child is born.   A friend is lost or found.   Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding.   We are awakened by a dream.   Out of the shadowy street comes a cry for help.   We must learn to listen to . . . our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to each of us out of the depths.” (4-5).   Identifying those moments where God was and is at work in his life, recalling the holy and elusive words he has been able to hear in his history, is the focus of this little book.   And in the book he advises readers to examine their lives to discover God working in their own sacred journey.   “Take...

I am serving on a committee at my church whose mandate it is to create a worship statement.  And my particular assignement is to construct a statement about the purposes of worship.  So today I remembered this word from my book of words, Angling in the English Stream: Flabbergast is a word whose origin no one speaks about with certainty, though one source suggests that it might be a combination of flabby and aghast.   That works for me since it brings to mind a picture of a person with flabby mouth wide open looking totally aghast at what has just happened.   Flabbergasted.   As I researched this word, I discovered a related word: Flabbergastation, “the state of being flabbergasted.”   It’s a wonderful word, but it ought to refer to a place where one can go, a sort of service station, that pumps you full of high octane amazement.   Perhaps that’s one thing a church service should do—pump us full of amazement, the kind St. Paul ...

A few years ago my college library replaced its old style bookshelves with new electronic shelves that run on tracks—three feet to the right, three to the left—and snuggle up to the shelves on either side so that when they all are parked properly, there is a solid wall of shelves for about fifteen feet and a single three foot aisle down which a reader might walk in search of a book.   It is a marvel of efficiency enabling the library to nearly double the number of books it previously housed in the same space.   With a push of a button, I can move as many shelves as I wish, enabling me to get to any shelf I desire.   Of course sometimes I have to move four or five shelves to get to the aisle where the book I am after resides.   But then I push the button and off the shelves go on their three foot journey.   What power! With my index finger I move a thousand books as if they were weightless. One of the small pleasures of my life from the time I was seven or ...