Hearing Holy and Elusive Words from God


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 out the album of your own life and search it for the people and places you have loved and learned from yourself, and for those moments in the past—many of them half forgotten—through which you glimpsed, however dimly and fleetingly, the sacredness of your own journey” (7).

In Now and Then, his second autobiographical volume, he quotes his professor at Union Theological Seminary, the great Paul Tillich:  “We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard . . . that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation, usually hidden, but sometimes manifest, and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called Christ” (14).
Whether he calls it a manifestation of a new creation or a sacred journey where the holy and elusive word is spoken to you--and they might not be quite the same thing--Buechner is talking of something that I have been reading  in other  Christians writers also—books by theologians like N. T. Wright and Lewis Smedes, for example, or essays of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard or the poetry of Richard Wilbur and Gerard Manley Hopkins—God flaming out “like shining from shook foil.”

This examination of one’s past life for moments when the hand of God became momentarily evident strikes me as a daunting undertaking, but one which might be mined for the gold of recognition that God was there with me far more often than I realized.   So I am setting out on this expedition, or to take Buechner’s metaphor, I am opening up the album of my life—from childhood to the present—to  see what I can see of the New Creation manifesting itself in my daily living.

I may even drop one into this blog from time to time.

 

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