The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner
"The Sacred Journey" by Frederick Buechner is a reflective narrative that chronicles the author’s first twenty-seven years of life, exploring the profound experiences that shaped his spiritual development. The book is structured into three parts: "Once Below a Time," detailing his early childhood until the tragic death of his father; "Once Upon a Time," covering his teenage years; and "Beyond Time," which focuses on his young adulthood leading up to his theological studies. Throughout the narrative, Buechner shares transformative events and significant relationships, particularly highlighting the impacts of loss and the mysterious ways in which he felt God's presence, often unrecognized at the time.
Buechner's writing transcends specific religious doctrines, inviting readers from diverse backgrounds to reflect on their own sacred journeys and the ways divine guidance may manifest in their lives. He employs accessible language, aiming to connect with those who may not share a Christian perspective, while maintaining a confessional tone that emphasizes human frailty and the grace found within life's complexities. The book is often compared to classic Christian confessions, such as those by Saint Augustine and C.S. Lewis, yet it is distinguished by its focus on mystery rather than rational arguments for faith. Ultimately, "The Sacred Journey" serves as both a personal memoir and a universal invitation to discern the sacred in everyday experiences.
The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner
First published: 1982
Type of work: Autobiography
Time of work: 1926-1954
Locale: The United States and Bermuda
Principal Personages:
Frederick Buechner , a writer, teacher, and Presbyterian ministerGrandma Buechner , his paternal grandmotherNaya , his maternal grandmother
Form and Content
The Sacred Journey is a narrative of Frederick Buechner’s first twenty-seven years of life, interspersed with the insights he gained from remembering and telling the story.
The book begins with an introduction and then is divided into three parts: “Once Below a Time,” which describes his life until he was ten, up to the day his father killed himself; “Once upon a Time,” the account of his years from ten to seventeen, when he was graduated from preparatory school; and “Beyond Time,” which tells of the next ten years until he started theological seminary. The whole book is 112 pages long, with approximately thirty-five pages given to each main part.
The contents of the book are stories of those events that had the greatest impact on the spiritual development of the author. The story is striking because the end result was so unlikely. Buechner was born into a family that had nothing to do with Christianity, and he enjoyed very little church influence in his formative years. In addition, he had to endure the devastating losses of his father and uncle to suicide, raising the fear that he too would be touched by that plague. Those events could easily have led him to believe that life is meaningless at best, or evil at worst, but instead he came to believe that life is the gift of a good Creator. As an adult, he became a Presbyterian minister and a writer of lucid, accessible theological books.
Focusing as he does on his spiritual life, his sacred journey, Buechner leaves out much that he could have included. In the sequel to The Sacred Journey, titled Now and Then (1983), he notes that in the earlier book he had left out everything that had to do with sex, money, travel, health and films, all of which were of great importance to him. In addition, he pays almost no attention to the public events of the world around him. He describes formative events (such as his father’s death and the family’s move to Bermuda), the most important people (especially his grandmothers), and the characters in books who profoundly influenced his imagination. The most important stories for him were those in which he was touched by the mystery from beyond that he did not know how to name during most of the period this book covers.
The central theme of the book is that God continually guides and speaks to human beings, but does so through their daily experiences, both good and bad. Buechner shows how he was drawn to Christ by events that he did not recognize at the time to be manifestations of the presence and guidance of God. Thus, his purpose in writing is not only to illuminate his sacred journey but to encourage others to see their own lives as such a journey. He invites readers to remember their own past and try to discern the ways in which God has been speaking to them through it.
The reader Buechner addresses is the literate adult interested in spiritual matters. He does not assume that his readers are Christians, nor that they know much about the Christian viewpoint. Instead, he writes in language that is free from theological jargon, focusing on human experience in general, so that all sensitive readers can identify with the story and find parallels in their own lives.
The tone of the book is confessional, not self-laudatory. Buechner is one of the foremost American religious writers, so the book could have been a celebration of success, but instead it is a celebration of the gift of God’s coming. Constantly the author stresses his own weaknesses and failures while pointing to the grace of God at work in hidden ways that only became apparent in hindsight.
Critical Context
The Sacred Journey can most appropriately be seen as a chapter in the long story of Christian confessions, those in which the writer shows how God graciously pursued him until he finally heard His calling. The most famous is perhaps Saint Augustine’s Confessiones (397-400; Confessions), but the one that is most comparable to The Sacred Journey in the twentieth century is perhaps C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955). Lewis, too, tells a story of being touched by the mysteries when he was young and then gradually, over many years, being drawn to realize that the One who was calling him was Christ. There are two central parallels between Buechner’s and Lewis’ life stories. Both were highly imaginative young readers who loved fantasy and found themselves living in the wondrous worlds that the fantasy writers created. Buechner’s world was Oz, Lewis’ was the world of the Greek and (especially) the Norse myths. Furthermore, both of them found these fantasy worlds arousing in them a longing for something that they could not define. Lewis calls this longing “joy”; the Germans call it Sehnsucht. For both men, this longing for something that glimmered in their experience drove them to seek until they finally found the Mystery that lies at the heart of reality.
The major difference between Buechner and Lewis is that the latter was a rationalist in addition to being a lover of imaginative fantasy. Lewis believed that a certain amount of God’s truth could be distilled and presented in rational form that believers could rationally accept. Buechner, on the other hand, stresses the mystery of God, never seeking to prove the reality of the divine in the way that Lewis did in his apologetic works.
Finally, The Sacred Journey must be seen in the context of the author’s two other works of autobiography. The earliest is The Alphabet of Grace (1970), in which he describes God’s presence and speaking in a single day of his life. The last of the three is Now and Then (1983), in which he takes up the story from his entrance into the seminary until the time of his writing of the book.
Bibliography
Buechner, Frederick. Interview with J. F. Baker, in Publishers Weekly. CCXXI (February 12, 1982), pp. 32-34.
Buechner, Frederick. Interview with Shirley Nelson and Rudy Nelson, in Christianity and Literature. XXXII (Fall, 1982), pp. 9-14.
Buechner, Frederick. “Listening to My Life.” Interview with Kenneth L. Gibble, in The Christian Century. C (November 16, 1983), pp. 1042-1045.
Christian Century. XCIX, October 13, 1982, p. 1025.
Library Journal. CVII, March 15, 1982, p. 630.
Lischer, Richard. Review in The Christian Century. XCIX (October 13, 1982), p. 1025.
McCoy, Marjorie Casebier, and Charles S. McCoy. Frederick Buechner: Novelist/Theologian of the Lost and Found, 1988.
Price, Reynolds. “The Road to Devotion,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (April 11, 1982), pp. 12, 28-29.
Woelfel, James. “Frederick Buechner: The Novelist as Theologian,” in Theology Today. XV (October, 1983), pp. 273-291.