Secrets in the Dark by Frederick Buechner

First published: San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Sermons

Core issue(s): Christmas; church; faith; hope; memory

Overview

A Life in Sermons, the subtitle of Frederick Buechner’s collection Secrets in the Dark, is not strictly accurate. To begin with, not all the pieces collected in it are sermons. Some of the pieces were originally given as talks, such as “Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,” delivered at St. Paul’s School; “The Newness of Things,” given at the installation of Buechner’s friend Douglas Hale as headmaster at Mercersburg Academy; and “Faith and Fiction,” given at the New York Public Library. Some are essays: “The Good Book as a Good Book,” which appeared in A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible (1993), edited by Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman, is on the relationship of fiction and religion; and “Paul Sends His Love,” which first appeared in Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1991), edited by Alfred Corn, is on Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. However, the rest of the collection consists of sermons delivered over the course of Buechner’s life, ranging from those he delivered at Philips Exeter Academy beginning in 1959 (“The Magnificent Defeat”) to one given at Princeton University’s anniversary celebration, “A 250th Birthday Prayer.” Many of them have appeared in earlier Buechner collections—The Magnificent Defeat (1966), The Hungering Dark (1969), A Room Called Remember (1984), The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction (1991), The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections (1996)—and their republication here indicates that Buechner considers them to be his best work in this genre. Also included are a few sermons that have not been published before.

Also, while many of these sermons contain autobiographical elements, they do not form a quasi-autobiography; they are more the sermons of a lifetime than a life in sermons. The portrait that they paint of Buechner’s life, aside from the richness given to observations that result from his life as a parent and his career as a writer, is a remarkably consistent one. Like many reflective minds, Buechner’s is always open to the possibility of revelation and epiphany, but the pilgrimage charted throughout these sermons is grounded in a few basic concepts that Buechner returns to again and again. The first sermons in this collection were delivered to a group of students who were resolutely resistant to any religious message, and this sense of preaching to the unwilling underlies many of Buechner’s messages. His ministerial vocation is indeed a calling: he calls his listeners to come with him on a search for God and Jesus in their lives, on a journey to what he sees as their true home.

One must remember, however, that most of these pieces are sermons, not essays, and were written to be delivered and heard, not read. As such, they have a particular structure: title; introductory text(s), the vast majority of which are from the Bible; the sermon itself; and a concluding prayer in italics (although the italics soon disappear, and the conclusion transforms itself into the substance of a prayer). Because they are sermons, and Buechner is a novelist, the sermons’ organizational pattern is often more associational than logical; in a way, the movement of thought toward the central kernel of the message within reproduces the pattern of the journey the soul takes toward faith. For example, “A Room Called Remember,” one of the early sermons, begins with quotations from the Old Testament (from Chronicles about David’s worship of God before the ark) and the New (Jesus’ words on the cross to the good thief). Buechner begins by talking about dreams in general and how they sometimes reveal a profound truth about the dreamer, then recalls one such dream in which he tries to return to a hotel room where he was extraordinarily happy: The name of the room is Remember. Buechner then goes on to discuss different types of remembrance; the type of remembrance he thinks the room stands for is the type in which we remember our entire lives, and discover in that remembrance how God has touched our lives. A bald summary like this cannot transmit the flavor of the entire sermon: how the theme is introduced, modulated, and recapitulated; how the texts are interwoven into the fabric of the message, amplifying it and transforming it; and how the filaments of its development tie it together. The journey to the message is the message. In remembrance is belief.

Also adding to the sermons’ effectiveness is Buechner’s use of fictional strategies to bring his examples vividly before his listeners. He often describes a biblical scene as if it were a passage in a novel. In “The Magnificent Defeat,” he re-creates Jacob’s pretending to be his brother Esau; in “Birth,” he writes three dramatic monologues about the birth of Jesus (delivered by the Innkeeper, a Wise Man, and a Shepherd); in “A Sprig of Hope,” he describes Noah’s summoning by God and the release of the dove to find land; in “Air for Two Voices,” he shows what the Annunciation might have looked like; and in “The Truth of Stories,” he presents the parable of the prodigal son as a modern first-person narrative. Buechner meticulously analyzes the miracle of resurrection in “Jairus’s Daughter,” not only because of its religious meaning, but also because Mark’s narrative of it is so detailed, almost an eyewitness account, that it approaches the density of a scene in a novel. Buechner also analyzes his own fiction not only to discuss his own religious subjects (such as his portrayal of saints and sanctity) but also to show that an author’s receptivity to his characters is like the receptivity that people should have in their lives to God. Buechner points out that in a way that transcends symbolism and metaphor, the Gospels and indeed the whole Bible are based on an identification of the Word and God— in the Hebrew word dabhar, which means “word” and “deed” at the same time, and in the beginning of John’s Gospel: “The Word was God.” To read the story of Jesus is not the entire message; that Jesus is the story is equally important.

Christian Themes

Buechner’s concerns as a Presbyterian minister are not confined to one denomination; indeed, several times he bemoans the fact that like the early Church, Christianity has splintered into factions. The central thread that runs through these sermons and talks is Buechner’s conception of faith. Faith is not dogmatic, static, and blinkered: It is both dynamic—“a movement towards” as he calls it—and subject to doubts and hesitation. It is not something that remains unwavering, full of certitude; it is a constant struggle to realize that even though we may seem to be in a world bereft of God’s voice and presence, he is actually present and communicating with us, if we can only learn to be open and remember. Faith requires us to “pay attention,” to be receptive to the workings of God in the world, according to Buechner. Two epiphanic moments for Buechner (although he does not call them that) occur when a minister, in giving Buechner communion, calls him by his first name, and when a woman he passes by on the street tells him, “Jesus loves you.” These moments make Buechner understand that God speaks to everyone personally and that he calls us by our names.

An equally strong theme in Secrets in the Dark is the realization that the world is not our home; we are all longing for our true home with God. In “The Great Dance,” Buechner finds himself in tears at a performance of killer whales at Sea World. After learning he was not alone in his reaction, he comes to the conclusion that he was overjoyed because the show was a foreshadowing of the Peaceable Kingdom, the home we should have had and will come into one day. All human homes, no matter how dear, are only reminders of the hunger we have for our final home. With his literary bent, Buechner encapsulates salvation history as a version of the hoary plot summary “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.” God creates the world, the world loses God, God saves the world. Buechner says that salvation story is our story too.

Sources for Further Study

Buechner, Frederick. “Ordained to Write: An Interview with Frederick Buechner.” Interview by Richard Kauffman. Christian Century 119 (September 11-24, 2002): 26-33. A valuable retrospective interview in which Buechner discusses his ministry as a novelist and minister and his use of autobiography in his writing.

McCoy, Marjorie, with Charles S. McCoy. Frederick Buechner: Novelist and Theologian of the Lost and Found. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. A persuasive attempt to connect Buechner’s vocations as novelist and religious thinker by analyzing his themes and concerns: In his works, theology is transfigured into storytelling.

Wriglesworth, Chad. “George A. Buttrick and Frederick Buechner: Messengers of Reconciling Laughter.” Christianity and Literature 53 (Autumn, 2002): 59-75. Convincingly shows how Buttrick’s religious thinking in his sermons affected Buechner not only in his conversion but also in his art.