dual personalities

Tag: Frederick Buechner

March 3, 2025

Postcards from the weekend–it is well with my soul edition

by chuckofish

Is anything more stressful than having tech problems? Yes, I can think of several things, but still you understand what I mean…My email account was locked for three days and it took three attempts and finally daughter #1 mediating for her elderly parents with Vijay in India to get it fixed…

But fixed it is and, praise Jesus, I am slowly regaining my composure.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
let this blest assurance control:
that Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
and has shed his own blood for my soul. 

It is well with my soul;
it is well, it is well with my soul.

We had a lovely, sunny weekend. After reaching 70 degrees on Friday (not a record) when everyone was out and about and a parking place in downtown Kirkwood was not to be found, the weekend was much colder. On Sunday we picked up the twins and brought them to church. (Lacrosse season is about to start and their Dad’s store was a madhouse over the weekend.) They enjoyed Sunday School, but their depravity self-checking during the service earned them a B- from me. C’est la vie, they are eight and the sermon was a long one on Hebrews 10:26-39. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

After depositing them back with their Dad at the store, we went to lunch at the house of our “fold” leader with two other couples. It was very nice–and the conversation was excellent. Then we headed home to meet daughter #1 and Mr. Smith, who stayed with us overnight so I could take him (again) to the kennel this morning. Daughter #1 had to get up early and head to Colorado for work.

So remember what Frederick Buechner said: “In everything,” Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”  

Amen, brother.

And here is a talk Anne gave last week wherein she asks (among other things) “Where Are We Going, and Why Are We in This Handbasket?”

Have a great Monday!

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January 1, 2025

My sinful soul is counted free

by chuckofish

It is a new year. Time to look forward. But it is also (and always) a good time to look back–especially to try and see where and how God has been working in your life. He is, you know. Every day, in 10,000 ways.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

-Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember

And remember this?

Wonderful! “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.” (Also Frederick Buechner)

Happy New Year! Live in hope and embrace what God gives you in this life in love.

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July 11, 2024

Keep your eyes peeled

by chuckofish

Ah, but friends, it is never too late, right? Right. You must keep learning and it’s okay to change your mind about a lot of things. Some of us are very slow learners after all.

I am starting a new teaching series on the Puritans, To God’s Glory: Lessons on Puritanism.

Because, as you know, I love the Puritans. So far, I am very impressed; the DVD presentations are excellent. And it is a great distraction from the election season hell we find ourselves in. The Puritans knew how to handle trials and they knew we need affliction to humble us and to bring us to God. Many good lessons to be had.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to the added distraction of a visit with…

…and…

…when thy come for a visit tomorrow.

And the rain has left the area, at least for awhile. I am grateful that the flooding (so far) hasn’t been worse.

Time like an ever-rolling stream…the summer is nearly half over! So don’t forget:

“There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.”

–Frederick Buechner, “The Longing for Home: Reflections on Mid-Life”

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March 29, 2024

He rose

by chuckofish

It is Good Friday and it is time to get serious.

Christmas has a large and colorful cast of characters including not only the three principals themselves, but the angel Gabriel, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the heavenly host, the three Wise Men, Herod, the star of Bethlehem, and even the animals kneeling in the straw. In one form or another we have seen them represented so often that we would recognize them anywhere. We know about the birth in all its detail as well as we know about the births of ourselves or our children, maybe more so. The manger is as familiar as home. We have made a major production of it, and as minor attractions we have added the carols, the tree, the presents, the cards. Santa Claus, Ebenezer Scrooge, and so on. With Easter it is entirely different.

The Gospels are far from clear as to just what happened. It began in the dark. The stone had been rolled aside. Matthew alone speaks of an earthquake. In the tomb there were two white-clad figures or possibly just one. Mary Magdalen seems to have gotten there before anybody else. There was a man she thought at first was the gardener. Perhaps Mary the mother of James was with her and another woman named Joanna. One account says Peter came too with one of the other disciples. Elsewhere the suggestion is that there were only the women and that the disciples, who were somewhere else, didn’t believe the women’s story when they heard it. There was the sound of people running, of voices. Matthew speaks of “fear and great joy.” Confusion was everywhere. There is no agreement even as to the role of Jesus himself. Did he appear at the tomb or only later? Where? To whom did he appear? What did he say? What did he do?

It is not a major production at all, and the minor attractions we have created around it — the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs — have so little to do with what it’s all about that they neither add much nor subtract much. It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. I f the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.

The symbol of Easter is the empty tomb. You can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide. Even the great choruses of Handel’s Messiah sound a little like a handful of crickets chirping under the moon.

He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death. What is left now is the emptiness. There are those who, like Magdalen, will never stop searching it till they find his face.

~Frederick Buechner, originally published in Whistling in the Dark 

Hallelujah! Sure, we’ll get dressed up and go to church and cook a big brunch and set the table with the good china. But let’s just take a moment, shall we?

And this is interesting–C.S. Lewis admired this play by Dorothy Sayers so much that he re-read it every year during Holy Week. (He re-read things too.) I have never read it, but I think I will.

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own…by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

–Dorothy Sayers

Happy Easter. Christ is risen indeed.

(The painting is The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection by the Swiss artist Eugène Burnand, 1898.)

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February 6, 2024

Still hanging in there

by chuckofish

Today daughter #2 and I are headed to C-U today with the girls.

DN left yesterday– He is very excited and happy to start work in person. The movers will also arrive today (allegedly) so there will be a lot to do. I am leaving my house in an absolute shambles and the OM in it, recovering from the dreaded virus which caught up with him Sunday night. He’s through the worst of it, eating rice cakes and drinking Gatorade.

“Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life…” (Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey)

All will be well.

Blessed be God,
Who has not turned away my prayer,
Nor His mercy from me!

–Psalm 66:20
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December 19, 2023

From our fears and sins release us; let us find our rest in thee*

by chuckofish

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through our neighborhood…city workmen are starting a new street project which involves numerous large earth-moving vehicles and trucks moving earth in our own side yard.

Last week a row of mature trees was removed. Also very noisy and disruptive. We knew this project was coming, but, you have to admit, the timing is really special. C’est la vie.

I am not going to let this disrupt my happy Christmas mood and you shouldn’t either. Don’t let whatever is going on in your life that is annoying and causing you to sleep badly take your focus from what it is we are celebrating–the incarnation of our Lord and Savior!

Here’s an old reminder from Frederick Buechner to hang in there and trust God:

I REMEMBER SITTING parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.   

–originally published in Telling Secrets

And this made me laugh. Now I want to go see Santa at the Bass Pro Shop. (Who knew that was a thing?)

*Charles Wesley

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July 11, 2023

Leave it to God

by chuckofish

Today we remember Frederick Buechner (1926-2022), Presbyterian minister, writer and theologian. He died last year and I miss him. Presbyterians do not have feast days, but if they did, today would be his, as it is his birthday.

He made a big splash in literary circles when his first novel, A Long Day’s Dying, was published in 1950. But then he entered seminary and the shine wore off. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and for the National Book Award for Fiction, but he never won any big awards.

He said:

I wanted to learn about Christ – about the Old Testament, which had been his Bible, and the New Testament, which was the Bible about him; about the history of the church, which had been founded on the faith that through him God had not only revealed his innermost nature and his purpose for the world, but had released into the world a fierce power to draw people into that nature and adapt them to that purpose… No intellectual pursuit had ever aroused in me such intense curiosity, and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. In the unfamiliar setting of a Presbyterian church, of all places, I had been moved to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them, I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment. (Now and Then)

To this day, I am still crying those same tears (and in a Presbyterian church!) that he described.

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November 10, 2022

Food for thought

by chuckofish

Have you entered the storehouses…which I reserve for times of trouble? (Job 38:22-23)

“Our trials are great opportunities, but all too often we simply see them as large obstacles. If only we would recognize every difficult situation as something God has chosen to prove His love for us, each obstacle would then become a place of shelter and rest, and a demonstration to others of His inexpressible power. If we could look for the signs of His glorious handiwork, then every cloud would indeed become a rainbow, and every difficult mountain path would be one of ascension, transformation, and glorification.

“If we would look at our past, most of us would realize that the times we endured the greatest stress and felt that every path was blocked were the very times our heavenly Father chose to do the kindest things for us and bestow His richest blessings.

“God’s most beautiful jewels are often delivered in rough packages by very difficult people, but within the package we will find the very treasures of the King’s palace and the Bridegroom’s love.”

–A. B. Simpson (1844-1919) quoted in Streams in the Desert by L.B. Cowman

“Trust God’s Word and His power more than you trust your own feelings and experiences. Remember, your Rock is Christ, and it is the sea that ebbs and flows with the tides, not Him.”

–Samuel Rutherford (1600-61)

We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better or worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times and the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.

–Frederick Buechner, “The News of the Day”

The painting is by William Bradford, 1859

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August 17, 2022

Listen to your life

by chuckofish

Well, now Frederick Buechner, author and Presbyterian minister, has died. He was born the same year as my mother, 1926. He lived a long and fruitful life. He meant a lot to me.

I’m sure in real life we would have disagreed about a lot of things, but we were kindred souls. Like me, I think he cried in church a lot. Things moved him. He loved Jesus. And Saint Paul. He was a fool for Christ.

He was a type of gentleman one rarely encounters anymore. I am glad and grateful I was able to shake his hand once and hear him preach in person. I will miss him, but he has gone home.

Into paradise may the angels lead thee, Freddy, and at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem.

P.S. The OM is home and doing well. He has to take it easy and stay home from work for a week. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,  for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” (James 1:2-3)

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February 17, 2022

Is it snowing where you are?

by chuckofish

“You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there–the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.”

–Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets
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