dual personalities

Tag: Frederick Buechner

March 19, 2015

Preaching to ourselves

by chuckofish

fleurs

Then at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts–whether we believe in God or not–that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

–Frederick Buechner (A Room Called Remember)

2 Comments
October 13, 2014

“I can’t look at everything hard enough.”*

by chuckofish

Field of Lilies, Louis Comfort Tiffany

“Field of Lilies”, Louis Comfort Tiffany

Last week I watched The Ghost and Mrs. Muir  (1947) and cried through much of it. Then this weekend I watched Our Town (1940) and wept through the entire third act.  I must say that much of this was due to the great musical scores of both films, by Bernard Hermann and Aaron Copland, respectively, but still. They even changed the end of Our Town! (Spoiler alert) Emily doesn’t die! They softened up the hard ending of the play, but it was still effective.

Then I finished Jan Karon’s Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good and got a little weepy. It is not a sad book at all, but it reminds us all to rejoice and be glad and you know that that can make me tear up.

Then we sang hymn #624 in church–“Jerusalem the Golden”–and I was done (or undone as the case may be).

Well, you know what Frederick Buechner says about tears:

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay close attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

(Whistling in the Dark)

So keep your eyes and your heart open as you go forth into the world this week. Thanks be to God.

*Emily in “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder

2 Comments
September 2, 2014

Vocation

by chuckofish

smushed_wishful_thinking

In honor of Labor Day, some wisdom from Frederick Buechner:

IT COMES FROM the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

—Wishful Thinking

Discuss among yourselves.

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August 1, 2014

“To amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself…seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously.” *

by chuckofish

Winslow Homer's "The Nooning"

Winslow Homer’s “The Nooning”

It is August. The year is more than half over!  The goals I have set for my summer are looming.

All that said, I still try to take each day as it comes and enjoy the moment. I suggest you do the same.

Here are a few things to think about this weekend:

“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.”

(Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons)

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

(Julian of Norwich)

“I have found that I even have to pray for the willingness to give up the stuff I hate most about myself. I have to ask for help, and sometimes beg. That’s the human condition. I just love my own guck so much. Help. Then I try to be a good person, a better person than I was yesterday, or an hour ago. In general, the Ten Command­ments are not a bad place to start, nor is the Golden Rule. We try not to lie so much or kill anyone that day. We do the footwork, which comes down mostly to paying attention and try­ing not to be such a jerk. We try not to feel and act so entitled. We let others go first.

How can something so simple be so pro­found, letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks, and even if no one cares or notices? Because for the most part, people won’t care—they’re late, they haven’t heard back from their new boyfriend, or they’re fixated on the stock market. And they won’t notice that you let them go ahead of you.

They take it as their due.

But you’ll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. There really is only today, al­though luckily that is also the eternal now. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid’s baseball game will notice your casual generos­ity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged—in other words, slightly changed for the better— and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.”

(Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow)

Clay Boone: I think we’ll go to St. Louis.

Cat: St. Louis?

Clay Boone: Yeah, St. Louis! City on the Missouri, railhead of the Santa Fe, jump off for the Oregon Trail – producers of beef, beer, shoes and, ah, good times.

(Cat Ballou, 1965)

Cat_Ballou_Poster

Cat Ballou will be shown on TCM tonight as part of their all-Jane Fonda-all day program. I remember going to see it at the movies back in 1965 and I thought it was pretty great. Of course, I was nine. It is not a great movie, but I am kind of in the mood for such silliness. Lee Marvin, of course, won an Oscar for his portrayal of Kid Shelleen/Tim Strawn.  I’m sure Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Rod Steiger, and Oskar Werner–who were also nominated that year–weren’t laughing. If you look at the nominees/winners, you’ll see it was a really weak year.

Anyway, it’s been a busy week and I am ready for my weekend! Have a good one.

*Aristotle

 

9 Comments
May 15, 2014

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” *

by chuckofish

image-memory

According to Wikipedia, “memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Encoding allows information that is from the outside world to reach our senses in the forms of chemical and physical stimuli. In this first stage we must change the information so that we may put the memory into the encoding process. Storage is the second memory stage or process. This entails that we maintain information over periods of time. Finally the third process is the retrieval of information that we have stored. We must locate it and return it to our consciousness. Some retrieval attempts may be effortless due to the type of information.”

I have been thinking about memory a lot lately. Probably because that pesky “retrieval” process is becoming such a pain.

Perhaps recently experiencing a reunion has made me more than usually aware of this. People remember different things and they remember those things differently.

Class Day rehearsal--I am so "in character" as my pater.

Class Day rehearsal–I am so “in character” as my pater. As I remember it,  I was awesome.

Also, looking back over my years as a mother, I realize that so much of my children’s “wonder years” are a blur. A real blur. If it weren’t for snapshots, would I remember anything?

marysue

I think I need to make more of an effort here. Take some notes. I need to be more intentional about thinking.

Here’s Frederick Buechner on the subject:

“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.” (A Room Called Remember)

I think our culture is becoming less and less intentional about thinking. Everything is presented in a shorter (and shorter) format. Our brains bounce back and forth from subject to subject. Focusing is hard. What will the result of all this be I wonder?

Discuss among yourselves.

*Nathaniel Hawthorne

6 Comments
April 2, 2014

Darlin’, pardon me

by chuckofish

…but do I look familiar?

chris 1

I recently found this photo of my big bro in his glory days. I am including it in today’s post for no particular reason except to say tempus fugit.

Here’s some food for thought from ol’ Fred B.

It is a moment of light surrounded on all sides by darkness and oblivion. In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another just like it and there will never be another just like it again. It is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

“This is the day which the Lord has made,” says the 118th Psalm. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before yo know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you’re wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you’ve been waiting for always that you’re missing.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from them. Today is the only day there is.

–Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

9 Comments
March 5, 2014

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.*

by chuckofish

Tulips from the grocery store brighten my day.

“All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance – not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are “Be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.”

-Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

Lent begins today on Ash Wednesday. There is a traditional Ash Wednesday service going on somewhere near you. At our church, we have two services today, but neither time works for me. So I think I’ll go to a Noon service near work. If I do, then I will wipe my forehead off. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s pretentious Ash Wednesday worshippers.

Bonus points for the Veep. No brownie points for the Veep.

When my children were younger and lived at home, I tried to make them aware of Lent. We watched our Lenten movies and discussed them. These efforts were a hit.

Once I put a lot of bible verses in a bowl on the dining room table. Each night one of the kids would pick one and read it. We would attempt to discuss it during dinner. My family was less comfortable with these efforts on my part. They seemed hokey I guess. I’m glad I tried. Perhaps something sunk in.

Once again I will endeavor to keep a “holy Lent”–not by denying myself things like chocolate or wine but by being more intentional about keeping the Great Commandment. You know, the one about loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself.

Good luck to me, right?

*Psalm 51, verse ll

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February 4, 2014

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” *

by chuckofish

prayer-stained-glass-religion

“I think of a person I haven’t seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife’s and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.

I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: “You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.”

–Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing to make a special report in a weekly meeting I attend at work. Doing this always makes me very nervous. I tell myself these people are not scary; they are my peers. It is no big deal. Still, I get nervous. I have trained myself not to ruin the day worrying about things that will take place in the future. Still, I worry.

Then, on the night before this meeting, I turned the page-a-day calendar I have to the next day. The Bible verse was: “For God did not give you a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and of love and of self-control.” My favorite Bible verse from First Timothy! And it couldn’t have been more appropriate. I wasn’t nervous anymore.

I do not believe in coincidence. I believe in the whispering voice saying, “You’re doing fine.”

Have you ever had such an experience? Pay attention and you will see that it happens with some frequency.

“This is a dynamic and mysterious universe and human life is, no doubt, conditioned by imponderables of which we are only dimly aware. People sometimes say, “the strangest coincidence happened.” Coincidences may seem strange, but they are never a result of caprice. They are orderly laws in the spiritual life of man. They affect and influence our lives profoundly. These so-called imponderables are so important that you should become spiritually sensitized to them. Indeed, the more spiritually minded you become the more acute your contact will be with these behind-the-scenes forces. By being alive to them through insight, instruction, and illumination, you can make your way past errors and mistakes on which, were you less spiritually sensitive, you might often stumble.”
― Norman Vincent Peale, Stay Alive All Your Life

* Albert Einstein and also Albert Schweitzer who said, “Coincidence is the pseudonym dear God chooses when he wants to remain incognito.”

6 Comments
November 4, 2013

Who are these like stars appearing*

by chuckofish

Sunday was All Saints’ Sunday when we Episcopalians remember “all the saints” –and by saints I mean that “glorious band” of Christians who have gone before us, leading by example. Protestants generally regard all true Christian believers as saints.

William Farel, John Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, and John Knox in Reformation Park, Geneva

William Farel, John Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, and John Knox in Reformation Park, Geneva

We are reminded on All Saints” Sunday to think of those saints who have influenced our lives. We all have them, starting usually, if we are lucky, with our mothers. I believe in God–Father, Son and Holy Ghost–chiefly because she told me about Him. Furthermore, I followed her example and her advice to remember that “this is the day which the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Of course, there have been teachers, ministers, friends who throughout my life have supported and guided me. Some I’ve written about here, but their names wouldn’t mean anything to you, so I won’t make a list. (But a list is a good idea.)

Frederick Beuchner, however, is a saint you have probably heard of. I am happy to say that I have heard him preach and even shaken his hand. I brought my three children to hear him and they too have shaken his hand.

FrederickBuechner_r_03

I have also heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu preach and shaken his hand.

Desmond-Tutu-001

I went to a Billy Graham “revival” and that, too, was an awesome experience. There were thousands of people present, so I did not get to shake his hand.

BGEAinK.C.04-56

All three men are saints in my book and their words–both spoken and written–have helped me along on my journey.

I feel that I need to include a woman here in my personal army of saints–how about Jan Karon? She has done what is nearly impossible: written popular fiction with a palatable Christian message that is not “Christian literature” per se. She has sold millions–you go, girl!

karon_2001

It has never been an easy thing to be a saint out in the world. One might argue, today especially. They are not feeding us literally to the lions, but metaphorically, it happens every day.

What God says…is ‘The life you save is the life you lose.’ in other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given away for love’s sake is a life worth living. To bring his point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of human wisdom, he was a Perfect Fool. And if you think you can follow him without making something like the same kind of a fool yourself, you are laboring under not a cross but a delusion.

There are two kinds of fools in the world: damned fools, and what Saint Paul calls ‘fools for Christ’s sake’ (I Cor. 4:10).

–Frederick Buechner

Our dedication to Christ may sometimes make us look like fools, but I like the company.

*Hymn 286, The Hymnal, 1982

5 Comments
June 20, 2013

Where are you now?

by chuckofish

Facebook, as you know, is a veritable font of new-agey platitudes and politically-correct advice. Once in a rare while, however, I find something that a friend has posted that makes me sit up and pay attention.

laotzu

Lao Tzu, or Laozi, is traditionally regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and as the founder of Taoism. I readily admit I know next to nothing about eastern religions. (If you are interested, you can read about it here.)

Whatever. I just think these particular words are eminently true. It is SO important to live in the day.

Here is what Frederick Buechner says about it:

“Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another’s burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad.”

― Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

So BE in the present. Or at least try hard. Look around you. Pay attention. Listen. Be brave, be strong, be glad.

Praise the Lord.

3 Comments