Frederick Buechner Quotes:

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Party, Mean, Grace, Amazing Grace, Completing

I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.

Topics: Fun, Giving, Want, Devotional

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

Topics: Sleep, Night, Grace, Grace And Forgiveness

If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn't mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.

Topics: Mean, Grace, Depth

In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today 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 today 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.

Topics: Yesterday, Today, Another Day

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Beautiful, True Meaning Of Life

Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.

Topics: Love, Justice, Judging, Justice And Mercy, Acquittal

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.

Topics: Long, Remember, Lost, Remember Me

Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world.

Topics: Joy, Needs, Calling

Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.

Topics: Jesus, Speak

Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but...at supper time, or walking along a road...He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 29, 2016

Topics: Religious, Jesus, Real, Supper, Supper Time

The worst isn't the last thing about the world. It's the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It's the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well.

Topics: Spring, Believe, Heart

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

Topics: Fiction, Theology

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Topics: Life, Happiness, Lonely

Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.

Topics: Joy, World, Needs

The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.

Topics: Giving, World, Christ

Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.

Topics: Mean, Lasts, Resurrection

Go where your best prayers take you.

Topics: Prayer, Best Prayer

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Topics: Ignorance, Compassion, Joy, Peace And Joy, Compassion For Yourself

If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.

Topics: Mean, Answers, Expecting, God's Presence

When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Sep 11, 2016

Topics: Heart, Mean, Who I Am

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Topics: Men, Would Be, Impossible, Conan, Existence Of God

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Topics: Men, Way, Mystery, Pilgrimage, Wonder And Mystery

Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.

Topics: Pain, Today, Splendor, Catch Me

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jun 12, 2014

Topics: Life, Spiritual, Pain, Gladness

When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.

Topics: Helping Others, Suffering, Persons

Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.

Topics: Morning, Self, Feet, Called By God

If you want to be holy, be kind.

Topics: Want, Be Kind, Kind

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 19, 2014

Topics: Kings, Fun, Pain, Deadly Sins, Smack

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.

Topics: Mean, Secret, Enough, What It Means To Be Human, Trusting Each Other

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

Topics: Eye, Artist, Imagination

the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all

Topics: Stories

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

Topics: Life, Beautiful, Party

Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.

Topics: Done, Remember, Ill, Remember Me

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Topics: World, Matter, Sake, Puzzling

The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

Topics: Jesus, Understanding, Way, Jesus And Christmas, Jesus Birth

If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

Topics: Children, Remembrance, Childish Things

The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were changed with new significance.

Topics: People, World, Facts

Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.

Topics: Sadness, Forgiving, Despair, Unforgivable Sin, Sins Not

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

Topics: Giving, Doe, Answers

Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.

What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

Topics: Next, Cups, Lost

There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?

Topics: Song, Easter, Book, Old Photographs

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is an on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich says that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.109, Zondervan

Topics: Faith, Journey, Opposites

It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

Topics: Thinking, Miracle, Want, Proof Of God

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

Topics: Justice, Mercy, Grammar

To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.

Topics: Giving, Mind, Saint

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Topics: Past, Views, Way

If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.

Topics: Preacher, Reach Out

To confess your sins to God is not to tell [God] anything [God] doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the bridge.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Bridges, Sin, Abyss

Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

Topics: Blessed, People, Giving, Truism, Avarice Greed

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.

Topics: Language, Speak, Easy

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

Topics: Important, Stories, Way

It is important to tell our secrets too because ... it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.

Topics: Two, People, Secret

God doesn't reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself.

Topics: Design

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

Topics: Taken, Men, Ideas

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

Topics: Darkness, Today, Oblivion

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

Topics: Drama, Boys, Men

You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.

Topics: Children, Remember, Be Careful

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Topics: Jesus, Father, Our World

You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.

Topics: Strong, Grows, Humans

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

Topics: Dream, Memories, Paradise

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

Topics: Jesus, Easter, Feet, Nazareth, Happy Easter

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

Topics: Men, Lust, Dying, Lust For Life

Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest 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 is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2017). “A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory”, p.60, Zondervan

Topics: Eye, Soul, Secret, Summoning, Tears In Your Eyes

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) 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).

Topics: Writing, Needs, Done, Deodorant, Gladness

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

Topics: Moving, Doubt, Alive, Kidding Yourself

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

Topics: Past, Grace, Today, Remembering The Past

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

Topics: Mean, Long, Track

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God

Topics: Spiritual, Religious, People

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

Topics: Healing, Eye, Joy

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?

Topics: Christmas, Jesus, Easter, Easter Sunday, Beyond The Stars

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

Topics: Christmas, Home, Heart, Bethlehem, Outlandish

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

Topics: Running, Sick, Broken, Commandments

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.

Topics: Jesus, Believe, News, Good News

To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.

Topics: Journey, Scare, Half

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

Topics: Hands, Guides

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.

Topics: Jesus, Children, Father

Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.

Topics: Heart, Mind, Pay, Bleeding Heart

Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way.

Topics: Life, Beautiful, Prayer

In honesty you have to admit to a wise man that prayer is not for the wise, not for the prudent, not for the sophisticated. Instead it is for those who recognize that in face of their deepest needs, all their wisdom is quite helpless. It is for those who are willing to persist in doing something that is both childish and crucial.

Topics: Wise, Prayer, Honesty

To be wise is to be eternally curious.

Topics: Wise, Curious, Being Wise

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.

Topics: Miracle, Plus, Thousand

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Topics: Religious, Moving, Doubt, Kidding Yourself, Doubted

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 04, 2015

Topics: Relationship, Family, Smile, Happy Family, Family Time

Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

Topics: Powerful, Heart, Love Is, Strongholds

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.

Topics: Waiting, Movement, Hunches, Sure Thing, Lump In The Throat

Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.

Topics: Dream, Assurance

Here and there even in our world, and now and then, even in ourselves, we catch glimpeses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glipmses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on.

Topics: Our World, Giving, Fleeting

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

Topics: Spiritual, Inspirational Life, Keys

Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.

Topics: Inspirational, Hurt, Source, Saddest

ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.

Topics: Long, Giving, Silence, Deathbed, Long Silence

Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.

Topics: Love Is, Matter, Sake, Live For Yourself

A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, 'I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross-the way he carries me.'

Topics: Christian, Eye, Hands

People are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them. They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Topics: Views, People, May

A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.

Topics: Christian

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

Topics: Discovering, Discovering The Truth

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.

Topics: Hate, Heart, Deep Love

It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.

Topics: Jesus, Children, Men

To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, "You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you've done, and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend.

Topics: Forgiveness, Pride, Rights

One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Feb 20, 2017

Topics: Earth, Fool, Enough

When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. . . . It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.

Topics: Home, Heart, Men

Grace is something you can never get but only be given.

Topics: Faith, Grace, Given, Raspberries, Good Dream

Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.

Topics: Clothes, Storm, Reputation

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb...

Topics: Eye, Giving, Bird, Supper, Mustard Seed

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

Topics: Heart, Names, Silence, Matched, Extraordinary Moments

The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.

Topics: Magic, Clear, Things Happen

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.

Topics: Jesus, May, Might, Parables

The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.

Topics: Pride, Forgiving, Accepting

The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.

Topics: Strong, Reality, Steel, Harshness

Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.

Topics: Eye, Drawing, Grace, Lumps

Whatever you do with your life-whatever you end up achieving or not achieving-the great gift you have in you to give to the world is the gift of who you alone are; your way of seeing things, and saying things, and feeling about things, that is like nobody else’s. If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill.

Topics: Giving, Missing, Feelings, Empty Places, Great Gifts

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jul 14, 2016

Topics: Healing, Godly, Generosity

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.

Topics: Running, Drama, Actors

We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.

Topics: Inspirational, Letting Go, Positivity, Hold Fast, Far Side

Wether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from May 02, 2013

Topics: Gods Will

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... Remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God's busineess... Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's Business. Leave it to God.

Topics: Judging, Trying, Remember

Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and for them and they are doing God's will.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from May 10, 2017

Topics: People, Risk, Love Each Other

True faith, a simple life, a helping hand- the three things prized most in Heaven.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Brendan: A Novel”, p.12, Harper Collins

Topics: Angel, Simple, Hands, True Faith

Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.

Topics: Attention, Way, Coincidence

Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1992). “The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction”, Harpercollins

Topics: Pain, Joy, Risk, Stewards, Painful Times

Our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Sep 13, 2013

Topics: Beautiful, Believe, Self, Hard To Believe

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.

Topics: Thinking, Endless, Dialogue, Chatter, Human Thought

. . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. waking up to the first snow. being in bed with somebody you love... whether you thank god for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. if you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Running, Stars, Crazy, Lucky Star, First Snow

The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

Topics: Hearing, Trouble, Heard

We have God's joy in our blood.

Topics: Blood, Joy

Each one of us could describe his or her life as a sacred journey. You are journeying from the beginning to the end, and what makes it sacred is that in the process of this journey you encounter the holy in various forms which, unless you have your eyes open, you might not even notice.

source: - "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

Topics: Eye, Journey, Might

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather

source: - Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Self, Weather, World

Jesus doesn't say, "The religion founded in my name is the way, the truth, and the life, [and] what people say about me is the way." "Our way of worship, the Christian structure, is not the way," [he would say,] "I am. I am. If you want to know what life is all about, what it's supposed to be, where it's supposed to go, where it's supposed to derive its strength from, don't look at anything people say about me. Don't look at the faith that's been created. Look at my life, which is a life ultimately of sacrificial love."

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Names, Sacrificial Love

At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.

Topics: Evening, Judged

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jul 21, 2016

Topics: Miracle, Everyday, Sacred, Everyday Moments, Sacred Moments

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.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1981). “The hungering dark”

Topics: Strong, Past, Yesterday

At least to look back over their own lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you're caught up in the process of living them. If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think he speaks to us largely through what happens to us, so listen to what has happened to you-for the sound, above all else, of his voice.

Topics: Thinking, Voice, Missing, Officials

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Mean

You do not need to understand healing to be healed or know anything about blessing to be blessed.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Nov 30, 2016

Topics: Blessed, Healing, Blessing

We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen.

Topics: God, Darkness, Green

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Nov 05, 2015

Topics: Fool, Truth Is, Making A Fool Of Yourself

To believe is not intellectual assent: "Yes, I believe in Jesus. I will sign my name to the Nicene Creed. I believe it all" - which you could do, [but] it would have no effect on who you were or what you did. It is, rather, to give your heart.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Jesus, Believe, Heart

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

Topics: Meaningful, Dream, Religious, Meaningless Life, Good Dream

Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.393, Zondervan

Topics: Dream, Home, Heart

Don't let your life just go in one eye and out the other.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Eye

We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.320, Zondervan

Topics: Attention, Compliment, Praise, Praise God

For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Home, People, Profound, Going To Church, Going Home

To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.

Topics: Bored, Cold, Moments, Cold Shoulder

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.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons”, p.19, Harper Collins

Topics: Believe, Missing Him, Voice, Incompleteness

Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Love You, Self, Trying, Egocentric, Take Care Of Yourself

God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in His image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in Him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by Him, His mark is deep within us. We have God's joy in our blood.

Topics: Running, Believe, Mean

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.

Topics: Christian, Religious, Grace, Dividing, Presbyterians

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.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechne”, p.23, Harper Collins

Topics: Jesus, Prayer, Thieves, Luke

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Flirting, Saint, World, Handkerchiefs, Flirtation

It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.

Topics: Jesus, Children, Men

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1981). “The hungering dark”

Topics: Prayer, People, Darkness

In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Finals, Christ, Eternal Life

Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.372, Zondervan

Topics: Dark, Air, People

The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word "God," at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.

source: - "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

Topics: Mean, Heart, Differences

The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.

Topics: World, Language, Speak

The world needs people who save lives.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: People, Needs, World, Save A Life

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

Topics: God, Faith, Religious, Thank You God

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Dec 27, 2016

Topics: Real, Joy, Wedding Toast, Peace And Joy

To believe in God is to give your heart to God.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Believe, Heart, Giving

Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Hurt, Memories, Past

A God in the hand is worth two in the bush.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.2, Zondervan

Topics: Faith, Latin, Hands, Spanish Proverb, Finnish

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Oct 19, 2016

Topics: Atheist, Believe, Knowing

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Topics: Writing, Godly, Way, Speaking And Writing

What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 12, 2017

Topics: Prayer, Heart, Dark

You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary

Topics: Ordinary, Way, Extraordinary

Don't look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don't know yet and who don't yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.372, Zondervan

Topics: Knowing, Missing, Looks, Looking Down

What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Needs, World, Should

And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless.

Topics: Love Is, Treasure, Want

If our pain doesn't destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.

Topics: Pain, Might, Lasts

When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Hurt, Father, People

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.

Topics: Journey, Thinking, Life Is

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.110, Zondervan

Topics: Real, Differences

The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me."

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.259, Zondervan

Topics: Jesus, Feet, People

Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jan 29, 2016

Topics: Atheist, Believe, Choices

The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Squirrels, Landscape, Littles

The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion.... I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.

Topics: Pain, Thinking, Hard Times, Orion

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

Topics: Miracle, Faith In God

... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jul 28, 2016

Topics: Running, Long, Joy

Pray anyway. Who knows what God can do through your prayer?

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Prayer, Praying, Knows

Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Indifference, Disguise, Toleration

Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.

Topics: Lying, Joy, Needs, Intersections

The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich.

source: - "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

Topics: Jesus, Worry, Enemy, Forgive Your Enemies, Peacemaker

I don't go to church all that regularly, and one reason I don't is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. I find myself being addressed by preachers who, I assume, were led by some initial passion for Christ, for the truth, for God, for "the More." That's what got them there. But that has gotten buried under all the debris of having to run a church, of concerns.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Running, Passion, Bored, Debris

Beneath the worst the world can do, there is always the glimmer of the best.

source: - "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

Topics: World, Worst, Can Do

Speak in your own voice and speak about things that you have in some sense witnessed, not just things you read about or have been taught about in seminary. To talk about the resurrection, think about those moments where in some way you have been resurrected.

source: - Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

Topics: Thinking, Voice, Way, Seminary

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

Topics: Leaving, Events, Rooms, Always Leaving

Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for Him that He needs to have done - run errands for Him, carry messages for Him, fight on His side, feed His lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for Him that you need to do - sing songs for Him, tell Him what's on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in Him.

Topics: Running, Song, Mean, Worship Service, Tautology

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

Topics: Loneliness, Grief, Book, Gail

. . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.

Topics: Peace, Hands, Giving, Giving And Receiving, Slipping Away

It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again. Be alive, if you can, all through this day - today - of your life. What's to be done? What's to be done? Follow your feet. Put on the coffee. Start the orange juice, the bacon, the toast. Then go wake up your children and your spouse. Think about the work of your hands. Live in the needs of the day.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1970). “The alphabet of grace”

Topics: Children, Coffee, Thinking, Orange Juice

Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1970). “The alphabet of grace”

Topics: Love, Thinking, Age

...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1991). “Telling Secrets”, Harper San Francisco

Topics: Magic

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

source: - Frederick Buechner, Lee Boltin (1974). “The life of Jesus”, Gramercy

Topics: Taken, Men, Ideas

Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.

Topics: Purpose, Calling, World

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

source: - Frederick Buechner (1988). “Whistling in the dark: an ABC theologized”, Harpercollins

Topics: Suicide, Bored, Form, Bored To Death

When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.

source: - FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jan 31, 2017

Topics: Goodbye, Thinking, Years, Times Gone By

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2017). “A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory”, p.24, Zondervan

Topics: Beautiful, Lying, Heart, Beauty Of The World, Heart Breaking

In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

source: - Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.265, Zondervan

Topics: Dream, Book, Years

What makes me a believer is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I've had. Sometimes literally a glimpse which made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate. That's what I think a lot of what my writing has been, my preaching has been - trying to listen to that voice again, to see those moments again.

source: - "Frederick Buechner Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. May 5, 2006.

Topics: Memories, Writing, Thinking