A brief glimpse at the “Grace” section of my inner library…

Or, time to stock up on tissues!

On Monday, one of my personal hero/saints passed from this world into the next. That news left me camped out in front of my favorite shelf in my literal library… letting the memories leak from my eyes.

I met Frederick Buechner during an event at Columbia Seminary, years and years ago. I had “known” him much longer, through his words.

He helped me through my seminary student fears that the “proper” interpretations of my faith tradition often felt like answers to exam questions rather than inspirations for life.

I even bought one of his books for my parents who were struggling to grasp what on earth made me think I could enter the ministry.

His passing has wakened a whole bunch of the voices and memories from my journey.

First, the surprise voice in my head… Whoopi Goldberg! It took me a minute to figure it out…

Not Whoopi, exactly, but Sister Mary Deloris in the movie, Sister Act.

Quoting the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, she told a young student who longed to be a singer, If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing… then you’re supposed to be a writer.” (Or singer.)

For me, Buechner was a writer like that.

His version was this:

The place where you are called is where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Then, this, from Wishful Thinking… A Theological ABC…

Doubt: Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Mysticism: Mysticism is where religions start. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan, each of them responding to Something of which words like Shalom, Oneness, God even, are only palid souvenirs. Religion as ethics, institution, dogma, ritual, Scripture, social action, all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat — to put it mildly — or with a bush going up in flames, a rain of flowers, a dove coming down out of the sky. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” Most people have also seen such things. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of their lives, most of them have caught glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by. Only then, unlike the saints, they tend to go on as though nothing has happened. We are all more mystics than we choose to let on, even to ourselves. Life is complicated enough as it is.

There’s much, much more, of course. I picked the bits calling most loudly in me, just now.

And one more voice from my inner chorus… from a sermon Walter Brueggemann preached at Columbia close to 30 years ago. The occasion was the decidedly “un-Reformed” All Saints Day.

Saints, Walter said, are all those who believe for us, even on the days we can’t quite believe for ourselves.

Now, I don’t know for sure about you, but I suspect I’m not the only one who has days when it’s hard to believe for myself. Days when life seems too complicated, indeed, for hints of mystical awareness. Days when blocking any sense of call seems like the safest way to go in a world full of such deep hunger.

That’s when the Grace section of my inner library — which is a lot like a Red Thread — gets the most use.

Whatever words you choose, you might just want to have a section like that in your library. It feels even more helpful now than it did when I began collecting all those voices along the way.

For now, a moment of silence where the links to click often are. And a note that the painting, above, is a stealth-mystic work-in-progress! (Believe it or not… it’s a tree!)

ps… I so hope you’ll let me know where that place is for you… where your deep joy and the world’s great hunger meet! You can comment, below, or email me at suesvoice@gmail.com