A Fair Trade Book (Cheers!)
Title: Listening to Your Life
Title: Listening to Your Life
Date: 1992
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-069864-0
Length: 341 pages plus references and index
Quote: “Like most theology, most fiction is of course also at heart autobiography.”
Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner is an unusual hybrid. It’s not the usual “reader” made up of selections from a writer’s books. Neither is it the usual “devotional” with one page of reflections on one Bible passage per day for a specified number of days. Rather, this collection offers a page (or less) from one of Buechner’s books for each day of a year.
To some this format may seem to burden the collection with a suggestion of hubris. Buechner is a great writer, but whose idea was it to treat his work like the
Word of God? In several selections,
of course, Buechner is reflecting on
Bible passages. If he’d linked each passage from his own work to the
appropriate Scripture, which is something readers can do at leisure, this would
be a better written devotional than most.
Buechner wrote novels
before he wrote the sort of books clergymen are expected to write (The Faces of Jesus, The Alphabet of Grace,
Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who, et al.). Some of his novels had
contemporary settings, some historical. From one day to the next, in this
collection, readers go from bits of sermons, to bits of Buechner’s memoirs, to
bits of speculative fiction about prehistoric churches in the British Isles.
For the sort of people to whom Buechner preached and
wrote, this mental gear-switching won’t be a problem.
In denominational terms, Buechner was Episcopalian, the U.S. counterpart of C.S. Lewis’s Church of England, in some ways the “merest” and least doctrinarian of the traditional denominations. If Episcopalians fail to explore Bible teachings that hold meaning for other Christians, like predestination or free will, adult baptism, the seventh-day Sabbath, or whatever else, this hesitation to seek insights into some Christian denominational beliefs has also been known to set Episcopalians free to write better about the beliefs most Christians hold in common.
“Christ is our employer as surely as the general contractor is the carpenter’s employer,” Buechner told a graduating class, in real life.
“Praise God for all that’s holy, cold, and dark...for all the river of the years bears off...for dying and the peace of death,” he had a fictional medieval monk advise.
“Through him,” Buechner recalls of a teacher, “I started to sense that...words have color, depth, texture of their own.”
In the paragraph selected for January 20, Buechner recalls a spiritual moment in boot camp. “I saw suddenly...that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good...there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.”
Then for January 21 we
get a conversation between a medieval mystic and the ghost of a medieval saint,
both fictional...and still we are, of course, listening to Buechner’s life,
throughout. And he had had a life worth listening to, even 25 years ago...
He still has, now. His web site has a slick staff-managed look, but check out that bibliography. If the reward for the enlightened life is an active, graceful old age...! I'm surprised, but delighted, to be able to offer this one as a Fair Trade Book. If you buy Listening to Your Life here, for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Buechner or the charity of his choice.
Probably six books of this size would fit into the package. No guarantees on Buechner's other books--several of them were bigger than this one--but we'll see what we can do. Without checking whether any of the books have gone into the collector price range, since that information is always subject to change, let's just say that if you bought three standard-size books along with this smaller one, and all had sold well enough when new that used copies were widely available, you'd send this web site $25 or $26, and Buechner's charity would get $4.
Probably six books of this size would fit into the package. No guarantees on Buechner's other books--several of them were bigger than this one--but we'll see what we can do. Without checking whether any of the books have gone into the collector price range, since that information is always subject to change, let's just say that if you bought three standard-size books along with this smaller one, and all had sold well enough when new that used copies were widely available, you'd send this web site $25 or $26, and Buechner's charity would get $4.
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