Now & Then

So last week I read Frederick Buechner's Now & Then. It was the second Buechner book I'd read, after Telling the Truth, which I read back in the fall (somehow I made it through four years of Wheaton without ever tackling him—or perhaps that's exactly why I hadn't until now).

I have never read an author, not even Hemingway, who leaves me with as mixed feelings as Buechner does. For one, I feel tremendous pressure to like him: he is a staple of the left-leaning, intellectual, liturgical Wheatie's (LLILW) bookshelf, right next to Balthasar and Berry, Auden and Milosz (assuming this is an "out" year for Lewis). More importantly, Ben likes him, and Ben has darn good opinions about religious writers. And I do like him, he punches a lot of my buttons. He's nuanced, he's lucid, he's mindful of paradox and mystery. He strikes me as being totally authentic, up front about his failures and his desires. He is also a beautiful writer, perhaps the most beautiful nonfiction writer I've ever had the pleasure of reading. And he calls out directly those nebulous things that are the core of what I can't dismiss about Christianity: in his own words, that it is

the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it the catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

How can you argue with that? Which for me is the point: I can't. And because of that I feel somehow like I've been tricked. So that's one point of contention for me—am I swayed by the rhetoric or am I swayed by that ineffable thing, that "catch of the breath"? Am I being a responsible reader to think such a skeptical thought, or do I need to make the Kierkegaardian leap over my cynicism?

But putting aside that huge, gut-wrenching question, I still have some issues with FB. For one, his Christianity is extremely internal and individual—at least in what I've read, there's very little of the widows-and-orphans stuff that's so crucial to Jesus' teachings. Because of this, he's awfully abstract. He admits that all he can do is tell his story, which is awesome, but doesn't help much in terms of practicals. On one hand, I love his emphasis on growth, on religion as process, as narrative. On the other hand, he focuses perhaps too much on the "not yet" side of things and not enough on the "already" part, if that makes sense. I tend to be inclined towards the mystic, contemplative part of Christianity, so maybe I'm just seeing my own shortcomings in how Buechner articulates my views. Which is a good thing.

I don't want to get on FB for not presenting a perfectly rounded portrayal of Christianity in all its aspects (indeed, who outside of Aquinas or Barth could?). He's only presenting what has stuck out to him, highlighting what has maybe gone underappreciated. But I still can't help feeling he's a little...soft? Like his vision of religion is almost too easy to swallow. He talks about the darkness, the jaggedness of it, but what he says is belied by his own clear, elegant writing. He's maybe unconsciously sanded off some of those rough edges simply by being a great prose stylist (Marilynne Robinson is perhaps also guilty of this--maybe that's why both her and Buechner enjoy a wider audience among the New York Times set than most religious writers).

Ben, thoughts? You're more read in Buechner than I, is there any particular book that would undo some of this?