August 18thFive Minutes on Friday #37
FREDERICK BEUCHNER
Frederick Beuchner died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 96 on August 15. Asked on numerous occasions how he would sum up everything he had preached and written in both his fiction and nonfiction, he said the answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
That theme was constant across more than six decades in his career as a preacher, teacher, and novelist.
His first novel, A Long Day’s Dying was very successful but his second book flopped badly. He moved to New York to focus on his writing and there he had an experience that changed the course of his life and work: He began attending Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Growing up, neither side of his family had a “church connection of any kind,” as he put it, but he went because he happened to live next door and “because I had nothing else to do on a Sunday,” he recounted in an interview.
One Sunday he was struck by a particular turn of phrase by the church’s pastor, the Rev. George Buttrick: “Christ is crowned in the hearts of those who love him and believe in him amidst confession and tears and great laughter.”
He recounted: “I was so taken aback by ‘great laughter’ that I found the tears springing to my eyes.”
He later told Buttrick he wanted to learn more about Christianity, to more than simply join the church. The pastor pointed the young writer to Union Theological Seminary — with some misgivings. Buechner quoted Buttrick in his autobiography “The Sacred Journey” as saying, “It would be a shame to lose a good novelist for a mediocre preacher.”
He graduated and would become one of the great writers of his time. Three personal favourites are Son of Laughter, a story about Jacob and his brothers; Wishful Thinking: A theological ABC full of humour and new takes on familiar religious terms; and Telling Secrets – the third in his four volumes of memoirs.
“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.”
SUNDAY – 1 Kings 17.7-21; Luke 14.12-13
In 1976 MCC published More-with-Less by an unknown author, Doris Janzen Longacre. Though it is a cookbook, More-with-Less includes much more than recipes and diet advice. In the revised edition, Mary Beth Lind affirms Longacre’s belief that “we are what we eat, and what we eat shows our theology.
In her cookbook, Longacre spends the first fifty pages urging North Americans to think differently about the kinds of food they eat and their consumption of food as it relates to the global poor. She connects the excess consumption of food, particularly meat and sugar, to both widespread diet-caused health problems in North America as well as a failure to be good stewards of food resources. She acknowledges that the immensity of the problem of world hunger can seem too large for one person to counteract even in a small way, but she affirms that the call of Christians is not to be successful but faithful: “Our directions come from the way Jesus told us to live, not from what we think will work.”
Join us on Sunday as Claire reflects on faith, food, and cookbooks. It promises to be a tasty combo!