Recoverable And Precious

I have been working for some time now on a memoir, a memoir focused on a particular area of my life and a particular person. As the stack of pages grows incrementally, I find myself remembering things long forgotten, and discarding memories that I once thought important but now see as distractions. As with all the things I have ever undertaken in my life, I feel inadequate to the task, but I also feel a strong compelling hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward as certainly as my own fingers push the pencil along the page of my notebooks.

Reading this evening in one of Frederick Buechner’s autobiographical volumes, I was buttressed and refreshed by these words:

It seems to me that no matter who you are, and no matter how eloquent or otherwise, if you tell your own story with sufficient candor and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story. I do it also in the hope of encouraging others to do the same — 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 that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us, so what I have done both in this book and in its predecessor is to listen back over what has happened to me — as I hope my readers may be moved to listen back over what has happened to them — for the sound, above all else, of his voice.

Because the word that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word — a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see — the chances are we will never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling.

from Now & Then by Frederick Buechner (1983, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, NY)

~ S.K. Orr