One late dark evening, not long after 9/11, I sat in my loft studio in downtown Manhattan, just three blocks from what the world had begun calling Ground Zero. We had only just returned home — if it could be called that. The air still carried the acrid memory of destruction, and the sky above held a vacant, empty, still smoldering hole. My children were learning to speak of their neighborhood with that phrase, “Ground Zero,” as if it were a normal location in a geography textbook. In those days, “normal” was a mirage we kept chasing, even as we made Thanksgiving dinner beneath a skyline punctured by loss.
That evening, I noticed a book on a small shelf above my writing table: Frederick Buechner’s The Longing for Home: recollections and reflections (1996). I had placed it there some time earlier, drawn initially to its design (unusual among Christian publishers then), alongside a Van Gogh baseball I’d purchased at the Met Museum gift shop. Small objects of beauty and sentiment — fragile anchors in the storm. But now, in the fear-filled season of aftermath, the title pierced me.
I was “home”, and yet I was longing for one.
The irony undid me. I was surrounded by the familiar — my family, my books, my sketchbooks — and yet the world outside was entirely a wasteland. The rhythm of life had changed, even the light filtering through our windows had drastically been altered. We had returned, yes, but nothing was the same. We lived in a city learning to name its grief.
As I’ve written many times (including to the author himself, with gratitude for his work in general and that book in particular), Buechner’s words in The Longing for Home found me again, particularly these from the sixth chapter, ‘The Journey Toward Wholeness’. He begins this chapter with an acknowledgement, ‘Like the majority of humankind I don’t know much about wholeness at first hand’, before turning to recollect on the final days of his grandmother.[1] Then, five pages in, he pivots to us, the readers, and offers the following reflection:
The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God, and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running strongest. When good things happen, we rise to heaven; when bad things happen, we descend to hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back, and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits soar. I know this to be true of no one as well as I know it to be true of myself. I know how just the weather can affect my whole state of mind for good or ill, how just getting stuck in a traffic jam can ruin an afternoon that in every other way is so beautiful that it dazzles the heart. We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors.[2]
He concludes the thought with these words:
The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.[3]
Those final lines opened me to the precise movement of a surgeon’s blade. What does it mean to live in a world that breaks us apart, and to yet bear witness to beauty? Much of what I write about, of how an artist sees the world, in my forthcoming book, Art Is: A Journey into the Light (Yale, 2025), might have unconsciously arisen out of, I realize now, that sentence from Buechner.
In my painting practice, I work in “Nihonga" — a traditional Japanese method using pulverized minerals. Artisans at specialty pigment shops grind azurite, malachite, and other minerals by hand, producing granules that carry within them the hidden quality of light. These pigments are layered onto prepared paper, often over a hundred times, to create not simply color but immersive prismatic light, shimmering surfaces where “blue” is never only blue. These are not the colors of immediacy. They are the colors of broken endurance, of reverent waiting.
We can only find true beauty in pulverization.
Buechner’s writing is much the same. He does not give us a polished vision of faith. His theology is not a smooth surface, but a layered one. It catches light in its fractures. Memory, sorrow, laughter, and longing — these are ground into the mineral dust of his prose. He does not smooth over pain. He refracts them like the Nihonga master.
For those of us who lived in New York then, and for my children who called Ground Zero their “furusato”, this matters deeply. Furusato — a Japanese word that means “old country” or native place — names not just geography, but emotional terrain. It is the place that holds your first memories, the stories that shaped your beginning. All my three children have returned to make New York City their home on their own today. What does it mean, then, for my children that their furusato is a place of trauma? That the shape of their longing for home will always be cast in shadow?
Buechner teaches us that longing is not weakness, but a vocation of calling. It is through longing that we see clearly. He offers us not a resolution, but a direction — toward faces, names, stories. His home is populated in his many stories: Naya, Ansel, Theodore, Brendan, Judy. His daughters. His father, Thomas. They are not symbols; they are radiant with particularity. These faces and their stories are refracted through his prose like light through crystal, and they become signposts to the greater Reality, the one we are always journeying toward but can never fully grasp. We can learn to see the past, however dark, through his language of particularity as the words incarnate themselves into our collective memories.
In Culture Care: reconnecting with beauty for our common life (2017), I wrote about the artist’s role as a custodian of beauty, a steward of generative memory in a world obsessed with utility. Buechner’s vocation was precisely this: to listen, to witness, to give shape to longing. His eloquence, poetic nuance, and theological depth were not ends in themselves. Fragile, yes, but full of light, they were vessels for the congregations he served, the friends he remembered, the invisible readers like me who found solace in his voice when everything else fell silent and the world was numb.
Buechner’s writing does not attempt to resolve life’s contradictions; instead, it inhabits them in their particular fragments, but with grace. To him, sorrow lies beneath the soil of the story, turning memories into roots. He did not dismiss the pain of the world; rather, he gave it a name, a voice, a shape embedded in a place. And perhaps most importantly, he did so without sentimentality. His hope was hard-won, his faith porous. He did not pretend to understand the entirety of the light. He simply turned the prism.
We all have been pulverized in some way. And yet, as with the slow art of Nihonga, it is from this pulverization that color emerges. Layer upon layer, waiting upon waiting, beauty appears — not in spite of the fracture, but through it.
Even Ground Zero has been rebuilt. The skyline has changed. The hole in the sky has been filled with new structures, symbols of resilience. And yet, our hearts still long. Because that longing, too, is part of being human. It drives us toward one another, toward community, toward a New Country — a home not yet seen, but deeply remembered.
In the end, our homes will not be built merely of construction materials that built up the new towers. They will be made of faces, of stories, of the strange light that shines from pulverized prisms held in love. Buechner reminds us that the hole in the sky will one day be filled: not only by buildings, but by memory, laughter, disappointment, and the kind of fragile hope that survives devastation.
We are still longing for home.
But in the longing, we will begin to see.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
*AUTHOR’S NOTE: Parts of this essay appeared as a foreword to Jefferey Munroe's reflection on Frederick Buechner's legacy, Reading Buechner: exploring the work of a master memoirist, novelist, theologian and preacher (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home: recollections and reflections (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), p.105.
[2] Ibid., p.109.
[3] Ibid., p.109.
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