“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal… Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
The quote above comes close to the end of Chesterton’s wild caper of a story that he subtitled ‘a nightmare’. It’s the fantastical tale of a policeman in Victorian London attempting to infiltrate what he believes to be an anarchist organization. His pursuit of a great villain leads him into the depths of society and human nature, into a tangled exploration of doubt and trust, but perhaps most urgently, of his own perceptions, his own sense of what is true and right and what it means to chase the ultimately good in a fallen world. Gabriel Syme, the protagonist, speaks the above words toward the end of the book as he begins to reckon with a world that both obscures and reveals the benevolence we sometimes glimpse behind our aching existence.
As a writer, Frederick Buechner reminds me of Syme in the earnest, anguished way he chased truth down the darkest alleys and most forsaken corners of his own existence. I’ve often wondered if Buechner saw himself in Syme, for he included Chesterton’s novel in his 2004 book Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say), an explanation of four great literary works that he believed emerged from the deepest griefs of their writers. Buechner himself, in their company, articulated the visceral nature of our confusion and grief, the way that what we so often see in this world is the ‘back’ of existence, and the despair to which that leads us. So much of his work revolves around the trauma of losing his father to suicide as a young boy.
But the point of Buechner’s work, both in the book above and the larger body of his creative writing, is not a descent into nihilism brought on by speaking the worst we know. Rather, he’s always seeking a way to ‘better bear the weight of our own sadness’.[1] For Buechner, speaking the worst is always a way of reaching for what lies beyond the final word of our anguish. Like Syme, he speaks the ugliness of existence because for the man or woman who faces it down, it begins to flicker and thin, so that the joy it obscures can be, to our astonishment, sometimes glimpsed even in this backward existence we endure.
If we could only get round front…
I first read Buechner when I was seventeen years old and recently diagnosed with a lifelong mental illness. My world contracted severely. My dreams crumbled around me along with the simple faith I had held since childhood. I could not contain my bewilderment and horror. But there was a phalanx of religious voices urging me to a passive acceptance of God’s inscrutable will. I felt my grief was a rebellious excess, but I knew clearly that if speaking what I felt meant a rejection of faith, then I was facing the loss of faith altogether. Reading The Sacred Journey (1982) allowed me to grasp that an outraged sorrow could be integral to faith. Buechner taught me that in articulating the stark, ravaged truth of our sorrow, we are ushered into the presence of the beauty that confronts our devastation.
But I didn’t understand the fulness of what Buechner was saying until I sat down twenty years later to write a book telling the story of my illness and the faith that survived it.
The first days of writing are seared in my memory. Pregnant with my second child, I began the crafting of my book in a little cabin on the Danish coast. My husband is half Danish, and we had taken a working family holiday in a home owned by a friend on one of the numerous inlets to the north of Copenhagen. I sat down each day at the kitchen table to work while my husband took our toddler out to play. Autumn flamed in the leaves out the window and the air was chill. The compact room was framed by giant windows and warmed by an old woodstove, and I looked up often to glimpse the weave of wind and storm always at play in the sky, the dashed lightning that was a flock of wild swans coming to rest in the cobalt waters of the bay.
Words poured from me. Flooded pages of memory as I revisited the bewildered sadness that attended those first years of learning to live with a mind constantly attended by images of disaster and death. The writing was a sob, the full articulation of grief that I had never yet allowed myself to express. I wrote exactly what I felt and did not say anything I ought and was utterly overwhelmed by it. When we reached the end of our week in the cabin, I had pages and pages of manuscript.
But grief alone is not a story.
We returned home to England to the devastating news that my beloved mother-in-law was dying very swiftly of cancer. I put the book aside as we entered the ancient drama of family gathering, of waiting, of anguished love… and death. After the funeral in the Netherlands, we came home to an exhausted, watchful quiet. But I could not write. There were so many sorrows roiling in me, unframed, untranslated, and as the time came on for me to give birth to our son, I did not look at my heart, or at the book.
But he came, blessed little son. We named him Samuel, ‘God hears’, a name that blossomed up from some deep place beyond the reach of our grief, framing and translating the world to us afresh. There are few things more purely beautiful than the face of a newborn child. My son, my little son, his eyes opened, a dim, starlit grey, and when he looked at me the furor and terror of the world fell away before the irreplaceable light of his gaze. Day by day as I recovered, sitting up in a bedroom where gulls cried and barren tree branches etched the sky, I sat in the light of his innocence, the shocking benevolence of his being.
One morning, I held him sleepily as choral music played quietly, and very suddenly I ‘got round in front’. They really do come, those moments of taut, benevolent joy. I glimpsed the unassailable beauty on the other side of pain. I felt as if I had been under a spell, for that beauty livened me again to the long trail of grace and joy that had attended my worst years and ushered me into the presence of hope. I knew myself to be accompanied by a kindness beyond explanation, it was why I sat down to write the story of my illness and my faith in the first place.
And I remembered something I’d read years before in Buechner’s book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (1977). He describes the gospel as comedy, tragedy, and fairy tale, but fairy is the final word he uses to describe our existence and in that chapter he says this:
To preach the Gospel in its original power and mystery is to claim… that once upon a time is this time, now, and here is the dark wood that the light gleams at the heart of like a jewel, and the ones who are to live happily ever after are… all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they might be.[2]
I picked up the writing for the book again a few days later. I knew now, that my story was not just the tale of my loss, but the story of the light gleaming at its heart, the goodness invading and transforming my darkness. The story of my sorrow was also, poignantly, the story of my salvation from the despair to which that sorrow might bring me. It was the story of my unlooked for joy, as Tolkien described it, ‘joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief’.[3]
Buechner taught me, he taught a generation of readers to be brutally honest, to interrogate our suffering rather than suppress it. But he taught us to do it within the larger narrative of the ‘fairy tale’ of the Gospel. We tell the horror in order to seek the beauty that lies both before and after our pain and will redeem it. For that’s the point, isn’t it? That our grief, that speaking of what we most brutally feel, the narration of our unravelling, isn’t the final world. A word speaks beyond it. A Word, if you will, speaks before and after our undoing and summons the whole brutalized world to healing.
It’s the secret of the world.
Buechner found it, and he spent his life telling us how to find it too.
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.
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith, (Harper Collins, NY, 2001, p. xi.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (Harper Collins, NY: 1977) p. 91.
[3] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Harper Collins, 2001) p. 68.
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