“I believe in God, but I’ve known so much horror. How do we live without fear?”
I was recently asked this question by a friend and it was the kind to halt me in my thinking tracks because it touched a deep and familiar doubt within myself. Of course, there are the usual reflexive answers urging greater trust or spiritual grit, words stretched like a flimsy plaster over a gaping wound. But because I knew exactly the fear she meant, the fear I shove aside daily, that no matter how much we love God we still live in a world where death or malice or accident may strike us with intimate terror at any moment, I edged away from the glib and took a while to answer. I remembered Frederick Buechner’s famed quote:
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.[1]
The statement is one of Buechner’s most oft-quoted lines regarding faith and hope. But I find it terrifying, for Buechner does not guarantee our safety. We want our faith to be a kind of contract with the divine that means we are cordoned off from the reach of the terrible. But we aren’t. We manifestly aren’t. The most passionate believers I know have been subject to loss and death and malice just like everyone else in a fallen world and this is the fear that haunts my reader and myself. Yet here is Buechner suggesting that even amidst the horror, we may learn to be unafraid.
It’s a radical proposition and one of the rhetorical burdens of his writing life.
One of Buechner’s great gifts to us, formed profoundly by the very terrible events in his own life, was his insistence that we ‘listen to our lives’ not just in their joy but also in their loss, that at the very heart of the grief and terror we fear, we will find God intimately with us, ‘in’ love with us in a way that really does ‘cast out fear’ (1 John 4:18). As a writer he addressed himself (like his imagined preacher) to ‘the fullness of who we are and to the emptiness too, the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all.’[2]
That quote comes from Buechner’s pithy, wondrous work in Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (1977). My first close reading of the book came when a copy was gifted to each student in my Oxford college, Wycliffe Hall. Still coming to terms with a decade of profound mental illness and the wreckage it caused to my life and faith, I read Buechner’s words with great relief, largely because they didn’t fight shy of the disaster and grief I still felt potently even in the midst of my belief. In articulating the Gospel first as a word that comes to us in tragedy, with God’s seeming absence the very thing that makes our need of his presence most conspicuous, he affirmed my continuing fear, my need and grief not as antithetical to faith, but integral. Perhaps, he writes, theology should follow the sacramental track in positing not only a Real Presence, but a Real Absence, ‘because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting.’[3]
I had gotten just about that far in the book when I had (perhaps was given) a vivid experience of exactly what Buechner was beginning to communicate in Telling the Truth, one that would illumine my reading of the book and the truth I found in life-changing ways. One that returned to me as I pondered how to answer my friend’s poignant question.
The encounter came on a summer’s night in London when my brother and I wandered out to catch a late Proms concert at Royal Albert Hall. The impromptu musical evening was a bid to escape the next day when we’d both turn from a few days of adventuring back to decisions and pressures that felt almost unbearable. But as we walked, I wondered if the tiny walled space of the hotel room would have been a better shelter. It was 2014 in the clamor of the city, the headlines in the newsstands crammed with images of disaster and war. The sense of dread all around us tangled with the doom I felt at returning to my workaday life, one in which change and loss had shifted the borders so greatly in the past year that I felt I no longer knew myself. But my composer brother was so enthused upon discovering a late evening performance of John Tavener’s Ikon of Light that I donned my concert clothes and forayed out.
We barely made it in time, and I was still breathing hard as we collapsed into our seats and the lights dimmed. A calm man in a dark suit took the stage and addressed us with quiet, winning gravity.
“In tonight’s piece, one must think of the string section’s part as the cry of the soul, its reaching toward the light. And the answering choir, as the voice of the light itself.”
With that command he stepped off stage, and the lights died in the high, empty space, leaving only the spotlighted stage and the circle of three violinists with the black mass of the choir curved in a half moon behind them. The violinists lifted their bows and for a moment, waited. Arrested by their poise, the audience stilled, attention fixed to the waiting three on stage.
The music began almost before I was aware; a single note thrummed from a violin. A note of yearning that gathered insistence as the voice of the second violin joined its plea. But timid. The simple melody was a question, a request presented almost in fear; soul’s cry into the night, a sob out of ‘the hungering dark’ that Buechner describes in his book of that title. And it was met with the mighty, sudden crash of the choir, a startling, trenchant declaration of song that answered the wistful violin so robustly one felt the violin might retract in frightened silence.
But into the shocking hush that followed the choral statement came the violin’s renewed plea. The melody was a low request, a strengthened desire, and the voice of the second violin added a note of resolve that made the music something that reached into the darkness with set intent. The taste of that crashing light had strengthened the soul, heightened its longing. And when the light answered, the answer was richer than before.
On it went, back and forth, a conversation of a concert between violin and voice, soul and light, song and silence. And with the introductory words in my mind the music became a story to me, the image of my own soul’s hungry, yearning journey through the long valley of this life under high, cold stars. The music sang my constant inner reach toward the mountains of a future, an eternity, almost unimaginable, sang my ache for that fragile, silver line of dawn I sometimes glimpse to come and set me free from the darkness. Ah, the darkness.
The shadows were palpable that night. Death stalked the night just outside the music in the suffering of the wider world, in the memories haunting the concert. The performance that night was couched in the recollection of death, given on the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s entry upon the First World War. The music was chosen to usher listeners all over the country (hearing it via the BBC) into a contemplative hour in which people were invited to switch off their lights in memory and tribute to the multitudes who died on the battlefields of the Great War.
The darkness came very close when the music was done as the host came back on stage and asked those who had been given electric candles to switch them on. For an instant, light reigned as the hall shimmered with hundreds of starry flames that danced in the hands of those who waved them through the shadows. And then, they were told to switch them off. The stars died. And the loss of them felt like grief, like the dying out of the countless hopes and loves and joys of those whose lives so tragically ended. The hall grew dark and loudly quiet. An actor took the stage and read the words from the announcement a hundred years before that had plunged the whole country into a time of unimaginable loss.
Silence reigned. No fidgeting scratched against the quiet now. As if the utter, unnatural silence of hundreds in one room could offer some tribute to the dead, we kept a steeled hush. And in it, caged, I thought of the ongoing march of death through the world. I thought of those soldiers, hundreds of thousands, dead in their prime, now dust. I thought of those still fighting, of starving children, and the wailing of their mothers. I thought, almost with shame, of my own small pains and felt them joined with the wars and famines and fights raging throughout the world at the very moment of our vigil.
In his chapter on the Gospel as tragedy, I had only recently read Buechner’s words,
beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm within and the storm without, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start.[4]
Those words keened in my mind in that eerie silence.
A rustle from the stage drew my eye and I realized that the concert had ended. No light came up, no closing word was spoken. The choir and musicians left the stage, and in silence, the audience got to its feet and we left the darkened hall with its fierce echo of music, its record of sorrow begging for the grace of light.
Out into the twilit darkness of late-night London we strode. And for a long time, we simply walked. We skipped the first tube stop and walked the deserted dirt paths around the edge of Hyde Park. When the gravity of the silence that closed the concert had worn off a little in the temperate air with the heat of our breath and hard thump of our feet, we began to discuss the music. How it promised so much, those crashing affirmations of hope cried out through the notes of Tavener’s work. But how pervasive, how disturbing was the silence that followed the darkness.
How is hope kept in a night-black world? How can we push away fear? The same questions asked by the reader at opening of this essay dogged me as we walked. A hundred years on from the war that was supposed to end all wars with new battles splitting the earth every day, we have to ask ourselves what it means for light to come in the darkness. What hope do we have for peace? For safety? What does it mean to live by light, to reach for it, to believe its promise when people die and children suffer? How does the promise of light answer our pain? And how do we order our lives, our aching lives, in response?
We rounded a corner, swift in foot and thought, and stopped abruptly in our tracks. The trees around the park drew back and a long vista of city roofs and steeples and high-rise apartment buildings stabbed the navy sky. But above them all, bolder, outreaching them by what seemed a mile stretched a mighty shaft of light that shot right up toward the stars and bloomed into a blazing orb. The light was like a sword, like a prophet’s staff, clean and straight and unbreakable.
I remembered then that someone had told me a column of light would blaze in London to mark the WWI centenary. As I marveled at the power of the light, the way the darkness fell back from it, the opening words from the Gospel of John came to my mind, ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it’. I have always savored that verse and the presence of that word, ‘comprehend,’ with its different shades of meaning. The darkness neither understands the light, nor can it grasp it, wrap its hands around it, assimilate it into itself. Light, even a pinpoint star of it, will always stand free of shadow.
And abruptly I remembered the last piece of music played at the concert. In the solemn drama of the dark, dramatic ending, I had actually forgotten that the music had closed with a short choral arrangement of a poem by William Blake. The song was so gentle, so humble, it slipped almost forgettably in at the end of the brilliant musical battle before it. But it grew now in my mind, the rich, woven music and the words like a seed-bearing fruit in the loam of my mind:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead…
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb…
we are called by his name…
I stopped at the corner before the Tube stop, breathing hard. In that instant, the many symbols, the music, the light, the wavering dark that I had witnessed that evening drew together into a truth that flared in my mind like that staff of light in the London sky. And I knew that whoever had planned that concert had chosen the Blake song to be the quiet answer to the darkness that would inevitably attend us out of the hall. As we dispersed into the night, that song was a gift to accompany us, a shepherd in the valley of the shadow teaching us how to hope. For the Light whom the darkness could not overcome was a Lamb. A little lamb, a tiny, wailing babe born in a stable, robed in our fallen flesh, bearing our secret grief. But he was also the Light of the world, his life, ‘the light of men.’
And like that column of light in the darkness, he also was lifted up, blazing, into the sky of history. He was bound to a crude, hooked, splintery cross, beaten until his brightness faded into blood and pain, so that it seemed at first that Light could die. Like the millions of others on the battlefields and barren mountaintops. Like the hearts whose light is extinguished by loneliness or desolation. But the darkness could not comprehend him, because the light he bore within himself was Love, and Love shines like flame in the darkness of this world and there is no power that can put it out because it offers itself wholly to answer every grief.
I had not yet read Buechner’s luminous chapter on the Gospel as fairy tale, but when I did, I instantly recognized that column of light as a kind of mythical symbol, an embodied narrative a little like the many great fantastical stories and fairy tales Buechner profiles (Narnia and Middle Earth, Phantastes and King Lear). What fairy tales teach us, what ‘joy’ itself teaches us (amidst a winter morning or a snowy sunrise), writes Buechner, is that ‘this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light’[5] is the Gospel. The difference is, of course, that the crucial claim of triumph made in the Gospel’s true fairy tale is factually true, that it ‘not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.’[6]
And this is the answer to the fear that does often still haunt even us who believe: the light that is eternal love remakes pain. Love does not deny pain. It doesn't cancel out war and loneliness and loss as if it never existed. It doesn’t cause or require them for its purposes, but in an act of redemptive defiance, Love comes into our suffering and takes the very substance of our pain and by the power of its own nature, by the alchemy of total self-gift, creates redemption. The conquering Light isn’t only outside of us, on the horizon of history.
The Light indwells us. By the gift of that fragile, gentle lamb, Light makes homes and worlds within the darkness of the grieving human heart. Throughout that night, in the music, in the light blazing above London, I had recognized a light beyond the darkness, drawing my desire. Now, I felt that light stir in my own heart. When any soul cries out for the presence of the light, like the violins in their keening desire, the answer isn’t merely a crashing glory outside ourselves, nor even just the promise of Light to one day conquer. Our answer is the voice of Love speaking within us, eternal Light present now, burning in the core room of our hearts.
And by that Light we live. In its strength, we order our days not by the darkness we see, but by the great dawn that indwells us. Like figures in a living fairy tale, we become agents of that light, claiming 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… the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be.[7]
There it is, the answer, the way we learn little by little to ‘not be afraid’ amidst the beauty and terror of our lives. An answer it will take the whole of our lives, and perhaps a little of Eternity to learn, as I think Buechner well knew. We follow the Lamb, whose bearing of our sorrow meant that he, in Buechner’s luminous words, took ‘fire into his own sweet flesh, so that the other men can take life.’[8] That’s what I wrote to my friend, and what I am learning to speak to myself. When I do, when I manage to stand within that light, I’m reminded of an old phrase I learned long ago:
Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur.
Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow.
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, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 139.
[2] Frederick Buechner Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), p. 5.
[3] Ibid, p.43.
[4] Ibid, p.33.
[5] Ibid, p.90.
[6] Ibid, p.90.
[7] Ibid, p.91.
[8] Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark (New York: Seabury Press, 1968).
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