Quotes by "Frederick Buechner"

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

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.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.

Go where your best prayers take you.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

One day I was having lunch with two students who were talking about whatever they were talking about - the weather, the movies - when without warning one of them asked the other as naturally as he would have asked the time of day what God was doing in his life. If there is anything in this world I believe, it is that God is indeed doing all kinds of things in the lives of all of us including those who do not believe in God and would have nothing to do with him if they did, but in the part of the East where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither I think the very air would stop my mouth if I opened it to speak such words among just about any group of people I can think of in the East because their faith itself, if they happen to have any, is one of the secrets that they have kept so long that it might almost as well not exist. The result was that to find myself at Wheaton among people who, although they spoke about it in different words from mine and expressed it in their lives differently, not only believed in Christ and his Kingdom more or less as I did but were also not ashamed or embarrassed to say so was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years.

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.

Somos todos mais místicos do que acreditamos ou queremos crer (...). Temos visto mais do que deixamos transparecer, até para nós mesmos. Seja em momentos de beleza ou dor, seja por meio de alguma reviravolta sutil em nossa vida, ao menos vislumbramos o que cegou os santos; só que, ao contrário dos santos, seguimos em frente como se nada tivesse acontecido. Seguir em frente ciente de que algo aconteceu, apesar de não ter certeza do que foi, nem do que fazer com o que ocorreu, é entrar na dimensão da vida de que trata a palavra religião.