It was the music of Wes King that led me to the books of Frederick Buechner.  King’s “Magnificent Defeat” was inspired by a Buechner sermon of the same name.  I remember in college reading through Buechner’s sermons and early biographical works (particularly The Sacred Journey, which I would eventually use in a class).  Discovering Buechner was a creative turn for me, finding a preacher who wielded words well and to great effect, who captured something about the sentiment of living without falling into sentimentality.  I’m thankful I have his writings to carry with me as I grow older.

Musician Andrew Peterson recently posted an “address” he recently delivered at the Buechner Institute at King College titled “The Consolations of Doubt.”  From the start, Peterson captures something great about Buechner’s style and influence.

Once upon a time I lived in a world of dirt roads and diamondbacks. Alligators haunted the lakes, four wheelers and hunters haunted the woods, and as Flannery O’Connor famously said, Christ haunted the South. He was everywhere. He was in the Bible verse printed on the front page of the church bulletin, he was in the oddly hyphenated words in the hymnbook, he showed up on the church marquee, he was prayed to before the football games and before meals, he was on bumper stickers next to confederate flags, his name lifted jubilantly from the tongues of worshipers during four hour Sunday meetings on one side of the tracks, and on the other the name of Jesus launched like a rocket from my father’s mouth as he paced behind the podium where the white folks sat dutifully and muttered an occasional “Amen.”

Buechner’s sermons always remind you that your own story is a nestled story, told in the messy context of day-to-day life full of vital detail.

From there, Peterson tells of his own idiosyncratic struggle with the doubts of faith and how Buechner’s challenge to “listen to your life” helped him understand that struggle well.  He weaves in Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis and Michael Card and the doubts of faith and then brings things together.

Before Buechner I had no context in which to admit to myself, let alone to anyone else, that this God, this basket in whom I have deposited every last one of my eggs, was a mystery as much as he was a revelation. Because of Buechner’s frank and persistent admission that he isn’t quite sure about this whole Jesus thing 100% of the time—and lest you get defensive on his behalf, why don’t we all just admit here that it’s just as true of us?—I found myself opening up to a new and deeper consolation than that of surety—the consolation of doubt.

The consolation that comes when one traveler says to the other, “I’ve been here before, and I still don’t know where I’m going. It’s a mystery, but at least we’re in this thing together.” And wherever two or more are gathered in his name, even if they’re lost and angry and doubtful and confused, Jesus is in their midst. Maybe especially so.

The whole address is a worthy effort and a great way to spend some time.  You can read the whole thing here.

(image from urbansimplicity.net)