Session Soul Survivor
How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church
by Phillip Yancey

Buechner, Endo, Donne and Dillard

Section Internet Links Wayne's Notes Jock"s Notes Back to Index
Wayne's Notes.

1. Frederick Buechner


Yancey said this to summarize Frederich Buechner and his influence: "By attending to his life, I learned to pay attention to my own."

So for me, the most important message of this chapter is: "Listen to your life." But there are other valuable discoveries as well.

Buechner was a novelist before he became a preacher, and, in a way, he never stopped being a novelist and storyteller, even when he preached (248). The first, and most impressive book of his that I read was one of his early ones, actually his Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale in the 1970s: Telling the Truth - The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale through which he demonstrates how story can transform the minds of hearers, transporting them in a new imaginative world. It is also a book that summarizes a lot of what Buechner is about.

We must tell our stories to someone, says Buechner (261). For him writing was a form of therapy, as well as a spiritual questing after truth, and an entre into mystery.

Story, therefore, was narrative and autobiography (248-9) Buechner says that for a preacher, and for all of us Christians, storytelling is both Jesus' story and our own. We can only write with identification and passion about our own experiences, and no one else's (262).

When we tell stories, we reveal God's presence in the world (250). Many modern writers have plumbed the despair of a world where God is strangely absent (Deus absconditus) but few have tried to tackle the reality of what God's presence (Deus revelatus) might mean. These themes are not new. Augustine and Luther have been writing about them during fifteen hundred years of Christian history! These two Latin terms are usually used together, and they imply that God's presence is usually veiled in mystery (252).

Literature at its best deals with how the ordinary events and experiences of life are able to because great teachers. Like the word sacramental, the ordinary things become extraordinary. Canadian writers like Carol Shields help us to appreciate that. Read medieval myths; listen to the news of the day; journal your day's experiences, says Buechner. In all of that, "Listen to your life." If God speaks at all in this world, God speaks in our everyday, personal lives. So make sure to attend to the ordinary.

Stories can provide the best bridges between people. Buechner tried to write for the general public, as well as for religious people, but it frustrated him. He confesses: "I am too religious for the secular reader and too secular for the religious reader" (267). So, he does not want to be known as a Christian novelist. Rather, as a novelist who happens to be a Christian (268). He straddles both worlds, perhaps in a limited way - he says.

Yet, he continues, people of faith stumble across God everywhere, while the secular mind sees no such evidence (269). He must be honest. I must be true to my search, wherever that may lead me. "Too much Christian literature gives off the scent of rationalization (without facing up to doubt, struggle and despair)," he adds. It is easy to understand why Yancey appreciates Buechner. Through writing, it is possible for the truth to be told," he ends (270).

2. Endo

Shusaku Endo was the storyteller of the Japanese apostates. Consider the image of the 'fumie' a bronze portrait of Jesus, or of the Madonna and child, that persecuted Japanese Christians were forced to stamp on with their feet at a gesture of recanting their faith.

"Step on it, be free; refuse, and be killed," was the choice offered to Christians during a time of religious persecution in Japan. Many did give up their faith. Endo investigated the reasons some did. In spite of the fact he was a Christian-seeker himself the fact that he asked such questions made him a threat to the Japanese Christian community.

Endo was determined to tell the stories of those who abandoned their faith, because, as a Christian he came to believe from the Gospels that Jesus sided with those who were rejected by their own. He struggled to claim a faith (Roman Catholic) against his will. Yancey could identify with that. He too had sought to claim his faith and was rejected by his own.

In the process of his writing about the apostates, Endo discovered and developed his idea of Jesus as a suffering servant (or, as Henri Nouwen would say, of the 'wounded healer').

Both Yancey and Endo could identify with this image of Jesus. "I discovered the Jesus of reversal," Endo says. "I met someone whose message centered on the rejects" (280).

Yancey assesses Endo - "a Japanese man, rejected by the Christian West and his own fellow-Japanese Christians, re-introduced me to Jesus." His books made Endo famous in Japan, in spite of those of his own faith who did not read him. What irony!

"No important modern novelist has worked so exclusively with such Christian themes as Endo" (281).

Eastern and Western Christians of the world focus on different values. For example, God, sin, guilt and moral crisis have litter relevance to Japanese readers. They are more stoic and value persistent love and faith. Endo was able to take people from the Japanese Christian story and romanticize them. He was able to say that it was for traitors that Jesus died.

Endo attempted to write the story of a Japanese Jesus (286). His was not a story of the Western Jesus of beauty and majesty, but the biblical Jesus of selflessness and servanthood. In a true sense, this Eastern writer discovered a Jesus in the Bible that those of us in the West have often failed to see. Endo emphasised the mothering values of Jesus - delineating the motherlove of God; the forgiver; the binder of wounds. This was done to provide a corrective to an overemphasize on the commonly held fathering values of Jesus - authoritarian, unapologetic, emotionally distant.

So, in conclusion, Yancey discovered in the personal writings and experience of Frederich Buechner and Shusaku Endo some spiritual correctives to mentor his own life. From Buechner he learned to listen to his life. From Endo, he discovered a Jesus of reversal.

Jock's Notes.

John Donne. When wrestling with how to give a eulogy for a friend who dyed of aids and so unable to find words of compassion and understanding in the familar words and practices of the church, he found John Donne spoke of pain and suffering so well Donne's words of understanding reached Yancey and his friends over the centuries.Donne lived when the plague was killing a third of the people. And when he was sick and believed dying of the plague he reflected on pain and suffering in a volume that still stands as insightful. The anglicanlibrary.org maintains an on-line library of many traditional anglican public domain works including some of John Donne including a sermon on the theology of death. Here is there link to his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (this links to a commonly quoted chapter 17). There is much of doctors and patients, of the daily grind and roller coaster of illness that make it a comforting read even today. Some of it argues with God as did Job. And in other parts there is great insight. Here is a taste:
... when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
... Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security. .
.. My God, my God, is this one of thy ways of drawing light out of darkness, to make him for whom this bell tolls, now in this dimness of his sight, to become a superintendent, an overseer, a bishop, to as many as hear his voice in this bell, and to give us a confirmation in this action? Is this one of thy ways, to raise strength out of weakness, to make him who cannot rise from his bed, nor stir in his bed, come home to me, and in this sound give me the strength of healthy and vigorous instructions?
Often it seems a person is called into service from a life of self centred endeavor. Such a transition is always remarkable. John Donne had been such a wastrel, becoming an Anglican priest at 42, a single dad of 7 children, His courage to stay in London in the plague and his eloquence as a preacher increased his respect. But it was his brush with death that tempered his steel. Yancey calls it the "mystery of suffering". And the principle gift Yancey seems to receive from reading Donne, is that in suffering Donne does not experience a condeming God but rather a "trustworthy physician" Says Yancey,
"That is why, following Donne, I turn for perspective to the central reason for trusting God: his son Jesus. How does God feel about those who die, even as a result of their own transpressions? Is God scowling, as the street prophets in John Donne's day warned, and some in our own day insist? Does God even care about the loss, anger, and fear that we feel? We need not wonder how God feels, because in Jesus, God gave us a face." (p214)
Yancey tells us another thing that issues from suffering and is to be found in Donne. At some point we shift our focus from the illness back to health and become the stronger for it. This is certainly something I can attest to, both observing it and experiencing it. Not only is what was taken for granted now precious, but what remains is treasured more and nurtured. And from travelling the path, one can advise others walking the path. This becomes the new protocol of acceptance - not quiet resignation, but active exploration.
Annie Dillard. Dillard clarified for Yancey what being a writer meant. In a sense then she was specifically a writer's mentor who speaking from a faith perspective meant much to Yancey. What is there for others? A difference with Dillard was that she never had the soul wrenching disenchantment with the church that Yancey experienced, but grew in her faith. Dillards work earned her a Pulitzer prize at age 30. She brought people attention to the beauty in the world.
"I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners."
Yancey recounts discussing with Dillard that one "should not go to nature to construct theology, but to nature once we have our theology and let her fill the words - awe glory, beauty, terror - with meaning." (p 234) and her rejoinder to "approach the whole chaos of nature as if it were God's book. For many of my readers, that's the only book of God they will read."

Dillard converted to Catholicism, appreciating the mix of it, finding the protestant flavours of community too much encouraging their distinctions. She like Yancey wonders why we Christians don't act on our belief.
"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?" (p139)
Her life and her witness is to be authentic where you are. And where you are to notice the holy. She is known as an environmental ethicist. She has her own website

William James in his famous lecture series "The Varieties of Religious Experience" in 1901 (Link to Glyn Hughes "Squashed Version" on line.) spoke about gradual integration of the divided self. That may well explain the differences in the faith journies of these different people we are studying, and indeed of our own histories.

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St. David's United Church.Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
October
2004