Book Review #13 – “Peculiar Treasures” by Frederck Buechner (real characters in the Bible); 1979 by Harper & Row Publ.
“You shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people, My own special property; for all the earth is Mine.” (Exodus 19:5).
Brief Bio of Frederick Buechner (1926-2022). There’s a good reason Buechner was considered one of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th-21st Centuries while earning so many national book awards. Yes, he was a brilliant wordsmith with his own unique style, and a literary craftsman. Yes, one could be forgiven for thinking first of Buechner when one hears the cliche, “He just seems to have a way with words.” It’s not just his lyrical skills, though, that elevated his stature as a writer. It was also the sheer variety of his writings. He never met a genre he didn’t like and that didn’t like him right back. The sheer varieties of his self-expression were mind-boggling… forty books published in all, including his notable success as a novelist: His best-selling trilogy, The Book of Bebb; his historical novel about a 6th century Irish monk (Brendan) in which Buechner composed the entire story in authentic language of that era; another historical fiction about a 12th century saint (Godric) written once again in the language of that time period; a biblical fiction of the story of Isaac (The Son of Laughter) written in completely believable biblical language. But we can’t stop there… Buechner authored biblical commentaries, spiritual memoirs, collections of sermons and essays and lectures. And he composed hilarious, witty and insightful thoughts regarding the Christian faith and Scripture into completely unique formats that made the Bible come alive: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (later renamed A Seekers ABC); Telling Truth: On the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale; and Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who. It’s obvious that Buechner had an imagination that was constantly starving for attention. He was always on the lookout for expressing something old in a fresh, new way. So in his writing there is something for everyone. All of us are so grateful that he didn’t seem tempted to stay in his own lane. As a result, many called him unpredictable, completely unique and unforgettable. Some called him a secular saint, but he could be described just as easily as a seeking doubter. At one point in an interview he said that, “I always hope to reach people who don’t want to touch religion with a ten-foot pole.” And he was good to his word as he expressed impatience with religious cliches or sanctimonious platitudes. He was unapologetic about calling out those who were doing Christianity no favors. Buechner was especially transparent about his troubled early family history and his subsequent mental health struggles: How his father died of suicide when Fred was only ten years old and how it has haunted him ever since; how Frederick has struggled with depression all his life, along with a “demon of anxiety” and a “floating sense of doom.'” He had a lifelong sense of grief and insecurity, and he expressed his helplessness when his daughter was struggling with anorexia. But Buechner was also candid about how his facing his brokenness helped to bond him intimately and mysteriously with God, and how he was strengthened to pursue healing and hope as a result. So then, through his writing and his personal life, Buchner refused to be put into a box. And we’re all the better for it. God bless him.
Quotable Quotes by Frederick Buechner:
“I always hope to reach people who don’t want to touch religion with a ten-foot pole.”
“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
“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.”
“Go where your best prayers take you.”
“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
“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.”
“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . . ”
“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.”
“If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.”
“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . ”
“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
“Coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention.”
“A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.”
“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. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”
“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.”
“To be wise is to be eternally curious.
“It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name….That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.”
“It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing–the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing–to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints. And then there is the love for the enemy–love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.”
“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?”
“We must be careful with our lives, for Christ’s sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.”
Mr. Buechner’s Introduction to “Peculiar Treasures”: “A few years ago I wrote a book called “Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC”, in which I tried to shake a little of the dust off a lot of moth-eaten old religious words and put some color back in their cheeks. It was my plan in this book to do the same stunt with a lot of the moth-eaten old saints, prophets, potentates and assorted sinners who roam through the pages of the Bible, but what I got for my presumption was exactly the reverse. Who did I think was moth-eaten? They were the ones who shook the dust off me, as things turned out, and if there’s any color either in my cheeks or in these pages, it’s mostly because they put it there. Again and again, I would start out thinking I knew who they were and what I wanted them to say to me, and again and again they dug in their heels. Not only did they refuse to be who I thought they were and insist on being themselves instead, but more often than not what I ended up saying about them were the words that they put in my mouth. What struck me more than anything else as I reacquainted myself with this remarkable rag-bag of people was both their extraordinary aliveness and their power to make me feel somehow more alive myself for having known them. Even across the centuries, they still have the power to bring tears to my eyes and send shivers up the spine. And more besides. Saints and scoundrels, nabobs and nobodies, they galvanize all the pages they appear on…”
Some Highlights of “Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who”…
Elisha. “It was a hot day as the prophet Elisha made his way up to Bethel where he had business to attend to. Pausing near a camping ground for a bit of shade, he was mopping his bald scalp with a corner of his prayer shawl when a boy scout troop broke ranks and surrounded him. They threw bottle caps at him, and they made rude gestures. ‘Skin-head’ and ‘Chrome-dome’ and ‘Curly’ they called at him till finally the old man had enough. He made a few passes at them, muttered a few words, and within seconds a couple of she-bears lumbered out from the trees behind the picnic tables and mauled some of the slower members of the troop rather badly. It is not the most edifying story in the Old Testament, but there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from it even so. The Lord does not call everyone to be Mister Rogers, for instance, and there is no need to try making a fool out of a prophet because sooner or later he will probably make one out of himself.”
Barabbas. “Pilate told the people that they could choose to spare the life of either a murderer named Barabbas or Jesus of Nazareth, and they chose Barabbas. Given the same choice, Jesus, of course, would have chosen to spare Barabbas too. To understand the reason in each case would be to understand much of what the New Testament means by saying that Jesus is the Savior, and much of what it means too by saying that, by and large, people are in bad need of being saved.”
Sarah. “Quantitively speaking, you don’t find all that much laughter in the Bible, but qualitatively, there’s nothing quite like it to be found anywhere else… Sarah was never going to see ninety again, and Abraham had already hit one hundred, and when the angel told them that the stork was on his way at last, they both of them almost collapsed. Abraham laughed ’till he fell on his face,’ and Sarah stood cackling behind the tent door so the angel wouldn’t think she was being rude as the tears streamed down her cheeks. When the baby finally came, they even called him Laughter – which is what Isaac means in Hebrew – because obviously no other name would do. Nobody claims there’s a chuckle on every page, but laughter’s what the whole Bible is really about. Nobody who knows his hat from home-plate claims that getting mixed up with God is all sweetness and light, but ultimately it’s what that’s all about too. At that moment when the angel told them they’d better start dipping into their old age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on Sarah and Abraham that the wildest dreams they’d ever had hadn’t been half wild enough.”
Amos. “When the prophet Amos walked down the main drag, it was like a shoot-out in the Old West. Everybody ran for cover. His special target was The Beautiful People, and shooting from the hip, he never missed his mark. According to Amos, it won’t be the shortage of food and fun that will hurt. It will be the shortage ‘of hearing the words of the Lord’. Towards that end, God will make Himself so scarce that the world won’t even know what it’s starving to death for.”
Pilate. “As the Roman governor, Pilate had the last word. He could have saved Jesus if he’d wanted to, and all indications are that for various reasons that’s what he’d like to have done. But for him, it was not so much the terrible thing he’d done as the wonderful thing he’d proved incapable of doing. He could have stuck to his guns and resisted the pressure and told the chief priests to go to hell, where they were obviously heading anyway. He could have spared the man’s life. Or if that is asking too much, he could have spared him at least the scourging and catcalls and the appalling way he died. Or if that is still asking too much, he could have spoken some word of comfort when there was nobody else in the world with either the chance or the courage to speak it. He could have shaken his hand. He could have said good-bye. He could have made some two-bit gesture which, even though it would have made no ultimate difference, to him would have made all the difference.”
David. “David had the ark loaded onto a custom-built cart and made a regular circus parade of it, complete with horns, harps, cymbals, and psalteries, not to mention himself high-stepping out front like the Mayor of Dublin on Saint Patrick’s Day. So far it was none of it anything a good public relations man couldn’t have dreamed up for him, but the next thing was something else again. He stripped down to his skivvies, and then with everybody looking on, he did a dance. With trumpets blaring and drums beating, for once that royal young red-head didn’t have to talk up the bright future and the high hopes because he was himself the future at its brightest, and there were no hopes higher than the ones his people had in him. How they cut loose together, David and Yahweh, whirling around before the ark in such a passion that they caught fire from each other and blazed up in a single flame of such magnificence that not even the dressing-down David got from Michal afterwards could dim the glory of it.”