Secrets in the Dark

I finally finished Frederick Buechner's collection of sermons, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. Normally I don't have to spend 2 months on one book, and if it takes me that long to read, I lose interest long before I finish it. However since it was a collection of sermons, it was more like 37 short-stories together. I really should have been writing my thoughts on Secrets the whole time I was reading it, because it's difficult to look back over 2 months' reading and really remember what struck me or stuck with me. (That's why underlining is so useful to me.)

Reading sermons that I've never heard spoken before always makes me wonder if I would grasp as much, if I listened to them first, as I do when I'm reading them - or would grasp more. Although I've never yet had the chance to listen to Buechner's preaching, his style is such that I can almost hear a warm, low, gentle voice exhorting and explaining such issues as the pain of a loved one's death, the first new breath of Christ on Resurrection Day, the importance of Communion, or the Eucharist - "The Blood of Christ, Freddy, the Body of Christ." The security, warmth and familiarity of home - our Home in Christ. He explores some issues close to heart; some sermons I thought were rather inconsequential; one, in fact, I thought unbiblical. Yet what I found most resonating in his words was his repeated theme that - Christ is the fulfillment of our desires, our hopes, our expectations, the One Way to the kingdom of God; Christ is found when we love one another, sacrifice ourselves for each other, look beyond the outer cloak of flesh and bones, and see truly the immortal soul that we can have a hand in transforming, for either good or evil.

So, a few high points/underline-worthy moments.....

...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. ("Message in the Stars")

...It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, beause 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. ("The Calling of Voices")

..."Remember the wonderful works that he has done," goes David's song - remember what he has done in the lives of each of us...remember those moments in our own lives when with only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing we have glimpsed that Christ's kind of life is the only life that matters and that all other kinds of life are riddled with death; remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us, by the power of Christ alive within them...because we remember, we have this high and holy hope: that what he has done, he will continue to do, that what he has begun in us and our world, he will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition. ("A Room Called Remember")

...Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things. ("Faith")

...And God knows we have all had our wilderness and our temptations too - not the temptations to work evil probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one - to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth. ("The Two Stories")

...We really can't hear what the stories of the Bible are saying until we hear them as stories about ourselves. ("The Seeing Heart")