How Frederick Buechner Helped Me Understand My Calling
The pastor-writer who taught me that my gladness can serve the needs of others.
Now that he’s gone, I’m astonished to realize just how little I actually read by Frederick Buechner. None of his novels, bits and pieces of his memoirs, and a handful of his sermons. That’s it.
You wouldn’t think that would be enough to make a real impact on someone, any more than you would expect that a Presbyterian pastor educated at Union Seminary would be so widely appreciated by evangelicals like me.1 And yet I don’t think it’s a sentimental exaggeration to say that Frederick Buechner, who died yesterday at age 96, did as much as anyone to help me understand and articulate my vocation: as a Christian, and as a teacher and scholar.
That he taught me about calling will come as no surprise. Buechner’s notion that God calls each of us “to the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet” is so common as to feel like cliché.
If that’s how his formula lands with you, go back to the original articulation of it, a sermon on Isaiah 6:1-9 preached to high schoolers in 1969:
To Isaiah, the voice said, “Go,” and for each of us there are many voices that say it, but the question is which one will we obey with our lives, which of the voices that call is to be the one we answer. No one can say, of course, except each for himself, but I believe that it is possible to say at least this in general to all of us: we should go with our lives where we most need to go and where we are most needed.
While “the great blaring, boring, banal voice of our mass culture” tells us to save “gladness” for the weekend, Buechner insists that gladness is the very voice that will call us where we most need to go — wherever we feel “the strongest sense of sailing true north and of peace.”2
Some critics have misread Buechner as endorsing something like narcissism or vacuous self-actualization. But the voice of gladness calls us to ourselves for the sake of others, to meet their needs. In the heartrending prayer that closes the sermon, Buechner asks God to remind the young that those who follow the voice of gladness do not seek after their own happiness, but after joy, which he says
is to him alone who, sometimes with tears in his eyes, commits himself in love to thee and to his brothers. Lead them and all thy world ever deeper into the knowledge that finally all men are one and that there can never really be joy for any until there is joy for all.
So while I can’t get up in front of a class or start to write without recognizing in my gladdened spirit “the strongest sense of sailing true north and of peace,” Buechner also helps me understand my vocation in terms of my relationship to others.3 What else is the Christian practice of studying and teaching history but committing oneself in love — sometimes tearfully — to the God who works within time and to our neighbors in the past?
I often share Buechner’s 1969 sermon with my students, everywhere from first-year surveys to our department’s capstone seminar. Because if they don’t need his wisdom, I need to hear his words again and again myself. I can’t always ignore the “blaring, boring, banal voice” telling me that I don’t make enough money or hold enough status. I question whether anything I’ve done in twenty years of teaching has made any meaningful difference.
But Buechner not only helps me make sense of how I got where I am as a history professor; he reminds me of the urgent necessity of what I’m doing, despite all the uncertainty surrounding my work. Bethel’s enrollment might continue to decline and budget cuts might perpetually loom over our heads; constituents might question our faith or the value of the liberal arts. Yet (to borrow still more of his prayer) I continue to believe with Frederick Buechner that there are “words of truth and healing that will never be spoken unless [we] speak them, and deeds of compassion and courage that will never be done unless [we] do them.”
And that’s not just true for historians and teachers, pastors and writers. Your gladness is as particular as the needs of those whom you can serve, so those two voices will sound different for each of us. But tuning your ear to that duet, Buechner teaches, ultimately reveals your share in the general vocation of all Christians: that is,
the calling to be Christs. To be Christs in whatever way we are able to be. To be Christs with whatever gladness we have and in whatever place, among whatever brothers we are called to. That is the vocation, the destiny to which we were all of called even before the foundations of the world.
Peace be to the memory of Frederick Buechner.
“At first glance,” wrote Russell Moore in a 2017 tribute for Christianity Today, “he doesn’t seem like one of us.” But Buechner “teaches us to feel what it is to suffer with Christ, but then to be held by him—to know he is there to hold us… Once again, Buechner drove me further into my evangelical identity, not away from it.”
Because I’ve only read and never heard him, I can only hear Buechner’s voice as a version of my own. But I imagine him to sound quiet and gentle, the opposite of so many evangelical preachers. I first read his sermon on Isaiah 6 in a collection entitled Secrets in the Dark, which takes its title from a sermon on the disciples’ response to the Resurrection: “It was the most extraordinary thing they believed had ever happened, and yet they tell it so quietly that you have to lean close to be sure what they are telling. They tell it as softly as a secret, as something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable, and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to dishonor it. To proclaim the resurrection the way they do, you would have to say it in whispers: ‘Christ has risen.’ Like that.”
My friend Sam Mulberry often tells his students about a famous passage in Buechner’s memoir, Telling Secrets. Why tell one’s story?, Buechner asks himself. “[N]ot because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.” And so Sam suggests that one value of history, like memoir, is that it helps us “keep track… of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way,” through which “God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.”