Saints are Life-Givers
Day 25
Buechner begins a new chapter, “A Long Way to Go”. In this chapter, Buechner tells the story of his childhood and the impact his father’s suicide - and the consequent secrecy around it - had on him and his family. He writes, “What happened then, and what perhaps is the reason why it remains a shadow, is that it was (as in so many dysfunctional families, to use that jargon phrase) a secret that we simply never told.” To honour Buechner’s story, I won’t be sharing snippets from it here - I would rather you read and reflect on the whole story, exactly as he has chosen to tell it. If you have a copy of the book and this topic feels safe for you to be with, you may like to read it some time this week and notice what it stirs inside you.
In yesterday’s passage, ‘The Subterranean, Life-Giving Grace of God’, Buechner described how telling his story helped him to notice the cracks in the surface of his life that allowed him to glimpse the subterranean grace of God. Today’s passage appears in the middle of Buechner’s retelling of the story of his childhood and it seems to me to be a wonderful example of a crack in the ground of his life that allowed him to glimpse the subterranean, life-giving grace of God in his life.
“We've all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars, not people setting for us a sort of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life-givers, people through knowing whom we become more alive. She was one of my earliest saints, a marvelous articulate, witty woman who spoke beautifully, spoke in paragraphs, had a great taste for literature, and a wonderful sense of humor, half-French-Swiss half New England. So we lived there with her, and that was one of the joys of it.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp76-77.
To help you reflect….
Who has been a life-giver for you? What was, or is, it like to be with them? What gifts did, or do, they offer you? What do they nurture or call forth in you?
Find a way to honour your life-giving saints today.
