The Plot of Your Life
Day 21
Buechner continues to reflect on the connection between story and faith.
“I think that a part of what to tell one's own story in a religious sense means is to affirm that there is a plot to one's life. It's not just incident following incident without any particular direction or purpose, but things are happening in order to take you somewhere. Just the way a story begins and has a middle and an end. Things are somehow wrapped up at the end, and everything in some fashion can be seen to have led to this inevitable conclusion and to have had its own place, however circumstantial and odd and out-of-the-way some of those things that happened may have been. They had their purpose in the overall shape and texture and reality of one's story.
“That certainly is what I discovered when I wrote those autobiographical books looking back at my life and finding that very often things that seemed at the time to have had very little significance were key points in the plot of my life. I can see myself at eleven or twelve in Bermuda as vividly as I see the line of trees out my window now, wheeling my bicycle up the little dirt path on one of the hills, and down toward me comes an Anglican priest dressed the way they did in the day of Laurence Sterne with gaiters and a black coat and a broad brim flat hat through the golden dust and the green palm leaves and the coral walls. It was a moment I've never forgotten because it was part of the plot of my life. I remember it because it was a clue to what my whole life and faith is all about.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp59-60.
To help you reflect…
How do you feel about the idea of your life having a plot? Do you have a sense that life has tried - or is trying - to take you somewhere?
And/or…
“…looking back at my life [I found'] that very often things that seemed at the time to have had very little significance were key points in the plot of my life.”
Looking back at your own life, what seemingly insignificant events have turned out to be key points in the plot of your life?
