Not long after I became the owner of this volume, my beloved Aunt Carr died. She died in mid-October, and in the weeks that followed, the readings (selected by the great George Connor, Buechner’s friend and a career professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) focused on the theme of All Saints Day. In the throes of my first experience of loss and grief, these words rose from the page to meet me: “How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them.”*
In the spring of my junior year, my mom let me take a whole week off from school to join her at Kanuga Conference Center (my favorite place on earth, where I had grown up going to summer camp and youth conferences), where Frederick Buechner was the keynote speaker at the Bowen Conference. Needless to say, I was the youngest attendee by decades, but by then I had read all of Buechner’s autobiographical writing and had started in on his novels.
The conference mostly consisted of Buechner reading from his most recent memoir, The Longing for Home, as well as a series of unpublished prose poems about his ancestors. My mom recently sent me copies of the recordings of that Bowen Conference, which I had to listen to little by little when I was in the car, since that is the only place where I still have a functioning CD player. As I took in those words again, I realized that Frederick Buechner was my first teacher in the art of memoir, and the earliest evidence that one’s life does not have to include fame or notoriety to reflect the divine – in fact, the most ordinary moments are likely the most holy.
One afternoon, the conference had smaller breakout sessions, and I split off from my mom to join a group crowded into the Fireplace Lounge. At some point, another participant made a comment about having tried to share Buechner’s writings with her teenage son, who had no interest. This set off a string of supposedly good-natured but also rather pointedly ageist remarks about how the finer points of Buechner’s writing were totally lost on the young and required much more life experience to truly appreciate.
I sat for a few minutes brimming with adolescent ire, until I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I remember little of the transcript of my outburst, but I know I stood up and informed the group that as a 17-year-old, I was just as capable of appreciating good writing as anyone, and that they should think – and look around the room – before making such sweeping comments about an entire age group. For the rest of the conference, I had a steady stream of my fellow participants approaching me (and my mom) to commend me for sticking up for myself and my peers.
Despite my minor celebrity, when Frederick Buechner had a book signing later in the week, I was too shy to say much of anything when it was my turn to approach the table with my copy of Listening to Your Life. Instead, as was my style, I drafted a long letter about my love of his writing and my experience at the conference, which I mailed when I got home, using the address list we had received for all participants.
A few weeks later his handwritten reply arrived:
13 Aug ‘96
Dear Rebecca,
Please forgive me for not having answered sooner your long, good letter of July 9. Not only did my extraordinary birthday take place [his 70th] amidst a clamorous group of children, grandchildren and old friends, but I then found myself caught up in a six-week writing binge during which I completed a book that gave me more pleasure in the writing than anything I’ve ever done before.
I’m surprised and appalled that your youth was held against you at Kanuga like the wrong color skirt or a police record, but the folly and insensitivity of the human race can never be overestimated. But I’m glad that all in all you had a good time anyway and met some nice people too.
Thanks so much for writing, and for your kind words about my books.
With all best wishes,
Frederick Buechner
This note, written 26 years and 2 days ago, has remained tucked inside my book ever since. I keep it near the entry for October 31, where this passage is underlined and starred: “By the time I was sixteen, I knew as surely as I knew anything that the work I wanted to spend my life doing was the work of words. I did not yet know what I wanted to say with them. I did not yet know in what form I wanted to say it or to what purpose. But if a vocation is as much the work that chooses you as the work you choose, then I knew from that time on that my vocation was, for better or worse, to involve that searching for, and treasuring, and telling of secrets which is what the real business of words is all about.”**
Not everyone gets to meet the authors who have influenced them in their formative years, and I am extremely fortunate to have had that opportunity. It was nothing short of an incarnational experience, as the person behind the words that had impacted me so strongly became flesh – and not only that, but became someone who would take a break from speaking, teaching, and writing what was, by my calculation, his 30th published book, to respond to a teenage girl in Tennessee.
Aside from the actual content of the letter (I so often recall that casually imparted wisdom: “the folly and insensitivity of the human race can not be overestimated”), the mere existence of this piece of paper affirmed me in my earliest years of listening to my own life and writing down what I heard, of taking myself seriously even though the number of my years was barely into the double digits.
Frederick Buechner died today at the age of 96, more than a quarter century after that big birthday celebration of his. His influence was sweeping and, in my case, very specific. I will always remain grateful for his words and for his kindness.
*from The Sacred Journey, 21-22
**from The Sacred Journey, 73-74
