What Frederick Buechner Means to Me
July 11, 2026, Celebrating Buechner’s 100th Birthday
I wish I could remember the first time I read Frederick Buechner or who told me about him. Perhaps his first piece appeared in the Listening for God series, in which Buechner reflects on his life and invites us to do the same. What spoke to me was his honesty, his deep understanding of his own suffering, and the way he lived through it. The video also showed a very sympathetic minister who navigated life’s grief and joy along a deeply personal path.
I have been receiving his daily emails since they began and have been a faithful member of his Writing for Your Life group and conferences. I once attended the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral at least twice a year and would buy all the Buechner books I could find there. I have used his quotations in so many conferences, especially “The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I speak and write this passage so often in conversations with other deacons in the Episcopal Church and in Spiritual Directions. I write a Daily Blog called Daily Something, and Buechner is the author I quote most often. I have read as many of his sermons as possible. They inspire me to new lines of thought and new ways of looking at faith. I can easily say that Rev. Buechner has been the person who has most influenced my writing. I give thanks daily for him and for his ability to share his ministry so fully with the rest of us.
Which of Buechner’s books have been most meaningful to me? This is so difficult. I look through Listening to Your Life and Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner and find so many underlines and notes in the margins. I reread these books year after year. I try to absorb and remember small doses of Buechner’s wisdom each day. It is his honesty and his humorous, insightful prose that stay with me. When I need to understand his thoughts on a word or name, Wishful Thinking and Beyond Words have also become daily reads and resources. When I am preparing a sermon or talk, I turn to Secrets in the Dark, A Life in Sermons, The Faces of Jesus, and The Magnificent Defeat. There, “in the dark,” with my friend of so many years beside me, I wait in silence and find inspiration.
Buechner’s later book, A Crazy Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory, has also been life-changing. In those few pages, Buechner urges us to find sacred spaces to revisit old memories and reconnect with the unconditional love of the past, so that great healing can now live in the present. The book finally reminds me how sacramental Buechner’s writings have always been.
The Rev. Joanna Seibert, M.D.
Deacon, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church
Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics and Radiology, Arkansas Children’s and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences