Frederick Buechner's Thoughts on Life After Death

Frederick Buechner: Life After Death

Guest Writer: Larry Burton

“So, what do you think about life after death?”

  As an Episcopal priest, I have heard that question, or others like it, more times than I care to count. I’ve come to think that the Resurrection event may not cover the question of what happens when we die like I would have thought it did. “But,” a friend said, “that was Jesus. This is me.”  Fair enough.

A group of us has been reading Frederick Buechner’s A Crazy, Holy Grace. Buechner, who died at age 96 in 2022, was a prolific author and theologian many of us greatly admire. In part of this book, he imagines a conversation with his beloved grandmother, who has been dead for more than forty years. She tells him that death is like stepping off a trolley car. However, life doesn’t stop but instead continues to a deeper understanding of God’s grace and love. That imagined conversation stopped me in my tracks.

For most of my life as a theologian, I have thought (and taught) something similar, but it was far more abstract and ultimately not entirely satisfying. Buechner has his grandmother put humanity on my abstractness and offers an image of continuity in God that, as I said, stopped me flat. Did I believe what I had been teaching? Yes. No question. But now, the abstract has taken on a form that both challenges and delights. 

So, I had my own conversation with my preacher father and stepmother. Both are dead. But they were delighted to talk with me. “Sorry you had to wait so long to understand,” Dad said after I told him about Buechner’s book. (My father was a Buechner fan, so he was way ahead of me. My stepmother added her two cents worth: “I always thought suddenly I’d ‘get it,’ but it didn’t happen that way. There are always new layers or new heights, and my heart! My heart just continues to open wider and wider.”

My words in their mouths? Or their words in my mouth? Buechner’s grandmother challenges her grandson, just as I am challenged. Buechner’s primary point is that memory can be an incredible portal into the wonders of God. So, what do I think about life after death? I am more convinced than ever that, as a beloved child of God, access to the reality of God’s love is far more cosmic, mysterious, and wondrous than I had imagined. It is more than Resurrection; it is a continuing transformation moving toward God’s very heart.

Larry Burton

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Frederick Buechner’s birthday was last month on Monday, July 11th. (Also, Stuart Hoke’s birthday. Also, the Feast day of St. Benedict)

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

 Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

“Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it.

 And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every person and see deep down within what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love in spite of. No matter what the person does, you see God’s image there.”—Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Loving Your Enemies,” sermon at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 1957.

I once worked with another physician, whom I thought was incompetent. I felt her decisions did not make sense and were not helpful. She often talked almost in riddles, trying to look at many sides of a question, while I already thought there was an obvious answer that, beyond question, was right. Moreover, she was amazingly slow to make any changes.

One weekend, I had to cover her job while she was on vacation. Overnight, I realized why she behaved as she did, the magnitude of her responsibility, and the endless number of real and imagined problems presented to her. I walked in her shoes, and it made all the difference.

Placing myself in her shoes led me to see God’s image in her and others, whom I had previously found difficult to understand.

A story also circulates that someone asked Mother Teresa the question, “How do you stand it when you have to serve some truly despicable person?” With a sigh, she replies, “I look deeply into their eyes and say to myself, ‘My Jesus, what an interesting disguise you are wearing today.”’–Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church, “Weekly Gospel Reflection,” Inward/Outward.com, Church of the Saviour.

This is also how Benedictine Spirituality calls us to see others. It is called radical hospitality. We are to look for the light of Christ in others. Often, if we are having difficulty with others, it is because we are having trouble finding the light of Christ, our God hole in ourselves. We have strayed from our path of staying connected to God in our own lives. We have lost the “light” in our lives that directs us to the light in the lives of others.

Having difficulty with others is always a “stop sign” to try to find the light of Christ within ourselves, and maybe even ask someone else for help. Walking in someone else’s shoes is always a good starting point in seeing others in a new light.

May You Live Long Enough

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders: Ricoeur and Anonymous: May You Live Long Enough

“I find myself only by losing myself”—Paul Ricoeur.

“It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and seek an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.”

—Paul Ricoeur.

My Grandmother Whaley and her sisters in front of her home

May you live long enough …

To be able to laugh at your most embarrassing moments in the past—sportingly owning the temporary title of “dunce”—before passing it on to the next clown in this dance of win-and-lose, hit-and-error called “life.”

To side with your former adversaries, if only for a glancing moment—to accept that in certain past disagreements or outright conflicts that cobble your past: “The other person had a point.”

To realize that even your greatest “triumphs” owe much to outside influences: others’ kind and diligent contribution, the coming together of circumstances, and “sparks” of grace flung from afar that happened to hit you at the moment.

To experience prayer as the automatic breathing of petitions for others’ good—urgently present in your heart before your own needs or requests enter your awareness.

To meet someone whose efforts or example—in any category—put you to “shame,” and feel the joy that such understanding, expertise, or goodness exists in the world apart from your receiving any specific personal gain from it.

To recognize that your “defeats,” by the world’s judgment, were blessed checks and balances in the larger arc of your journey toward maturity and self-acceptance.

To feel genuinely sad for people who seemed unfair and cruel to you for no apparent reason and to lament the conditions that must have made them that way—even when their cruelty caused you genuine pain.

To let go of any idea that we might be able to judge who is worthy or unworthy of anything that comes to them in this life, or in the life to come.

“We look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”—2 Corinthians 4:18.

“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts. …”—Romans 5:3-5.

Isabel Anders

Author of Circle of Days: A Church Year Primer--Years B and C: A Celebration of the Major Themes and Texts of the Church Year

Year A is out as well!

Joanna   https://www.joannaseibert.com/