Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

447 Pages·2004·3.1 MB·English

by  Frederick Buechner

Beyond Words
=

Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith
Frederick Buechner

For
my grandson
Douglas
Contents
Introduction
Topics
About the Author
Books by Frederick Buechner
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

Introduction
My three ABC books—Wishful Thinking (1973), Peculiar Treasures
(1979), and Whistling in the Dark (1988)—have been in print for so
long now that I’m encouraged to think there continue to be people
who find them useful and might find them more useful still if com-
bined into a single handy volume. So that is what I have done here—
tweaking some of the original entries a little and adding enough
new ones to bring the grand total up to 366 in the hope that maybe
a word a day will help keep the demons at bay.
In Wishful Thinking, the words I dealt with were mostly reli-
gious words like God, sin, salvation, repentance, and in that book
I was as much concerned to show what they don’t mean as what I
think they do. I made no attempt to define them in any compre-
hensive, scholarly way, but to show how much less boring, banal, and
irrelevant they are than the way they all too often sound in church
or Sunday school or on the lips of some televangelistic vaude-
villian. I tried to suggest something of the true richness and vitality
of the realities they point to. I tried to have some fun with them.
viii Fr e der ick Buech ner
In Whistling in the Dark, I turned to just plain, everyday words
like good-bye, marriage, animals, and remember in the effort to
show that they too have a religious dimension and that, just like the
plain, everyday events of our lives, speak to us of holy things if we
have our eyes and ears open. It is less a theological ABC like its
predecessor than an ABC theologized.
Peculiar Treasures deals not with words, but with biblical char-
acters all the way from Aaron to Zaccheus. Far from the moral ex-
emplars and stained-glass superstars they are usually taken to be,
they are just such a conglomeration of saints and scoundrels, odd-
balls and screwballs, apostles and apostates, as we are ourselves, so
that to look at them as they move through the pages of Scripture is
not unlike looking into a mirror.
I have called the collection Beyond Words because in one way or
another all the words it contains point to the realm of mystery and
depth that lies beyond our ordinary experience and thus could be
called beyond-words. To say something is beyond words is also to
say that it is beyond the power of even beyond-words to convey ad-
equately. Beethoven’s last string quartets, falling in love, the death
of a friend—how can we possibly describe such things other than
to say that they are ultimately indescribable? You can know them
only by experiencing them for yourself, and maybe that is the final
message of a gallimaufry like this: Be alive to your life! Observe!
Pay attention!