The Light Shines in the Darkness

The gritty gleam of Frederick Buechner's religio-historical novels

Jacob’s Ladder, Nicolas Dipre, ca. 1500

I remember the first time someone handed me a copy of one of Frederick Buechner's historical novels. The book was Godric, Buechner's account of the life of 12th-century English saint, Godric of Finchale. The place was the gritty sidewalk in front of the Comet Tavern, Capitol Hill, Seattle, next to the family minivan of the teenager placing the book in my hands. The kid's haircut, somewhat fittingly, reminded me of a squire in a medieval woodcut; part hippie, part Teutonic page boy. He was in actuality the bassist in a local indie rock band. I think we were doing a trade, though I don't remember what book I gave him in return. 

Godric, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, surprises and delights from its opening sentence; “Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.” Written in a voice that retunes medieval language to the 20th-century ear, the novel’s pages brim with sentient serpents, crusaders, and brutal pagan kings, all described through a dreams-and-visions style that fuzzes the line between historical fiction and magical realism.

Godric is a wizened old hermit living on the banks of the river Wear. At the request of Ailred, a local abbot and one of his “five friends,” Godric has reluctantly begun recounting the story of his life to a cheerful monk sent to serve as his scribe. And what a story. Godric has not always been a holy recluse, and he makes sure Reginald, the scribe, knows it, relating the misadventures of his youthful journeys, sins, and ultimate redemption in winsomely cantankerous fashion. Despite the sanctity the locals attribute to him he remains a prickly figure, nagged by regrets and dogged by temptations.

From Godric I continued on to The Son of Laughter, a retelling of the story of the patriarch Isaac's relationship with Jacob in which God is only ever referred to as The Fear (!), and then Brendan, about the fifth century Irish saint known as “The Navigator,” and finally On the Road with the Archangel, Buechner's take on the Apocryphal story of Tobit, embroidered with details of a concubine-collecting Assyrian king who wears a fake beard. Across all these works humanity is depicted with a kind of searing, hilarious candor. Everyone is pathetic and craven. Everyone cheats, lies, steals, blasphemes, sleeps with who they ought not, and generally fails to rise to life's challenges in such a way as to make clear how desperate they are for a little light and love.

There are other works of spiritual-historical fiction which employ visceral honesty in their depiction of religious figures. Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord comes to mind, a stark, artfully-wrought take on the life of King David notable for its unremitting portrayal of the monarch’s violent brutality, indulgence of his own appetites, and abysmal performance as a father. Despite having read about David all my life in the Bible, reconsidering his choices in light of Brooks’ framing shook me in a way that seems only appropriate. Brooks takes liberties — Nathan the prophet has an outsize role as narrator, an adolescent Solomon trains a raptor to hunt, Absalom's depravities are embellished — but none that feel disingenuous. The core of the story is there in the Scriptures for anyone who cares to double-check. David was a man who did absolutely awful things. He raped. He murdered. And yet, bafflingly, he is held up as "a man after God's own heart," a type or forerunner of Christ himself. 

When I read The Secret Chord, I was left with a different aftertaste than what I savored at the conclusion of any of Buechner’s works. Every book has its own flavor, but I suspect my assumptions about the authors’ respective allegiances played a part in how their work hit me. I often find myself wishing I knew nothing of an artist’s personal creed, as the upshot is so often disappointment or distaste as opposed to anything that improves my experience of the work. In the case of Buechner, having sampled his nonfiction first, my subsequent reading of his novels was influenced by a sense that the author’s life was pointed in the general direction of Christ, by which I mean that Jesus of Nazareth is the one toward whom Buechner wanted to move, to influence, to gesture, and in a way that constituted an endorsement as opposed to ambivalence or critique. His straddling of the line between the sacred and the profane is so affecting because of how his stories are suffused with redemptive assumptions. There is a light which pervades Buechner’s work, one by which he seems to understand the entire universe to be backlit.

To be sure, bearing witness can be a virtue in itself, and art may move us deeply regardless of its creator’s beliefs. Neither artists nor their work are obliged to provide happy endings, tidy morals, or explicit calls to action. I cherish The Mission (1986), a particularly moving cinematic portrait of Christian devotion no less powerful for being directed by the self-described “wobbly agnostic” Roland Joffé. Shusaku Endo’s Silence, a novel about martyrdom and apostasy, is both particularly bleak and profoundly moving in its meditation on the nature of faithfulness, suffering, and the boundaries of God’s mercy; a provocative work in the best sense. 

Authenticity — that ring of truth without which a story falls flat — cannot be earned save through the truthfulness which, for the Christian novelist, often requires reckoning with the sense of absence and even despair that so often attends the human longing for God. This must be related, sometimes in detail. Buechner’s gift, relatively unique, is his ability to bring an unflinching honesty about just how bad things can get into conversation with grace in a way that somehow works in — perhaps even results in — levity, joy, and outright hilarity. 

In Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, a book-length compilation of lectures he gave at Yale in 1977, Buechner’s general premise is that the gospel is so good we cannot quite comprehend it. It is too generous for us to conceive, its contours and promises encompassing a redemption greater than our wildest imaginings. This confidence that God is more gracious than we can possibly hope may be what frees Buechner to write himself down to the very dregs of human awfulness while still maintaining the sense of humor that permeates his work. He seems to have truly believed that even the most evil among us were incapable of defeating the love of God.

Yes, we are all liars, Buechner says. We are all down here in the gutter. We have all failed. Look at the patriarchs. Look at David. Look at this so-called saint, Godric, who was also a dirty old man. But that is not the end of the story. Evil, shame, failure; none of them get the last word. If justice has not been rendered, if all have not yet been redeemed, if a shadow still hides the sun… well, then the story is not over after all. And our job is to keep reading, even unto the end of the age.