Frederick Buechner’s enduring legacy of ordinary faithfulness

August 11 marks one year since the death of the writer and ordained pastor Frederick Buechner. His spiritual memoir The Alphabet of Grace was originally presented as a lecture 54 years ago. What possible relevance could this slim volume of scarcely one hundred pages have? 

In this insightful and poetic memoir, Buechner writes about an ordinary rainy day in autumn that begins for him at 6:45. He moves from dreams to wakening, sees himself in the mirror and goes about his duties as a father. He takes his children to school and then attempts to make progress on a book he is writing. Throughout, we glimpse bits of his past — his absent father, his first awakenings to faith, a grandmother who found fault with him, funeral procession rituals in New Orleans, a jarring news report about child abuse — and how these each touched and shaped him. The narration of the day ends at 11 p.m. with words of intimacy towards Christ, who alone can “forgive and mend.”

Because Buechner wrote about the truth he knew, his work is both original (as C.S. Lewis described the path to originality in Mere Christianity) and relatable to other human beings, even those in succeeding generations. One of his enduring insights comes near the end of this book where he imagines even the mundane life of an ordinary person as the Hebrew alphabet, with “nothing but consonants, and it is left to the faithful to fill in the vowels with faith.”

In this year after his passing, Buechner’s vision of ordinary faithfulness has continued to inspire me. By paying attention to the subtleties of our hours and days, I am hopeful that many more readers will come to appreciate his voice as they go about the faithful work of their own lives.