Here’s a conversation* I had with the dear (and now departed) Reverend Frederick Buechner just a couple of days before Christmas on a morning when our neighborhood was blanketed with several inches of snow.
Overstreet:
I am having trouble finding a sense of peace and quiet this Christmas. I am surrounded by crises. It’s hard to sit still and read a book. It’s hard to feel that writing — writing fiction, writing about art — is worthwhile. It’s hard to pray. The nation’s future teeters on the precipice, and half of the country seems inclined to shove it over into the abyss of authoritarianism. The university where I work is crumbling due to poor leadership and the consequences of cruel, discriminatory hiring policies. The vast majority of my colleagues — the faculty, staff, and students —are pleading with them to change their policies and try to save their own school, but our appeals fall on deaf ears and hard hearts. A close friend just told me that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. A family close to mine lost their daughter to a stroke this very morning, right before Christmas. I am trying to hear the voice of God in all of this. What I’m afraid I’ll get, if I share these things, is a blast of cheap platitudes and clichés. I don’t think I can bear it if I hear another Christian, even a well-meaning one, say “All things work together for good,” or “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”
“What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.”
O:
Is that your way of saying I should turn off my phone? Take a social media break? Spend more time praying?
“I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, as the huge monk in cloth of gold put it, than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.”
O:
Normally at this time of year, I’m scrambling to catch up with all of the big movies I’ve missed, but this year so many of them are loud, chaotic, full of frantic battle scenes. This year, while I’ve watched some of them, my heart isn’t in it. My spirit is too worn down by the troubles around me for me to get quiet, open myself to art, and receive another heavy testimony of suffering. Perhaps that’s why I find myself more drawn to books of devotional mediations like yours, or even to contemplative cinema. The cinema is, in fact, one of the only places anymore where I find I can “get out of my own head.” For one thing, while the screen is illuminated, the surroundings are dark and I am not distracted by others. For another thing, I’m required to turn off my devices. I am there to pay attention to one thing, not a dozen things. But its hard to find somewhere that provides a reliable quiet.
“God knows I am no good at it, but I keep trying, and once or twice I have been lucky, graced. I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt a promise promised.”
O:
As you can see, we’re snowbound here today. But we live on a very busy main road. In some ways, the snow makes things louder. Emergency vehicles are screaming past. People are braking and skidding, leaning on their horns. Maybe I should wrap up in my warmest winter clothes and go to the park. I need to find some of these moments you’re describing. I’ve experienced them, but it seems like it’s been many years.
“I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved.”
*Buechner’s lines come from his book Telling Secrets. They are also included in the “Daily Meditations” collection, marked for December 23 — appropriate words for a snowy pre-Christmas morning.