Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner

Author:Frederick Buechner [Buechner, Frederick]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-03T06:39:29.382000+00:00

In the parish house of a church, I work in a room which on Sundays is used for Sunday school. The window by the table where I work has large, old-fashioned panes with wavy places and blisters in the glass so that when the sun shines through, it makes Andrew Wyeths on the broad window sill where the white paint is flaking off. Each morning I approach this room as Prince Oblonsky must have approached the French governess who was his mistress: with a mixture of dread and desire. There is a child-sized conference table with ten kindergarten chairs around it. There is a blackboard with two singularly angry trees drawn on 73

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it in chalk. Each tree has three branches sticking almost straight up in the air, and at the end of each branch are three desperate fingers. On the ground there is some kind of creature which seems to have a moustache—perhaps a walrus. At the top of the picture, just beneath a stormy mat of blue-chalk sky, the title of the picture is written— Jesus Answers a Question—and beneath it a name that I assume to be the artist’s: Jane Mc Williams. What is the question that Jesus answered? Why are the trees so angry, and what is the creature with the walrus moustache doing there? What am I doing here in this room myself, coming here day after day?

At its heart, I think, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan: each of them responds to something for which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid, alphabetic souvenirs. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” Religion as institution, as ethics, as dogma, as social action—all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky. As for the man in the street, any street, wherever his own religion is a matter of more than custom, it is likely to be because, however dimly, a doorway opened in the Absence of Vowels / 75

air once to him too, a word was spoken, and, however shakily, he responded. The debris of his life continues to accumulate, the Vesuvius of the years scatters its ashes deep and much gets buried alive, but even under many layers the tell-tale heart can go on beating still. Where it beats strong, there starts pulsing out from it a kind of life that is marked by, above all things perhaps, compassion: that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin and for knowing that there can never really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy finally for all.

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