Quotes from Frederick Buechner

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.

There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and through time.

I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics - woe to him who tries to make it look simple and easy - but because to do it any other way would be to be less true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no less than in others.

What they had in common was that, like us, they believed (or sometimes believed and sometimes didn't believe; or wanted to believe; or liked to think they believed) that the universe, that everything there is, didn't come about by chance but was created by God. Like us they believed, on their best days anyway, that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this God was a God like Jesus, which is to say a God of love. That, I think, is the crux of the matter.

We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don't like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.

Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing. So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in. How are they going?

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.

The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.

And it seems to me the world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again. You've got your mind on so many other things. You are so busy with this and that, you don't see it. You don't notice it.

To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks... It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there, powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.