“Magnificent defeat”

Writer Frederick Buechner, who died Aug. 15 at age 96, once said his work was likely too religious for a secular audience and too earthy for the religious—pointing to the ­tension he faced as he plumbed the depths of human frailty and God’s grace.

Nowhere is that more on display than in his most popular novel, Godric, the fictionalized account of a guilt-­ridden English saint, or in another series of novels centered on Leo Bebb, a ­former con man and pedophile turned pastor. “We all got secrets,” Bebb once preached, concluding, “You know what would happen if we would own up we’re lost and ask? … We’d find out home is Jesus that loves us lost or found or any whichway.”

During his long life, the oft-quoted author published 39 books, including novels, essays, memoirs, and collections of sermons. An ordained Presbyterian minister, the closest he came to a ­pastorate was the chaplaincy at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy from 1959 to 1967.

“Listen to your life,” Buechner famously wrote, turning a microscope on the details of his own life in a series of memoirs, beginning in 1982 with The Sacred Journey. He grappled with the suicide of his father when he was only 10. “The world had come to an end that Saturday morning,” he later wrote, presaging a lifetime of exploring its meaning.

Reading Buechner as theologian—a title he disclaimed—could be vexing. His beliefs were shrouded in mystery, ambiguity, and doubt. Yet at times he was remarkably clear. About the problem of evil, he said Christianity offers “no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene—not even this—but that God can turn it to good.”

While not an evangelical, he accepted an invitation to teach at Wheaton College in 1985, and found that being among believers in Christ and His kingdom who were not embarrassed to speak of it “was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years.”

In one early Exeter sermon, Buechner reflects on Jacob’s battle with God, calling God the “beloved enemy” who asks our all. “Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat that is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”