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You would not expect to find an old, battered license plate hanging on a wall in the home of a distinguished novelist. But the world of Frederick Buechner includes plenty of room for the odd, the unexpected.

The acclaimed writer and ordained minister loves to tell the story about the plate he refers to as a "holy relic." In a bleak time in his life he was parked by a road not far from his Vermont home, worrying about his then-anorexic teenage daughter. Suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, a car came down the highway with a license plate bearing the letters T-R-U-S-T. "Of all the entries in the lexicon of words that I needed most to hear, it was that word trust. It was a chance thing, but also a moment of epiphany—revelation—telling me, 'trust your children, trust yourself, trust God, trust life; just trust.' "

Later Buechner was sitting in his living room with his youngest daughter talking over the very same anxieties, when, as he recounts, "So help me, there came a knock at the door and my daughter answered it. I heard her speaking to some male voice that I didn't recognize. It was the owner of the license plate—the trust officer in a local bank, whose reason for the choice of the word became obvious—and he said, 'Here, I wanted to give you this.' " The man had heard Buechner tell the story in a sermon and wanted him to have the object that had prompted Buechner's road-side revelation.

Buechner has made a career of telling others about such moments of holy insight. His "congregation" of readers, largely invisible to him, is widely diverse, perhaps because the author himself seems to thrive on variety. He may appear before members of the East Coast literary crowd for a prestigious lecture series at the New York Public Library one week, and address a gathering of Iowa pastors another.

Buechner's books are hardly standard-fare devotional musings. His novels about saints, such as the eponymous novel Godric, portray figures who are crusty, salty, even tainted by such dark sins as incest. When he wrote a series of novels about an ebullient evangelist, Leo Bebb, Buechner did not flinch at depicting Bebb's shady finances and sexual exhibitionism. Even reading through his artfully theological—and sometimes reverently funny—nonfiction, one gets the impression that this ordained Presbyterian minister enjoys—even feels called to—living in multiple worlds.

Buechner had a taste of yet another world in 1985 when he was asked to teach for a semester at Wheaton College in Illinois. He had already donated his papers to the college's Marion E. Wade collection, depository for the manuscripts and papers of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Malcolm Muggeridge. After he accepted the invitation, this sophisticated New Englander, trained at Princeton University and New York's Union Theological Seminary, was quietly moved by what he saw and experienced.

"I'd been sort of a closet religious person for years and years, moving among people to whom faith was either a dead letter or something not to be talked about. All of a sudden I was surrounded by people who found it very easy and natural to talk about faith. It was wonderful."

One day he was having lunch with two students, and the conversation suddenly shifted from small talk—about weather, the movies—and one of them asked the other what God was doing in his life, "as naturally," Buechner recalls, "as he would have asked the time of day. I thought, if anybody said anything like that in my part of the world, the ceiling would fall in, the house would catch fire, and people's eyes would roll up in their heads."

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47