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The time at Wheaton was all the more meaningful because it was set against the backdrop of a teaching experience a few years before at Harvard Divinity School, a bastion of Unitarianism. "You can't imagine two more different experiences or places," he says.

While at Harvard, Buechner began the first session of his preaching class with a simple prayer, just as many of his own professors at Union Seminary in New York had done decades before. "Apparently, as soon as class was over the word went round like wildfire: `He prayed! He prayed!' Almost from the first day I began to realize that it was not Union in the fifties, but Harvard almost 30 years later."

If Buechner was intrigued by the seminarians' reaction to his simple act, he was "somewhat floored and depressed" by much of what he found at Harvard. One day a student came by his office to say that few of the things he had to teach about preaching were of any practical use to people like her who did not believe in God. Recalls Buechner, "I asked what it was she did believe in, and with the air of something like wistfulness she said that whatever it was, it was hard to put into words. It struck me that to attend a divinity school when you did not believe in divinity involved a peculiarly depressing form of bankruptcy."

The world of sermons and lectures is for Buechner, however, the exception rather than the rule. This man of rugged good looks and a build surprisingly athletic for someone in his midsixties is much more likely to be found working in his study, pen and pad in hand. He usually writes while sitting on a sofa—a kind of writer's pulpit—in the study of his hillside Vermont home.

Such a scene has burned in the imagination of every would-be writer. The study window looks east across a pastured hollow where dappled horses graze near a stand of birch and a small pond. There are few signs that humans inhabit the rugged, tree-covered hills that surround the valley and fill the horizon. In the fall, says Buechner, the foliage becomes a "conflagration of color"—flaming reds, vivid yellows, and pumpkin orange. The isolation accents the irony of a minister who does some of his most effective communicating when he is away from people.

The study itself is paneled in old barn siding turned silvery gray from perhaps two centuries of weathering. A rugged beam from the dismantled barn serves as mantel for the fireplace. The furniture—the well-worn sofa, a desk, a library table—are not antiques, perhaps, but old enough to give the room the familiar feel of an uncle's living room. Fireplace ashes and shelves of antique, leather-bound books (some dating back centuries, carefully oiled and preserved by Buechner) contribute to a gentle, musty smell. Memorabilia—including a bound volume of cherished letters from his grandmother (addressed "Freddy Dear"), family photos, a beer stein, an old clock—give the room the atmosphere of a past well-remembered and lived in still.

Buechner's career as a writer began with the publication of his first novel, A Long Day's Dying. It was a resounding critical and commercial success, much to Buechner's and publisher Alfred Knopf's surprise. While the title came from a passage in Milton's Paradise Lost, critics labeled the book decadent (to Buechner's delight at the time); its subject matter had more to do with melancholy and alienation than theology.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47