Telling Secrets, by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 106 pp.; $16.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Timothy K. Jones.
“I shake the secrets from my deepest bones,” Theodore Roethke once wrote. Frederick Buechner, in his latest autobiographical book, succeeds in an unusual way at following the poet’s lead. As his title suggests, Buechner proposes something that requires more courage, perhaps, than anything this novelist and Presbyterian minister has written to date: he shakes out into common view some hard and hidden episodes from his life as a son and father.
“I have called this book Telling Secrets,” he writes, “because I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell.” And while, he notes, the Anglican Collect for Purity affirms God as one “from whom no secrets are hid,” we humans too well hide from one another—even from ourselves—the twists and turns, the hurts and hopes, that story our lives and inform our faith.
Not-So-Pretty Stories
Buechner has become practiced at such “professional remembering,” reaching a wide audience with his previous autobiographical works, The Sacred Journey and Now and Then. But Buechner goes deeper here. If the first two volumes dealt mainly with the “headlines” of his life, Telling Secrets more resembles “the back pages of the paper where I have always thought the real news is anyway—the reviews, an obituary or two, a couple of in-depth reports, the editorial and op-ed sections. It is the interior life.”
With candor and simplicity, Buechner rummages around in an attic crowded with over 60 years of memories—such as the morning his alcoholic father went down to the family garage where he turned on his car and let the fumes of the exhaust quietly kill him. Buechner examines his family’s tacit, incredible agreement to bury forever any memory of his father.
Buechner moves on to trace the awful days when he watched his anorexic teenage daughter totter on the edge of death, when all the while his hovering, pathetic overtures of fathering not only did not help, but seemed to make her worse. These are not pretty stories. They are raw enough at times to seem almost not “edifying.”
But Buechner begins Telling Secrets with novelist E. M. Forster’s theory about stories and plots: A story is a narrative of events arranged chronologically (“The king died, and then the queen died.”). But a plot, Forster continued, concentrates more on the because of things (“The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”). More than anything Buechner has written, Telling Secrets is full of becauses. He is eager not just to tell, but to understand. He is especially anxious to look at the role faith has played in his suffering—questioning beliefs ultimately to reaffirm them.
It is Buechner’s articulations of faith that evangelicals will find most intriguing and, at times, troubling. Many readers have long been uneasy with Buechner’s tolerant views on homosexuality, his sometimes irreverent and racy novels, his frequent nods to mainline liberal theology. Despite that, he does seem genuinely to believe. This is illustrated poignantly in Telling Secretsby his account of his two teaching experiences of the eighties.
First, he taught preaching one semester at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard, he writes, was proud of its pluralism—“feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians all pursuing truth together.” But the cost of that pluralism was illustrated for him in class one day: “There I was, making a fool of myself spilling out to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes.” Finally, a black African student got up and spoke. “The reason I do not say anything about what I believe,” he said, “is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.”
Three years later, Buechner found a completely different environment at Wheaton College in Illinois. This solidly evangelical school amazed the East Coast-bred Buechner with its uncompromising perspective of Christian faith (see “At Billy Graham’s Alma Mater”). To have missed the experience, he writes, would have left his life “immeasurably impoverished.”
Faith With Question Marks
Even so, many readers will wish Buechner’s voice, when it comes to faith, was more certain. At times, while praying and seeking God, he tells us, “I have sensed the presence of a presence.… I like to believe that once or twice … I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved.”
For all the eloquence of such lines, there is more solidness to faith than Buechner suggests. The God who was “pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ]” (Col. 1:19) is not so elusive that we must punctuate statements about his reality with question marks, as Buechner is prone to do: “Is it finally true what we have believed and hungered to believe? This side of Paradise, who can say with certainty?”
What should the evangelical make of this book that is sure to gain a wide reading in the larger church? We could wish that Buechner was a more unabashed apologist, saying more about the transforming power of Christ and of the “open secret” of forgiveness found in him as nowhere else. Still, Buechner’s chronicling once again tells us something about what it means to be human, and offers at least a starting place for facing life’s uncomfortable secrets with faith.
At Billy Graham’s Alma Mater
An Excerpt
“One day I was having lunch with two students who were talking I about whatever they were talking about—the weather, the movies—when without warning one of them asked the other as naturally as he would have asked the time of day what God was doing in his life. If there is anything in this world I believe, it is that God is indeed doing all kinds of things in the lives of all of us including those who do not believe in God and would have nothing to do with him if they did, but in the part of the East where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people, the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither.… The result was that to find myself at Wheaton [College] among people who, although they spoke about it in different words from mine and expressed it in their lives differently, not only believed in Christ and his Kingdom more or less as I did but were also not ashamed or embarrassed to say so was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years.”
The Whisky Priest Turns Fifty
The Power and the Glory (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition), by Graham Greene (Viking, 295 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by Ken Steinken, a free-lance writer who teaches Spanish at Stevens High School, Rapid City, South Dakota.
In 1940 Viking released the original U.S. edition of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which numbered a scant 3,500 copies. Soon the little-known British author’s work was out of print. By 1961, when Time, Inc., released a special edition of The Power and the Glory, Greene had gained a wider U.S. audience, especially through his crime thrillers, many of which were adapted for film. But the Time editors suggested in their preface that Greene’s popularity must seem a bit odd to some. He had built success “out of ingredients that belong by right to old-fashioned theologians: sin, conscience, good and evil, salvation and grace, the search for God.” All this he had accomplished in a world where “fewer and fewer people really believe in the stern old notion of sin.” With the release of a fiftieth-anniversary edition, The Power and the Glory speaks once again of human evil and divine grace.
Sin is not a foreign concept to Greene, who at 86 is still trying to retire from writing. (His latest novel, The Captain and the Enemy, was released in 1989.) Greene has said that at the age of 13 he suddenly saw the world of good and evil plain before him. Throughout his literary career, which includes over 50 books and plays, he has wrestled with the clash between good and evil while exposing the haunting emptiness of modern secular life and its painful impotence to deal with this basic universal struggle.
One key to Greene’s popularity is that he has written realistically, in a way that rings true even to the secular reader. The Power and the Glory, acknowledged in literary circles as Greene’s masterpiece, is full of irony and doubt. What mocker of religion would not be interested to read a book whose main character is nameless except for his moniker of “the whisky priest”?
Living in the remote Tabasco region of Mexico during a period of intense religious persecution, when people were machine-gunned on their way to Mass, the priest one day finds himself, quite by accident, the only priest left in the state. For eight years he performs his priestly duties, slipping in and out of villages minutes before or after the authorities, who have him at the top of their most-wanted list.
Although he is divinely delivered from capture on more than one occasion, he finally decides that he is such a terrible example that God may be better served if he is caught and executed.
Greene deals masterfully with the mysteries of God, with the realm of daily faith that leaves us puzzled and perplexed, wondering in the secret place of our hearts if God is really there—or, at the very least, why he doesn’t do something.
In The Power and the Glory, Greene illustrates God’s grace as it humbly defies a violent, atheistic government through the faith of his flawed, yet faithful people. The story has occurred many times in many places in the 50 years since the book’s first release. And as the bedrock of communism begins to crumble around the world, Greene’s book reassures the reader that there is a God who cares, and the gates of hell will not prevail against him. In the secular and spiritually hungry milieu of America, that may be a winning formula for a marketable novel.
A Psychedelic Legacy
Generation at Risk, by Fran Sciacca (World Wide, 223 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, a writer living in Colorado Springs.
For years, education majors in college viewed You Are What You Were When, a film that showed how throughout their lives people carry decade-specific cultural traits from their formative, youthful years. Author Fran Sciacca, a teacher for ten years at Colorado Springs Christian School, takes a similar approach in his study of America’s sixties culture and the resulting ills of contemporary society as these alumni of the sixties become parents and leaders.
In Generation at Risk, Sciacca (pronounced shock-uh) has really written two books. The first is an objective—if passionate—look at the past three decades of American cultural history. The second is a confrontational book in which a reader can almost feel the teacher’s fingers jabbing the air at his errant students. The two books do not always overlap peaceably.
So where are we, and how did we get here? According to Sciacca, while Americans who came of age during the fifties had their share of challenges growing up “within the perimeter of the hula-hoop and in the shadow of ‘the bomb,’ ” they did not face the problems kids did in the sixties. The evolution of pop music is illustrative. There’s a world of difference between the Beach Boys’ sun-bleached trilogy of romance, cars, and surfing and Buffalo Springfield’s litany of society’s ills in the sixties’ protest-rock classic, “For What It’s Worth.”
Sciacca is frank in his positive appraisal of some of the core values of the sixties: altruism, a belief in the value of the individual, hope in a better future, and a critique of “plastic” consumerism and materialism. But he also frankly addresses the failure of those values, and the desperate search for replacements that ensued.
His observations are based on research, but also on what he saw firsthand: “I watched hippie ‘brothers’ steal each other’s drugs, money, and bedmates.” He later writes about what happened to some of his former college professors: a sociology professor who preached moral relativism killed herself; a Marxist sociologist lost his commune’s funds in a pool game; and a libertarian philosophy professor was dismissed for having sex with coeds.
When the sixties’ bubble burst, and the answers to all the tough questions weren’t readily available, refugees from the Woodstock nation went in three directions: irrational optimism (“Let’s pretend we never asked the questions”), hedonism (“Let’s deny there were any lasting answers”), and mysticism (“We need to look outside ourselves for the answers”).
Unfortunately, the church wasn’t considered a valid avenue for this generation’s spiritual quest. As Sciacca writes, “Because the institutional church was perceived as part of the despised ‘system,’ and had neither taken the counterculture seriously nor offered any significant model of authentic biblical faith, most of the refugees from the decade looked elsewhere for answers.”
The legacy of the sixties, Sciacca suggests, is a culture based on narcissism, amorality, and an ahistorical focus on the present moment. Sciacca argues that the American church has swallowed these perverted values indiscriminately, resulting in a body that suffers from biblical illiteracy, lacks a biblical world view, values feelings over truth, focuses on social ministries instead of deeper devotion to God, and simultaneously affirms the truths of doctrine while denying those truths in their lifestyles.
Sciacca calls the church to a return to the Bible and a restoking of the dwindling fires of spiritual passion. He writes, “The most solid preventive action we can take to protect and preserve the next generation is to help them develop a biblical worldview when they are children.”
Generation at Risk is a good book with fresh insights. Yet Sciacca occasionally loses sight of the big picture and expresses instead his odd, personal gripes. For example, he sees rampant materialism lurking when “many of the students own and drive newer cars than the faculty at our school.” And in attacking the self-centeredness of today’s American Christians, he criticizes Christian self-help books, saying that “ ‘Current Christian Books’ lists nearly 500 books whose titles begin with How to.” But certainly, Sciacca cannot seriously fear the effects of many of those books, such as How to Have a Daily Quiet Time, or How to Promote and Administer a Church Media Library.
Generation at Risk isn’t merely confrontational, it’s heavy-handed. My eyes glazed over reading the 27 imperatives—such as, “Christians need to be taught how to develop intimacy with God in Bible study and prayer,” or, “Our congregations need to hear preaching on the theme of sanctification,” and so on—found in last five pages of the concluding chapter. Such rhetorical style borrows more from rebellious college students with bullhorns than it does from the lecture halls of academia. But perhaps Sciacca’s fervor may help his message strike home in hardened hearts.
