Easter Thoughts WE WILL SPEND Easter eve afloat at our prayers, I tell them. We'll have mass on the rocks at daybreak. They sleep like rocks themselves. I sit in the bows and watch the moon glint white in the flat pool... -Originally published in Brendan

Real Tear WHEN THEY BROUGHT Jesus to the place where his dead friend lay, Jesus wept. It is very easy to sentimentalize the scene and very tempting because to sentimentalize something is to look only at the emotion in it and... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

To Be Himself BUT LET HIM TAKE heart. He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human, to be human, and that... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Words Without Knowledge IT IS OUT OF the whirlwind that Job first hears God say "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" (Job 42:3). It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present, and it is not... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

God Makes Himself Scarce WHEN JESUS WEPT over the dead body of his friend Lazarus, many things seem to have been at work in him, and there seem to have been many levels to his grief. He wept because his friend was dead and he had... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Catching by Surprise WHAT IS THE kingdom of God? Jesus does not speak of a reorganization of society as a political possibility or of the doctrine of salvation as a doctrine. He speaks of what it is like to find a diamond ring that... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Those Who Hear AND FINALLY THE Gospel itself as comedy—the coming together of Mutt and Jeff, the Captain and the Kids, the Wizard of Oz and the Scarecrow: the coming together of God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Preaching the Gospel SWITCHING ON THE lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Tobias TOBIAS WAS A YOUNG man when he ran into the angel Raphael, and not knowing that he was an angel at all, let alone one of seven great ones who stand and enter before the glory of the Lord, Tobias hired him at a drachma a day... -Originally published in Peculiar Treasures

Memory THERE ARE TWO WAYS of remembering. One is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie.. -Originally published in Wishful Thinking

Our Search WE DO OUR TWENTY minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice's... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

Shakespeare's Truth A BRITISH FILM that came out of World War II has a scene in it showing a couple of air-raid wardens sitting out on the roof of a building in London during the blitz. It is night and enemy planes are overhead... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

The Gospel World LIKE THE FAIRY-TALE world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had his first meal in the dark at his mother's breast... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

The Child in Us WE WEREN'T BORN yesterday. We are from Missouri. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of... -Originally published in Telling the Truth

THE BUECHNER REVIEW [May ‘25] We invite you to enjoy this article from Joy Clarkson, ‘Light Eternal’: frederickbuechner.com/buechnerreview…

Healing Grace Madge Cusper is an alcoholic parishioner of Nicolet's. SHE WAS DRESSED AS if for a garden party in powder blue with powder blue gloves, a string of white summer beads tight about her thick neck. She turned away from him... -Originally published in The Final Beast

Threadbare Language "I SHALL GO TO my grave," a friend of mine once wrote me, "feeling that Christian thought is a dead language—one that feeds many living ones to be sure... -Originally published in Peculiar Treasures

Life-Giving Power MOST OF THE TIME we tend to think of life as a neutral kind of thing, I suppose. We are born into it one fine day, given life, and in itself life is neither good nor bad except as we make it so by the way that we live it. We may make a full life...

He Who Seeks, Finds IN LUKE, JESUS tells a strange story. At midnight an unexpected guest arrives. He is hungry, but you have nothing to feed him. So you go to the house of a friend to borrow some food. "Don't bother me," the friend says. "The door's locked. The children are...

A Child or a Saint IN CHRIST'S PARABLE, a third man finally did come along, of course. He looked, really looked, and saw not just a man, a man, a man, but saw what was actually sprawled out there in the dust with most of the life whaled out of him. He bound up his wounds, set...