To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love him.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Wilderness
When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone. Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Remembrance
Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that Jesus tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Wealth
We condemn in others the wrong we don’t want to face in ourselves.
—Frederick Buechner
Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Anger
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: One liners
Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Faith
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Life and Living
Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Religion
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Relationships
Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Prayer
Your calling in life is where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.
—Frederick Buechner
It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: God
Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Kindness, Compassion
To find your mission in life is to discover the intersection between your heart’s deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.
—Frederick Buechner
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Grace
Faith is better understood as a verb than a noun, as a process than a possession. It is an on-again, off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not sure where you’re going, but going anyway.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Faith
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
—Frederick Buechner
Topics: Doubt
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Thomas De Witt Talmage American Presbyterian Clergyman
- William Sloane Coffin American Presbyterian Clergyman
- Austin Phelps American Presbyterian Clergyman
- Maltbie Davenport Babcock American Clergyman
- Theodore L. Cuyler American Presbyterian Clergyman
- Archibald Alexander Hodge American Presbyterian Theologian
- Francis Schaeffer American Presbyterian Religious Leader
- William J. H. Boetcker American Presbyterian Minister
- Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
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