My friend Sarah tells me that sometimes she has intellectual crushes. I think I have a literary crush on Frederick Buechner. I have long appreciated his book, Telling the Truth - although it does not unseat Till We Have Faces as my favorite book (besides the Bible of course). For Christmas, my mom gave me Peculiar Treasures: a Biblical Who's Who by dear Frederick. Here are a few excerpts that will hopefully prompt you to read some of his work yourself.
on Lazarus
"Recent interviews with people who have been resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead reveal that after the glimpse they inevitably all of them get of a figure of light waiting for them on the other side, they are very reluctant to be brought back again to this one. On the other hand, when Lazarus opened his eyes to see the figure of Jesus standing there in the daylight beside him, he couldn't for the life of him tell which side he was on." (p. 102)
on Sarah and laughter
"Nobody claims there's a chuckle on every page, but laughter's what the whole Bible is really about. Nobody who knows his hat from home-plate claims that getting mixed up with God is all sweetness and light, but ultimately it's what that's all about too.
"Sarah and her husband had had plenty of hard knocks in their time, and there were plenty more of them still to come, but at that moment when the angel told them they'd better start dipping into their old age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they'd ever had hadn't been wild enough." (p. 173)
on Gabriel
"She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.
"He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. 'You mustn't be afraid, Mary,' he said.
"As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl." (p. 44)
on Hagar
"The story of Hagar is the story of the terrible jealousy of Sarah and the singular ineffectuality of Abraham and the way Hagar, who knew how to roll with the punches, managed to survive them both. Above and beyond that, however, it is the story of how in the midst of the whole unseemly affair the Lord, half tipsy with compassion, went around making marvelous promises, and loving everybody, and creating great nations, like the last of the big-time spenders handing out hundred dollar bills." (p. 52)
Frederick Buechner. Peculiar Treasures: a Biblical Who's Who. HarperSanFrancisco, 1979.
