Attention’s Invitation
If there is one message in The Remarkable Ordinary, it is the same chord that tolls throughout all Buechner’s writings: pay attention.
Review by Abigail Storch
In a letter to her friend Alice Tuckerman, a fifty-four-year-old Emily Dickinson famously quipped that there was only one commandment she ever obeyed: Consider the lilies. “It’s a joke, in a way, the thought of commandments like this,” writes Frederick Buechner in The Remarkable Ordinary, “but in another way it is the kind of commandment Jesus gives in different ways again and again, that this life is, in a way, a parable: Consider the lilies of the field. Consider what it was to find that thing you had lost, that coin, that ring . . . . Pay attention to these things.” If there is one message, one invitation in The Remarkable Ordinary, it is the same chord that tolls throughout all Buechner’s writings: pay attention. Pay attention to what happens in your life. Pay attention to the small things, the boring things, the strange things. Pay attention to the painful and the beautiful and the surprising.
Published in 2017 by Zondervan, The Remarkable Ordinary is a collection of Buechner’s mostly unpublished writings, largely drawn from the transcripts of a 1987 Norton lecture and a 1990 Laity Lodge presentation. Most people know Buechner only by his oft-quoted definition of vocation (“where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”), which is unfortunate, as he is a distinguished novelist, preacher, and autobiographer with a wide-ranging, fascinating body of work. He is the author of no less than thirty books, including fiction based on medieval hagiography (most notably Godric, a 1981 Pulitzer finalist), four memoirs, and his “lexical trilogy”—an alphabetically-organized index of theological and biblical terms, with Buechner’s fresh, free-associated commentary on each word or topic. His work is characterized by incessant curiosity and an attempt to shake off the baggage of religious language, to display the wisdom and wonder of faith to a world that considers religion to be dull at best, and harmful at worst.
These features are on full display in The Remarkable Ordinary. The slim, 120-page book is organized by the editors into three parts: first, it presents Buechner’s philosophy of attention, how literature and art call us to hone this skill, and what it has to do with faith. Second, it particularizes this philosophy, focusing specifically on narrative and the power of storytelling. Third, it invites us to practice the art of attention by reflecting with Buechner on several key events in his life, looking for what he calls the “subterranean moments of grace.” The unwritten fourth section, of course, is the exercise of listening to our own life, looking deep into our own story.
Paying attention, loving God, and loving one’s neighbor: for Buechner, these are the same; they are seamlessly interwoven.
The richest section of the book is, without question, the first, entitled “Stop, Look, and Listen for God.” In this section, Buechner applies his bright intellect to various kinds of art, investigating what sorts of questions they pose and how. He opens with the famous Bashō haiku:
An old silent pond.
Into the pond a frog jumps.
Splash. Silence again.
What is this haiku doing? What exactly is it asking us to do? For Buechner, the answer is simple: it’s framing a moment in time. It isn’t trying to mean or convey; it’s simply putting a border around something that seems to matter, and it’s asking us to put everything else aside for just one minute and simply look. The same is true, Buechner says, for painting. It’s outlining something, setting it off so we can really see it. Music: it’s edging time, asking us to look deeply into time, to “keep time in another way—keep in touch with it, keep your hands on it somehow.”
For Buechner, the invitation of art is the same as that of faith. “It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks,” he writes. Paying attention, loving God, and loving one’s neighbor: for Buechner, these are the same; they are seamlessly interwoven. We may not be able to pay attention perfectly, all the time; who could? “But,” Buechner writes, “we can do more than we do—more than we do, surely we could do that.”
Something holy is happening, even in this riven, ruptured world, even now.
If there is a part of the book that feels out-of-place, it is the opening of the second section, an interlude entitled “The Laughing Face of Maya Angelou.” In this anecdote about Buechner’s experience becoming friends with Angelou when they were both lecturers at the Trinity Institute, Buechner realizes that he and Angelou share much in common, despite obvious differences in race and background. The short chapter interrupted what would have otherwise been a patterned argument for Buechner’s philosophy of attention, and for this reader, the jump into story came too soon; if it was to appear, it should have been later in the book.
The second section is rounded out by an essay on narrative; in which Buechner argues that the part of what it means to listen to one’s life “in a religious sense is to affirm that there is a plot to one’s life” even if such a design is difficult or sometimes impossible to recognize. This sets up the third section, which is devoted to Buechner’s reflecting on key events in his own life. Those familiar with his memoirs will find very few revelations in these reflections; he once again rehearses his father’s suicide and the dark shadow it cast over him for fifty years; his broken relationship with his mother; his years at the Lawrenceville School, Princeton University, and Union Theological Seminary; and his writing and teaching careers. Nevertheless, in reflecting again on these experiences, Buechner models the discipline of attention that he outlines in the first half of the book—conveying, most importantly, that it is never over. The act of paying attention is only valuable insofar as it is constantly renewed so as to become habitual. Buechner advises us to consider our stories as the rabbis advise us to consider the Torah: like a prism, turn it and turn it again, for all is in it.
Attention’s invitation: Buechner certainly isn’t the first to remind us of it. Poets and artists have implored us to pay attention for as long as there have been poets and artists. But in today’s world, when our attention is a product that is bought and sold, one can scarcely be reminded too often: Sit. Listen. Something holy is happening, even in this riven, ruptured world, even now.
Abigail Storch is a graduate of Eastern University and Yale Divinity School. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, she now lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Remarkable Ordinary was published by Zondervan on October 3, 2017. You can purchase a copy from the publisher’s website here.