One of the books I’m reading now is Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark – A Life in Sermons. It contains thirty-seven sermons, and I’ve been trying to read one or two a day for the last week or so. In the one I read this morning, Faith and Fiction, Buechner draws a connection between faith and the way he approaches writing stories, and once again articulates what Faith is better than anyone else I know.
I lean over backwards not to preach or propagandize in my fiction. I don’t dream up plots and characters to illustrate some homiletic message. I am not bent on driving home some theological point. I am simply trying to conjure up stories in which people are touched with what may or may not be the presence of God in their lives as I believe we all of us are even though we might sooner be shot dead than use that kind of language to describe it. In my own experience, the ways God appears in our lives are elusive and ambiguous always. There is always room for doubt in order, perhaps, that there will always be room to breathe. There is so much in life that hides God and denies the very possibility of God that there are times when it is hard not to deny God altogether. Yet it is possible to have faith nonetheless. Faith is that Nonetheless. That is the experience I am trying to be true to in the same way that other novelists try to be true to the experience of being a woman, say, or an infantryman in World War II. In all of them, there is perhaps nothing more crucial than honesty.
If you are going to be a religious novelist, you have got to be honest not just about the times that glimmer with God’s presence but also about the times that are dark with his absence, because needless to say you have had your dark times like everybody else. Terrible things happen in the four novels (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt) I wrote about Leo Bebb. In a drunken fit, Bebb’s wife, Lucille, kills her own baby, and when Bebb tells her long afterwards that she has been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb, she answers him by saying, “Bebb, the only thing I’ve been washed in is the shit of the horse,” and dies a suicide. Poor Brownie, reeking of aftershave, decides in the end that his rose-colored faith in the goodness of things is as false as his china choppers and loses it. Miriam Parr dies of cancer wondering if she is “going someplace,” as she put it, or “just out like a match.” The narrator is a rather feckless, rootless young man named Antonio Parr, who starts out in the first book with no sense of commitment to anything or anybody but who, through his relationship with Leo Bebb, gradually comes alive to at least the possibility of something like religious faith. He has learned to listen for God in the things that happen to him anyway, just in case there happens to be a God to listen for. Maybe all he can hear, he says, is “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Or, if there is more to it than that, the most he can say of it constitutes the passage with which the last of the four novels ends, in which he uses the Lone Ranger as an image for Christ: “To be honest, I must say that on occasion I hear something else too – not the thundering of distant hoofs, maybe, or Hi-yo, Silver. Away! echoing across the lonely sage, but the faint chunk-chunk of my own moccasin heart, of the Tonto afoot in the dusk of me somewhere who, not because he ought to but because he can’t help himself, whispers Kemo Sabe every once in a while to what may or may not be only a silvery trick of the failing light.”