Quotes from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name....That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed...”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour’s work as for a day’s. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the Lamb, and when the bridegroom finally arrives at midnight with vine leaves in his hair, they turn up with their lamps to light him on his way all right only they have forgotten the oil to light them with and stand there with their big, bare, virginal feet glimmering faintly in the dark.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“We weren't born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from the Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb...”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Podes despedir-te da tua família e dos teus amigos e afastar-te milhares de quilómetros, mas, ao mesmo tempo, leva-los no teu coração, na tua mente, no teu estomâgo, pois não só vives no mundo, mas o mundo vive em ti”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

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