One morning in the fall of 1936, 10-year-old Frederick Buechner and his younger brother were playing in their room. Their father opened the door, checked on them, and then went down into the family garage, turned on the engine of the car and waited for the exhaust to kill him.
Buechner and his brother heard a commotion, looked out the window and saw their father on his back in the driveway. Their mother and grandmother, in their nightgowns, had dragged him out of the garage and were pumping his legs up and down in a doomed attempt to revive him.
There would be no funeral, or discussion of what happened. Their mother just moved the boys to Bermuda to escape. The rules in that family were, “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.” They became masters at covering themselves over. (David Brooks, NY Times, August 18, 2022)
Many decades later, despite this horrific and formative incident, and the rules of his family to not talk, not trust, not feel, Frederick Buechner emerged as one of the most significant writers, preachers, and theologians of his time. He somehow discovered that you cannot steel yourself against the pain, just shut down the feelings. When you do that, you simultaneously close yourself off from being transformed by the power and beauty and grace of life itself.
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