I don’t think Frederick Buechner believed in saints, not exactly. The holy people he depicts in his novels are resolutely what he himself called “clay-footed,” which is to say, earthbound. No ethereal light here. No gauzy angelic presence. In both Godric and Brendan, the reader encounters figures who, for all their historical and cultural remove, we might have known and might know still. But still, I thought of Buechner, who died earlier this month, as a kind of patron saint, one particularly for artists.
Just about every artist of faith I know — photographers, poets, actors — all count his books as among their dearest treasures. The outpouring of affection in the days since his death has been enough to convince a great many people, who meant to read his works, that they were missing, or had missed, something. They had. And what that was — and what of course he still can be, though it feels different now — was a confidant. Someone who had seen it. Whether artistic fame, childhood trauma, family troubles, struggling friends, inspiration dead ends, or the highs and lows that accompany the life of religious faith, Buechner had been there, and more importantly still: he told us.
That act of radical self-disclosure across several autobiographies is quite distinct from the TMI memoirs writers seem to deal in these days. His writing is closer to Augustine because in every library nook, garage, pulpit, and darkened room there lingers this … what? The big other? You’ll have to read his books, really, any one of them, to see what I mean, but it is there, as real as anything: a hovering over the face of the depths into which he plunges us, nothing spared from view, because for Buechner, every thing in its thing-ness is saturated with God-presence. Nothing isn’t holy for him if we pay attention to it aright. And since the artist’s work, in any genre, is primarily an act of paying a kind of attention, a great many of us found him a guide to a certain way of being in the world.
The other part of it though, is that I owe him personally.