Discover the remarkable life of Frederick Buechner, who died Monday | McKibben

I am amazed at how quickly the internet exchanged the verb “is” for “was” in the leading biography of the theologian who has most impacted my life, Frederick Buechner. He died on Monday, Aug. 15, and at 6 that evening, I discovered the edited version of his remarkable life.

I cannot recall exactly when I first heard of him when I was a seminary student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Was it Pastoral Care classes because of his strength in capturing the psychology of the human spirit?

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Perhaps it was Preaching, as he had not only an expansive vocabulary and an artist’s eye for weaving words together, but also a strong ethic for what preaching is about and who the preacher must be.

Was it Theology, where his deep insights into human psychology intersected with interpretation of scripture in ways that made the word come alive? I am not sure. But from my introduction, I was smitten by the so-called “wordsmith.”

A shift in the universe

When I learned of his death from thoughtful friends who are more connected to social media than me and knew my admiration for him, I was overcome with grief.

It felt as if something had shifted in the universe that this person I had never met or even heard in person, as he was extremely humble and shy and had only a handful of public appearances in his 96 years, was no longer with us on this earth.

Because my now grown children know of my great love for Frederick Buechner through the years, I felt compelled to send them a group text to let them know of his passing.

Using my common descriptor for him, “my favorite theologian, Frederick Buechner,” a descriptor I had just used on Sunday past when visiting a friend in prison, I told my beloved children he had died and that somehow I just wanted them to know. Their quick and loving response was a balm to my soul.

I once offered a community class to explore “celebrity grief,” that is, the sense of loss we sometimes feel when some public figure dies who we never met or knew personally. Of the 25 persons attending the class, all but one reported ever feeling a sense of grief for someone they knew as a public figure but had never met.

Why we grieve celebrities

Two bright and creative mental health professionals in Baltimore who run the very helpful website, “What’s Your Grief,” once posted an article on the website giving nine reasons we grieve the death of people we do not know personally.

We reviewed those reasons in our celebrity grief discussion, just days as it turned out, after the death of David Bowie, whom many around the world mourned.

It is common human behavior to want to form relationships with other people, even if we do not know who they are. “Parasocial” is a term that psychologist use to describe one-sided relationships, sometimes with celebrities or famous people or public figures who do not reciprocate the relationship.

Because of the many social media platforms available today, the prevalence of these one-sided relationships is increasing.

Parasocial relationships can become detrimental and toxic, as we have witnessed, but they also can be positive: inspiring career choices, teaching life lessons, and promoting wellbeing. As was my “friendship” with Frederick Buechner.

Recognizing common stories

Though admittedly shy, he was remarkably transparent in his writing. In one of his memoirs, my personal favorite, “Telling Secrets,” Buechner writes that his story is important not because it is his, but because if he tells it anything like right, the chances are we who read it will recognize that in many ways it is also ours.

In this slight volume he tells of his father’s suicide when he was only 10 and how it impacted his life, his daughter’s anorexia and what it taught him of love, the ways in which teaching at an evangelical college shaped his faith, and how the empathy of others saved him.

His willingness to listen to his own life and encourage others to do the same is one of the reasons I love him.

I am also grateful for the unique perspective he had on scripture. His creativity in describing biblical characters and their particular place in the narrative of Christian faith in his book, “Peculiar Treasures,” has enlivened many sermons, bible studies, and skeptics through the years.

I think of his description of Jacob and Esau ending, “Then Jacob and Esau together, the guller and the gulled, buried their father, Isaac, as by then they had also buried the hatchet.”

And of the entry, “Yahweh,” where he concludes, “ ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,’ Yahweh says, ‘and he will have everybody aboard at the last because if just a couple of stragglers fail to show up, the party simply won’t be complete without them.’ ”

Doubt and grandchildren

Another of his remarkable volumes is “Wishful Thinking, A Theological ABC.” Of this book, Buechner himself says “I tried to shake a little of the dust off a lot of moth-eaten old religious words and put some color back in their cheeks.”

One of my favorite definitions in the book is for the word “doubt.”

He writes: “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

In a book titled, “Beyond Words,” he has an entry for “grandchildren” that I appreciate. It begins, “To have grandchildren is not only to be given something but to be given something back…of your children’s childhood, your young parenthood, and your own childhood.”

The gifts they leave us

One of the reasons that we grieve famous persons we have never met is because of how much they have given us.

I feel deeply indebted to Frederick Buechner for his willingness to pursue “the intersection of the world’s greatest need and his own greatest passion,” his definition of the word “vocation,” in writing 39 books across several genres.

This week the New York Times called him “a novelist with a religious slant,” the Washington Post, “a prolific novelist and theologian,” and Religion News Service, “the minister’s minister,” as he was dubbed by the Princeton Theological Seminary President in 2016.

About the death of someone you love, Buechner encouraged, “Weep all the tears you have in you to weep because whatever may happen next, if anything does, this has happened. Something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it.”

I am weeping, believing as Buechner wrote, that “if death is the closing of one door, there is implied an opening of another.”

Thank you, Frederick Buechner. You will always be my favorite theologian.

The Rev. Candace McKibben is an ordained minister and pastor of Tallahassee Fellowship.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Author of 39 books, theologian Frederick Buechner died Aug. 15