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Speak What We Feel

Late last year, prominent Christian writer Philip Yancey released Soul Survivor , a personal, intriguing and inspiring exploration of the lives and work of 12 people who inspire Yancey’s faith and writing.

Not surprisingly, many of these are writers themselves.

Soul Survivor provides both an introduction to the work of these writers and a reflection on their work from someone who has been influenced and inspired by them.

Among the writers selected by Yancey was Frederick Buechner. Significantly, Buechner has recently released a similar volume— Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought To Say), which traces some of his sources for writing and personal faith.

 

Buechner has authored 32 books, including fiction and nonfiction. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for one of his early novels, but temporarily turned away from a burgeoning writing career to study theology and is now an ordained Presbyt erian minister. However, rather than spelling an end to his writing, his ministry experience has informed his books over the past 50 years.

 

The writers and works attracting Buechner’s attention will be familiar to readers of his earlier work—the later sonnets of Irish poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton and King Lear from William Shakespeare. However, Buechner’s most recent book is a more focused analysis of these works and, in that context, of the conjunction between literature and faith.

The title is taken from the closing lines of King Lear —“The weight of this sad time we must obey;/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”—and this sets a sombre tone for Buechner’s thoughts.

Buechner’s best known book ( Telling the Truth, published in 1977) considered the gospel as tragedy, comedy and fairytale. It is the “gospel as tragedy” that is the main focus of Speak What We Feel, including an expansion upon his use of King Lear in Telling the Truth.

As the title suggests, what Buechner finds most striking in the works of these four writers from such different backgrounds and times is their honesty and their recognition of the tragedy of the human tradition.

Buechner describes how each of these writers wrestled—in their own ways—with the darkness they found in themselves and in the world around them.

 

But it is not all bleak. As Buechner quotes Chesterton, “Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.” There are gleams of hope—even if only found in the realisation of our own hopelessness—in each of the works considered.

The one false note of Speak What We Feel is reflected from Chesterton who, in The Man Who Was Thursday , states that Sunday rather than Saturday as the seventh and pre-eminent day of the week and the leader of the group of men representing the days of the week in Chesterton’s story.

 

The high point of Speak What We Feel is Buechner’s brief but poignant “Afterword.” Now aged 75, Buechner reflects on his own “sad times” and speaks what he feels. He questions his contribution to the world and thinks “how much more he might have done with his life.” Yet even in these thoughts, Buechner expresses the wish that “such faith as I have had been brighter and gladder.” However, the message he derives for himself from the reflections forming the body of this book is “a kind of unexpected encouragement.” Speak What We Feel may add an item or two to your “To Read” list, but it is much more than a recommended reading guide. It is the deep reflection of a distinguished writer nearing the end of his life and recognising many of his own struggles in those of his fellow writers.

This resonance brings out the honesty with which all five writers—including Buechner himself—have addressed their readers at various stages over the past 400 years and continue to challenge us with the tragedy of fallen humanity and the glimmers of hope as we search for faith and hope in the darkness.

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say) : Reflections on Literature and Faith, Frederick Buechner, HarperCollins, 161 pages.

 

 

Extract from Signs of the Times, September 2002 .

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