The collection / 87 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1974 AD

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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02c. 1974 AD

Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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03c. 1974 AD

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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04c. 1974 AD

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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05c. 1974 AD

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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06c. 1974 AD

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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07c. 1974 AD

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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08c. 1974 AD

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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09c. 1974 AD

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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10c. 1974 AD

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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11c. 1974 AD

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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12c. 1974 AD

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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13c. 1974 AD

Go where your best prayers take you.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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14c. 1974 AD

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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15c. 1974 AD

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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16c. 1974 AD

It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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17c. 1974 AD

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?

Frederick Buechner / quote

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18c. 1974 AD

Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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19c. 1974 AD

There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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20c. 1974 AD

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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21c. 1974 AD

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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22c. 1974 AD

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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23c. 1974 AD

If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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24c. 1974 AD

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.

Frederick Buechner / quote

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