Whispers from the wings

A collage of articulations, reflections on faith by figures who have inspired me of late. Indeed, if life's a show...then God prompts and guides us with directions from the wings of the stage...afterall He has the original 'script'.

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Philip Yancey on the writer Frederick Buechner:

" That slim book,'Telling the Truth', carries the subtitle 'The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale', a three-part division through which Buechner recapitulates the entire Christian story. He quotes King Lear and The Wizard of Oz as often as he quotes Isaiah or Matthew, and for some reason I found that made the gospel all the more believable....

He writes of a magic kingdom like Oz, of an end to our weary journey, of a home that will heal at last the homesickness that marks our days. As a preacher and a writer, he tries to awaken the child in people: the one who naively trusts, who will at least go and look for the magic place, who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers because he is not expected to know the answers. Given my own melancholy, my obsession with the problem of pain, and my emotionally truncated childhood, it was a message that breathed life into me.

'I have been spared the deep, visceral look into the abyss,' Buechner says. 'Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike puts it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent of the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage.'"

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Frederick Buechner on faith:
"Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and time.

So if someone (and this frequently happens) were to come up and ask me to talk about my faith, it's exactly that journey through space and time I'd have to talk about. That up and downs of the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions. I'd have to talk about the occasional sense I have that life isn't just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in pool causes billard balls to go off in many directions, but that life has a plot the way a novel has a plot- that events are somehow leading somemore."

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Everything in its time (Corrinne May)
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The river runs, and the river hides
Out to the ocean and under the sky
I promise you, the answer will come
Hold on to patience.
And watch for the sign
Everything in its time