Saint Frederick

Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)

This morning I'm interrupting the long story of the Glasgow Ghost Shirt because yesterday, at 96 years old, Frederick Buechner (beek'-ner) left this world behind and passed, as my Native friends might say, into the spirit world. 

I should have read Buechner much more than I have, and I can say that with certainty because we've been at it, the two of us, for a long time now, going through a compilation of his thoughts titled Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith, a book, really, like none other we've used for daily devotions. It's profoundly beautiful and wonderful, thoughtful, mysterious, and almost always, in its own way, funny. I love it.

I was surprised to know he was still alive. I honestly believed we were reading a text from a departed saint who had passed on some time ago. I was surprised to know that I'd been wrong--he was still among the living. But then, it didn't matter really because once every day we listened to him--we heard his voice. For Buechner, I'm sure, like the apostle Paul, in the most profound of ways, it didn't matter: "to live is Christ, to die is gain."

Two nights ago, the night he passed away, we read the passage from the S section, a couple of paragraphs titled "Saint." In his honor this morning, let me offer it, right from the meditations of just such a one, Saint Frederick. 

Saint

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Many people think of saints as plaster saints, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, "I am foremost among sinners" (I Timothy 1:15), and Jesus himself prayed God to forgive him his trespasses, and when the rich young man addressed him as "good Teacher," answered "No one is good but God alone" (Mark 10:18).

In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, "Give me chastity and continence, but not now," that Saint Francis started out as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pole, you figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves. 

The Holy Spirit has been called "the Lord, the giver of life" and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.  

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You can read an obituary here.