Telling the Truth

December 9, 2025

A secret special passage mediates between me and the message that wants to get through. One mess (or not) involved with access to and movement within this passage involves the collection of books that somehow shuffle around desk, floor, shelves, boxes… to say nothing about drop-ins from used book stores, goodwill, on-line sources, and recommendations... Just yesterday (or maybe the day before) I was browsing about the basement library hoping that something would light up. Although Taylor’s Disfiguring was the right book to be reading, the copy I had was just too cluttered with a previous owner’s ink underlinings and marginal notes. Connecting Taylor’s terrific commentary on Modernism/Post-modernism, art, transcendence/immanence and integrating this with personal experience was demanding enough. Trying to block out the distraction of someone else’s grappling/frustration with the text was too much. So I gave in to the need to order a replacement and to find another good read while waiting for it to arrive. 

     A gift really, because when looking about the possibilities, my eyes fixed on a slender volume with Truth in the title, by an author I’d not read before, Frederick Buechner. The first glance wasn’t compelling enough so I kept browsing, but maybe that golden thread that Blake says leads the way must have been tugging me back. So I returned and took down Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. 

     A day or so later I’m very grateful because not only is this book terrific but I’ve now found two other books by Buechner that were lost in the other side of the basement library thus promising prospects for wonderful hours guided by his imagination, the opening of truth, the Word in the rich dimensions of depths of each human’s life expressed through tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. 

“The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be pointed to by the language of poetry—of metaphor, image, symbol—as it is used by the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it—meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful—but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery.” p. 25

December 9, 2024