Frederick Buechner: Quotes about God

Frederick Buechner is Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian. Explore interesting quotes on god.
Frederick Buechner: 134 quotes13 likes

“The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger coincide.”

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking, p. 95
Variant: Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“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

The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“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

“Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.”

Frederick Buechner

“It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

“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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Alphabet of Grace (1970)

“Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat

“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

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”

Frederick Buechner

Telling the Truth (1977)
Source: Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

“Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

Frederick Buechner

“Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.”

Frederick Buechner

Source: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

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

Frederick Buechner

Source: The Magnificent Defeat (1966)

“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.”

Frederick Buechner

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

“To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business... even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought... unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy... What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort... than being able from time to time to stop that chatter...”

Frederick Buechner

Telling Secrets (1991)

“One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.”

Frederick Buechner

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

“Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.”

Frederick Buechner

Telling Secrets (1991)

“So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

“I wanted to learn about Christ – about the Old Testament, which had been his Bible, and the New Testament, which was the Bible about him; about the history of the church, which had been founded on the faith that through him God had not only revealed his innermost nature and his purpose for the world, but had released into the world a fierce power to draw people into that nature and adapt them to that purpose… No intellectual pursuit had ever aroused in me such intense curiosity, and much more than my intellect was involved, much more than my curiosity aroused. In the unfamiliar setting of a Presbyterian church, of all places, I had been moved to astonished tears which came from so deep inside me that to this day I have never fathomed them, I wanted to learn more about the source of those tears and the object of that astonishment.”

Frederick Buechner

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)