Telling Truths and other things that linger

So, haunting my short-term memories has been the second song in my Morning and Night series. Telling Truths is based on the book, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. This was actually the first Buechner book that I picked up years ago. It’s a short book with pretty simple themes – which hold great depth. I read through the book in one sitting while visiting my parents (where I found the book). Then, I sat and pondered what I just experienced. Then I opened the book back up and savored ever word. Buechner does such a masterful job at not only conveying truths, but in drawing you into landscapes and conversations, and familiar places and memories that you’ve stored away and forget you’ve had. While, in many ways the song does summarizing of the general concept, the only thing to do it any justice is reading the book yourself. I highly recommend it.

With that said, here are a couple nuggets:

“Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again” (pg. 29).

 

“Jesus shares with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as showing forth the glory of what it is to be with God” (pg. 42).

 

“From the divine perspective, I suspect that it is the tragic that is seen as not inevitable whereas it is the comic that is bound to hapen. The comedy of God’s saving the most unlikely people when they least expect it, the joke in which God laughs with man and man with God” (pg. 72).

I could go on, but here you go:

Telling Truths
By Joel Bidderman