Thoughts on Faith - Buechner

The following are excerpts from Fredrick Buechner’s excellent book, Secrets in the Dark.

The world and all of us in it are half in love with our own destruction and thus mad. The world and all of us in it are hungry to devour each other and ourselves and thus lost. That is not just a preacher’s truth, a rhetorical truth, a Sunday school truth. Listen to the evening news. Watch television. Read the novels and histories and plays of our time. Read part of what there is to be read in every human face including my face and your face. But every once in a while in the world, and every once in a while in ourselves, there is something else to read—there are places and times, inner ones and outer ones, where something like peace happens, love happens, light happens, . . . . And when they happen, we should hold on to them for dear life, because of course they are dear life. They are glimpses and whispers from afar: that peace, light, love are where life ultimately comes from, that deeper down than madness and lostness they are what at its heart life is. By faith we know this, and I think only by faith, because there is no other way to know it.

“By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear,” says the author of Hebrews. Faith is a way of looking at what is seen and understanding it in a new sense. Faith is a way of looking at what there is to be seen in the world and in ourselves and hoping, trusting, believing against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface we see there is vastly more that we cannot see.

What is it “that is seen,” as Hebrews puts it? What is seen is the ruined landscape I saw through the train window, the earth so ravaged you can’t believe any green thing will ever grow there again. What is seen is all the streets in the world like Forty-Second Street—the crazy drunks, the child whores, the stink of loneliness, emptiness, cruelty, despair. Maybe most of all what is seen, if we’re honest, is that there is in all of us what is both sickened and fascinated by such things, attracted and repelled. What is seen is a world that tries to sell us what kills us like the cigarette ad and never even gives it a second thought, as you and I rarely give it a second thought either but rush to buy what the world sells, and in our own way sell it ourselves.

Who or what created such a world? On the face of it, there seems to be only one answer to that question. We ourselves created it—that is the answer—and it is hard to see on the face of it—hard to see—that what created us can have been anything more than some great cosmic upheaval, some slow, blind process as empty of meaning or purpose as a glacier. But “by faith,” says Hebrews, we see exactly the same world and yet reach exactly the opposite answer, which is faith’s answer. “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God,” it says, “so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”

By faith we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to the last truth. Madness and lostness are the results of terrible blindness and tragic willfulness, which whole nations are involved in no less than you and I are involved in them. Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things—by faith we struggle against all odds to be able to see—that the world is God’s creation even so. It is he who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of his peace to live in peace, out of his light to dwell in light, out of his love to be above all things loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world.
(70-71)