I'm indebted to Frederick Buechner for many things: for his helping to sort out my faith when I was ready to walk away from it in my twenties, for his demonstration of the rippling effects of suicide on a family which has kept me from committing a sin by which I've been sorely beset, for his calling up the inherent musical possibility of prose sentences—their Janus-faced, Chestertonian grace—that made me want to be an essayist as well as a poet, and especially for his sorting out what is now my theory of evangelism: that it doesn't start with sharing The Story, as one might tell it out on a string of beads beginning with green for Eden, then black for sin, etc.; rather, it begins with sharing The Author as He has written, and has been writing, my story, or as Buechner memorably-as-ever, phrased it,
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness.[1]
I've been trying to pick out that lead of Love ever since reading his biographies decades ago, and by Heaven's grace, sometimes even successfully. But in addition to all that, recently, I've been grateful to the good Reverend for helping me make sense of Shakespeare's strangest stage direction.
It's famous; you've probably heard it. In the middle of The Winter's Tale, when the lost child Perdita is set among the rocks, exposed to whatever death or happenstantial rescue might find her, poor Antigonus—the servant in charge of setting the supposed-bastard out as a foundling that the kingdom might not be defiled by the act that King Leontes wrongly imagines begat her —is chased off-stage with a curt ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (iii.3.65). It's a fun bit of artistic assignment as generations of directors are given a practical problem to solve. In Jamesian England, maybe they used a live bear from the bear-baiting shows that often preceded a night at the theater. Do we make a bear costume and have an actor stage the chase? Should it be funny? Animated? What if we used a stuffed teddy and Antigonus just acts terrified? Some critics, theater-goers, and directors enjoy this scene simply because it seems so random: here we are in a very serious play about jealousy and power imbalance, rage and injustice, gift-economy and indebtedness and now this crazy bit of text suggesting, what exactly? I think I know now and I know I wouldn't have noticed were it not for Buechner's relation of his experience of teaching King Lear at Phillips Exeter in Telling the Truth (1977).
Buechner refers to the ‘tragic vision’ of King Lear, ‘in which the good and the bad alike go down to dusty and, it would seem, equally meaningless death with no God to intervene on their behalf’,[2] but he also calls the same play ‘a homily’ on 1 Corinthians 1:27-28 because,
[It] points to the apparent emptiness of the world where God belongs and to how the emptiness starts to echo like an empty shell after a while until you can hear in it the still, small voice of the sea, hear strength in weakness, victory in defeat, presence in absence.[3]
Read the full essay at The Buechner Review (Frederick Buechner Center) →
Originally published in The Buechner Review (Frederick Buechner Center), 2024-06.
Image: Richard Heinen / Unsplash — https://unsplash.com/photos/25OeoEKoNP8 — Unsplash License https://unsplash.com/license
