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, “Message in the Stars”
“It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.”
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Message in the Stars”
“You see him? You see him? By Almighty God, brothers. Open your eyes. Listen.”
— What the Wise Man told the Shepherds
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “The Birth”
Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without [Jesus] is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?
— The Wise Man
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “The Birth”
becoming flame 