Book Review: Telling the Truth by Frederick Buechner
Initial Impressions
Of all of the Frederick Buechner that I have read, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale was most challenging to get through. There were quite a few times that he dragged out over the course of many pages rather than saying what he meant in a paragraph or two. I am used to his wordiness and artsy writing, but this was almost too much of that. o be fair, Buechner's writing starts off measured but becomes increasingly wordy. In the first chapter he is making his case for the rest of the book, and is relatively to the point. However, as the book progresses, his form becomes less precise. Nonetheless, he would probably say that his writing style makes sense considering that, like Shakespeare in King Lear, Buechner wishes to emphasize that we preachers “speak what we feel” and a preacher should be “less concerned with matters of form and clarity and good taste than he is with telling the truth” (5). Therefore, Buechner's entire premise in the book is that of telling the truth. He pushes that the preacher should tell the truth in whatever way is most fitting, primarily in ways that connect to the humanity of the listeners and the preacher themself.
Because we humans are all in this together, we all need the gospel (4). And to Buechner, we should be less concerned about “how the Gospel is preached than with what the Gospel is and what it is to us” (4) He argues that the Gospel speaks to the deepest parts of who we are, and we must truly feel it and truly speak it when we preach. He also attempts to reveal that the Gospel itself is most deeply felt when the truth is tragic, comic, and “transcends all such distinctions and points beyond itself” (6). In other words, the Gospel is tragedy, the Gospel is comedy, and the Gospel is fairy tale (7).
Buechner’s attempt to distill the Gospel of Jesus down in this way is both helpful and admirable. This is primarily because stories of tragedy we all know and experience, the sudden shift of comedy and the unexpected, and the extraordinary of the fairy tale all touch our hearts in some very unique ways. The Gospel too can do the same, because within the Gospel all of those things exist. However, I do think the implementation of his idea within his writing is less practical than it could have been. Yet, the focus on taking the Gospel itself and finding how it deeply connects with the hearts of the listeners is incredibly helpful, especially his push to hear it as the hearers of our preaching would hear it (8).
Preachers, in particular, are tasked with revealing the good of the Gospel, or at least conveying hope within our truth-telling. So Buechner spends the next three chapters exploring the ideas of the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. This is where he gets a tad bit long winded in much of his examples and writing. The long meandering was more unhelpful than helpful in many cases. Yet, there were still quite a few seriously good nuggets of wisdom packed in the final three chapters, especially the chapter on fairy tale.
Further Thoughts
As mentioned above, I seriously resonate with Buechner’s desire to tell the truth in such a way that it touches the lives of the hearers of sermons. His focus on our duty as preachers to do our best to tell the story of Jesus in a way that moves people holds irresistible charm for me. He says in the initial chapter, “They simply hold him up to our gaze. At their most poetic and powerful they do not say something as much as they make something happen” (22). For me, this connects with Eugene Lowry’s The Homiletical Plot in that both Buechner and Lowry are leaning into the “show don’t tell” idea. Sermons are at their best when they connect with people’s hearts. When we, the preacher, reveal our own humanity and allow the Gospel to strum the harp strings of our hearts, people listen. That is a goal I always want to keep in the forefront of my mind while I prepare and preach. The Gospel is wonderful news, and it must penetrate the deepest parts of our souls. Its roots must run deep into the soil of our souls.
The best part of the book following the initial chapter was primarily the chapter on fairy tales, but there were some good nuggets in the chapters on tragedy and comedy. Tragedy was a little harder to pin down for me, as his writing on it was not clear. But from what I could gather was that all of us are “poor naked wretches of the world” (30). Furthermore, we try to hide that nakedness from each other, ourselves, and God, just like Adam and Eve in the Garden (31). Another part of that tragedy is that “[the] world hides God from us, or we hide ourselves from God, or for reasons of his own God hides himself from us, but however you account for it, his is often more conspicuous by his absence than by his presence, and his absence is much of what we labor under and are heavy laden by” (42-43). In short, the tragedy of the Gospel story is our desperate need for God’s presence. It is the realization that we are not enough on our own. It is the brokenness of humanity without God. Leaning into the tragedy can really pierce through the veil of assuredness we all tend to have in ourselves.
After exploring the tragedy of our need for God, Buechner turns to comedy—the unexpected grace in the Gospel story. I also like his twist on the use of Gospel as comedy. Buechner says that if “the tragic is inevitable” then “the comic is the unforeseeable” (57). For Buechner, the comedy is certainly laughter, but it also seems that comedy is not just hilarity. Rather, comedy is the unexpected twist or the unforeseeable. Specifically, “the comedy of grace as what needn’t happen and can’t possibly happen” actually does happen (58). And also, the way that Jesus was stringed up, and for the wrong reasons…basically everything happens not as you expect (60). I think this is a good way to picture the story of Jesus. Nothing happens as it should, yet we get all of the benefit and God gets all of the glory.
Finally, the fairy tale portion was my favorite part of the book. Honestly, Buechner could have just copied and pasted J.R.R. Tolkein’s essay titled On Fairy Stories, and I would have been happy. I love thinking about fiction and how it all intertwines with the story of God. How our imaginations reflect the character of God. Buechner does quote Tolkein, but only briefly. I particularly like how Buechner discusses fairy tales as things that each culture has and that each culture tells to its kids (75-76). But more than that he talks about how fairy tales seem to find us in our everyday lives. Buechner says, “you enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary” (78). I think this sums up the fairy tale section nicely, but I will return to it in the practical portion of this response paper.
Conclusion
My conclusion on Telling the Truth is that it is a decent book, but maybe not worth the entire time it took to read. There was too much fluff. Nonetheless, it was a good exercise in being stretched. Also, there were a few really good nuggets in here, especially the first chapter. I think it did remind me of the joy and mystery and excitement that the Gospel can hold, which is certainly a lesson worth remembering. In particular, the final chapter does a good job summing up the importance of the beauty that the Gospel holds in the form of story. While talking about J.R.R. Tolkein’s On Fairy Stories essay and his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Buechner says the following.
…what gives [fairy tales] their real power and meaning is the world they evoke. It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name…Yet the tears that come to our eyes at the joy of the fairy tale are nevertheless essentially joyous tears because what we have caught a glimpse of, however fleeting, is Joy itself, the triumph if not of goodness, at least of hope. And I do not think it is entirely fanciful to say that it is not only in fairy tales that we have glimpsed it (81-83).
That is a rather long block quote, as were many of Buechner’s sentences throughout, but ultimately this is his finest work in the book along with what he defines as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale in the first chapter. In that particular quote, Buechner shares that the Gospel, the story of God at work in the world, the story of Jesus, should pierce us like the tales we read in books or experience on the screen. The Gospel really is a fairy tale in that good and evil are exposed, and the good wins. It is fanciful in that things happen in ways we both do and do not expect, and there is something deeper going on than we could ever imagine. In the end, Joy itself, which Buechner reveals is Jesus himself, triumphs. But because of Jesus being rooted in history and rooted in real life, the fairy tale worlds we imagine and the brutal reality of human existence touch. The fanciful nature of God’s story is now tangible and realized. To me, that lesson is worth the read. God is at work, and we by the grace of God, get to live in that magic and mystery.
