3
" When I woke up this morning, before I’d gotten out of bed, I was looking around to see what was going on in my room. Not much was going on, I’m happy to say. But there was a cricket on the glazed stone floor. He didn’t belong in the room. Crickets don’t belong in rooms. I looked at him and decided to give him a helping hand, so I picked him up as gently as I could so as not to either alarm him or hurt him, and I carried him out into the sunshine. And he hopped away to do whatever crickets do, where they belong. And I thought to myself, that’s what it’s all about: to be lifted up carefully and in a way not to frighten us, to be taken out of the confinement of the room where we’re locked up away from where we belong, and to be carried out into the fresh air. And that’s, in a way I guess, what this book is about, how to get out of that room or what to do when you’re in that room. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
4
" And then, of course, there are the other servants who put their money out to earn interest, whom the master calls good and faithful servants. Faithful, as if their goodness is their faithfulness. They somehow—despite the fact that the master was a hard master, despite the fact that God makes impossible demands of us or terrible demands of us: to be perfect, to be loving, to be open—have faith in him that somehow all will be well; that it’s worth taking the risk, even if you live your life and it doesn’t turn out the way you want. There is forgiveness. There is compassion. There is mercy in God. And therefore, you dare take your chances and do what you can do with the hand that life, or God, has dealt you. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
5
" I told this story to a group in Texas once, and afterward the retreat leader came up to me and said, “You’ve had a good deal of pain in your life,” which, of course, he could’ve said to any one of us. And he said, “You’ve been a good steward of it. You’ve been a good steward of your pain.” That caught me absolutely off balance. I’ve never heard that before. Steward has always been a boring, churchy word to me, you know? Stewardship Sunday or something like that. It’s about taking care of your money, probably. But to be a steward of your pain, what a marvelous idea. I’ve thought a great deal about it ever since—what it means to be a steward of your pain, the various ways in which we deal with the sad and puzzling things that happen to us over the course of our lives. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
6
" When my daughter was dying, in effect, in this hospital on the west coast, I had never lived through a time when, in any obvious way, God seemed more distant. This girl reduced to a concentration camp victim, her arms and legs such sticks, her lovely young face such a death head that when we came upon her in the hospital that first night after we arrived, I literally would not have known it was my daughter. It was a horrifying, terrifying time. Which might well have given rise to the sense of, “If there is a God, what in hell is going on? How does this kind of thing get to happen?” But instead, by grace, I had this overpowering kind of comfort. God was silent. He said nothing I could hear; he did nothing I could see. But I had this tremendous sense that he was doing all he could do without blowing the whole show sky-high. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
7
" Another way, I think, is to be somehow trapped by your pain. Being stopped in your tracks. Never, in a sense, being able to escape your pain. Never being able to move on out of it into whatever lies beyond. I think a classic example of that would be the character Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham was at an early age all set to be married. She had on her bridal finery, and the great wedding cake was there in the parlor. Then her boyfriend jilted her, and that was the end of her life. From that day on, she lived in that room, wearing her tattered, moldering wedding clothes, with the cake still there, a sort of ruined pile on the table with cobwebs and mice. And I think I’ve known people like that, who have been somehow trapped in their pain. It becomes their confinement. It becomes like the room to the cricket—it can’t get out of it. You keep living it over and over and over again, almost relishing the bitterness of it. So you deal with your pain by allowing it to overwhelm you, by allowing it to stop you in your tracks. And I suppose it’s also a way of surviving your pain, because as in the case of Miss Havisham, you take a kind of grim, awful pleasure in your ruin. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
8
" Sloth is getting through life on automatic pilot. Not really being alive. Not really making use of what happens to you. Burying what you might have made something out of. Playing it safe with your life. To bury your life, to bury your pain, to bury your joy. To bury whatever it is that the world gives you, and then live as carefully as you can without really living at all. And I think that when the master speaks of being cast into darkness, whether it was wailing and gnashing of teeth, it’s not so much that he’s saying, “I’m going to punish you by casting you into the darkness where you will wail and gnash your teeth,” but, “To live a buried life is to say you have not really lived your life at all. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
9
" And then the ultimate word of judgment that the master speaks is, “From him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” This from, you must remember, the Prince of Peace, the Good Shepherd. From him who has not, even what he has will be taken. That seems the ultimate injustice, to take away the one talent from a man who has only one talent and give it to the other ones. I take that to mean, again, not a punishment so much as the inevitable consequence of burying your life. If you bury your life—if you don’t face, among other things, your pain—your life shrinks. It is in a way diminished. It is in a way taken away. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
10
" God does not sow the field of our life. He does not make these things happen. He did not cause Chester’s car to smash into Paula’s car, killing her young husband and her daughter. God doesn’t deal with the world that way; he doesn’t move us around like chess pieces. He does not sow, but he expects that out of whatever the world in its madness does to us, we will somehow reap a harvest. He does not sow these things that happen, but he expects us to deal with these things in creative and redemptive and life-opening sorts of ways. But again, the one-talent man was right, God does reap where he did not sow. He gathers where he did not winnow. He does not sow the pain, he does not make the pain happen, but he looks to us to harvest treasure from the pain. "
― Frederick Buechner , A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory
