Monday 6 April 2015

Words of wisdom (1)

I am quite taken by Frederick Buechner, American writer and theologian. A very wise and gentle-man. Novelist, theologian, and (even) Presbyterian. He seems to me to talk sense, and with a great humanity.
I read from one of those books of daily reflections each day ....yesterday's (Easter Day's) happens to say
" I am a congenital believer, a helpless hungerer after the marvelous as solace and adventure and escape."

We need to think about what he is saying here. 
He is NOT saying, I suggest, that he is an escapist! (This is the mistake that the Richard Dawkins of this world and even the S.Freud's make. They think that religion is about escape)

Buechner goes on 
"I am also a fabricator, and I am willing to believe that the whole business of God in my life may be something I have fabricated out of my need for solace and adventure if not for escape because religion has never seemed escape to me. Escape would be for me to get out of religion— with all its demands and promises—rather than to get into religion. " 
and concludes 
"Such faith as I have, where did it come from and why?"

This all seems to me much more profound than Dawkins' shallow dismissal of everything spiritual and religious as imaginary


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