The Sacred Journey

I'm noticing I gravitate toward biographies and memoirs when life throws me a curve ball. Makes sense, I guess. When you are walking through the valley, what could be more comforting than the testimony of those who have gone before you? And since there really is nothing new under the sun it is impossible to open up a good biography and not see some of your own struggles and fears represented there. Right now I'm reading The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days by Frederick Buechner.

In the book, Buechner examines his childhood and young adult life looking for, listening for, God. Here is an excerpt from the intro:

"Life itself can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves."

Good stuff.