Last week I visited my best friend Jed in Los Angeles. I slept with the windows open because it was March and Los Angeles was, for once, raining. I woke in the middle of the night—somewhere around two-thirty—and laid there in the silence, listening for nothing in particular. Suddenly I heard a whistle in the air above me. It took me a second, but I matched the sound to a memory. I had heard that whistle before in war movies. The whistle of a bomb. Something inside me innately knew it to be true. Then the explosion. It was loud, and it was close. I jumped up and ran to Jed’s room and opened the door to see him sitting up in bed. “I heard it too,” he said. We both looked at each other in silence, listening for anything, for everything.

Seconds went by, and I expected to hear screams or another explosion. I didn’t though. Just silence.

Turns out, it was a firework.

I called my mom the next morning and told her about it, laughing. I felt so dumb, mistaking a firework for a bomb. But deep inside, in the place that innately knew that sound, I still felt afraid.

The world we live in feels perilous enough for a bomb in Los Angeles. I know it to be true. Don’t we all these days?

—

Frederick Buechner has a repeating theme. It’s a simple theme, and it appears throughout his books, especially his memoirs, which I finally read all the way through sitting out on my porch last summer. He uses the first words of his first memoir—The Sacred Journey—to share it and, like a musical theme, it flows throughout all the rest. Here are those first words:

“All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there… It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks.”1

That’s the theme: that “if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks.”2 In all his writing, Buechner implores his readers to recognize that God is speaking in the normal, humdrum of this life. Buechner exhorts us to pay attention and to listen.

But is he right? In a clamorous and contradictory world, in a world so very far from idyllic, in a world with whistles in the night sky, who gets to claim they have heard the voice of God?

—

I’m originally from Oklahoma, and it is impossible to put into words what that place was like when I was growing up. Buechner writes of Bermuda what I believe of Oklahoma:

“No place I have ever been to since—no matter how remote, no matter how strange and lovely—can match the loveliness of the Bermuda islands as they still existed when I first saw them.”3

No place I’ve lived—not Los Angeles, not Boston, not Michigan—comes close to the Oklahoma I grew up in. It was flat and vast, and I had a full family and church. To the eyes of a nine-year-old, standing in the baptismal waters before going under, it was like looking out at the sea of the faithful, looking out at the green branch shooting up from the stump of Jesse.

In a word, it was idyllic.

God’s voice seemed loud and obvious, as close as the nearest fish decal in my church parking lot.

—

I’m reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.4 On the opening page, he describes a child being pulled from rubble in Gaza. It is after another strike. He writes,

“Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.”5

There was no bomb over my head last week in Los Angeles. There are plenty in Gaza and other torn and scarred places around the world. However, I grew up safe in Oklahoma, in my own little idyll, able to hear the voice of God. But the older I get, the more I wonder whether that idyll was built of blessing and divine protection or luck and privilege.

Did God speak safety over me, or was that just chance? Why would I be more blessed than a Gazan refugee?

—

I wasn’t aware of the definition of “idyll” until this essay. I looked it up and discovered it is defined as a near-perfect scene that is often unsustainable. I didn’t know about the “unsustainable” part until writing these words.

But it applies to Oklahoma. I got older and the world became more complicated. A mentor in the faith told me racism didn’t exist. Televangelists and self-appointed prophets told me who to vote for. A man in power tear gassed peaceful protestors, stood outside a church, and used a Bible as a photo-op, and so many Christians with fish decals cheered all this on.

But I disagreed with them. Who was right?

So, Frederick Buechner, who speaks for God?

—

September 13^th, 2001. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell Sr. sit on The 700 Club reflecting on the events of two days prior.

JERRY FALLWELL: What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if in fact God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

PAT ROBERTSON: That’s my feeling. I think we’ve just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven’t even begun to see what they can do to the major population—

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Oh yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God off—successfully with the help of the federal court system—throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools—uhh—the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked, and when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians—who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle—the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur.6

Do they speak for God?

—

Buechner writes in one of his collected sermons,

“Or in the year that King Uzziah died, or in the year that John F. Kennedy died, or in the year that somebody you loved died, you go into the temple if that is your taste, or you hide your face in the little padded temple of your hands, and a voice says, ‘Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people die?’ and if you are not careful, you may find yourself answering, ‘Send me.’ You may hear the voice say, ‘Go.’ Just go.”7

Or in the year that terrorists took down two buildings, or in the year that a firework went off over your head, or in the year that your apartment was turned to rubble. Or, or, or.

Buechner seems to not be blind to the harsh conditions of this world, and he knows that every idyllic life will ultimately be unsustainable; the bottom will eventually fall out, along with any semblance of control. And it is in that year—that day—that moment—that we are asked, “Whom shall I send into the pain of a world where people die?”

Will we be willing to say, “Send me?”

Am I willing today, with whistles over Los Angeles and Gaza, to say, “Send me?”

—

Buechner spends much of his time in The Eyes of the Heart “speaking” to his deceased grandmother Naya. She is alive for him in his Magic Kingdom.

I want to do the same with my own grandmother, Grandma Sue. I had the rocker she rocked me in as a baby until it became too broken to fix last year. My mother gave me another rocker to replace it, and it is that rocker I am sitting in now, looking at the picture of my Grandma Sue rocking me as a baby all those years ago.

I want to tell her about the war going on in Gaza and the fireworks over my head and the crumbling of my idyllic tableau. I want to tell her about all the people walking powerful roads claiming to be the voice of God.

“Well, Drew,” she says, “Cast your cares on him, for he careth for you.”

If anyone is allowed to say that to me, it is her. She watched a marriage end, and went from financial comfort to working the front counter of the Tastee Freeze in Chandler, Oklahoma. She raised my mother from the age of eleven as a single parent, and she lived the rest of her life alone after Mom left for college. She attended First Baptist Church every week, and even when she was nonverbal from the years-long onslaught of dementia, she still sang along to “In the Garden,” her favorite hymn.

And despite the harshness of life, she radiated love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. If anyone can tell me to cast my cares on him, it is her.

So who speaks for God? She does.

The part of me that innately knew that whistle can also recognize God’s voice.

—

He does careth for me, I believe that.

But still, sometimes the whistle above my head gets loud, Christians abuse the weak and celebrate bombings in far off places, and the doubts creep in.

In The Sacred Journey, Buechner writes,

“Religious or unreligious, sophisticated or unsophisticated, in one form or another we all of us share the same dark doubts, the same wild hopes, and…unless those who proclaim the Gospel acknowledge honestly that darkness and speak bravely to the wildness of those hopes, they might as well save their breath for all the lasting difference their proclaiming will make to anybody.”8

Buechner seems to be telling me, were he alive and sitting with me right now in my own Magic Kingdom, that I am to acknowledge this darkness. Because if I can’t acknowledge it, with the Holy Spirit burning inside me, then who can?

And Grandma Sue seems to be telling me, were she alive and sitting with me right now in my own Magic Kingdom, that this darkness can be handed to God, trusting that he has a plan for it.

Is that too simple of an answer? I don’t know. But it seems to fit me for this moment, the one filled with whistles overhead and shouting religious pundits. Maybe, through the Spirit burning inside me, I can braid these whistles into something resembling the grace and voice of God, something that can quietly and diligently stand in opposition to the shouting powerful.

—

There is an extraordinary passage in Now & Then in which Buechner speaks of the power and peril of the sermon. He begins with a quote from Karl Barth’s The Need for Christian Preaching,

“What are you doing, you man, with the word of God upon your lips?...Upon what grounds do you assume the role of mediator between heaven and earth?”9

Buechner is not naïve or ignorant when he tells us to listen to our lives.10 He knows it is a perilous business speaking on behalf of God, and—in the year JFK died or the year the planes flew into two towers or the night when the bombs whistled overhead—he does not present a pie in the sky, crocheted pillow type faith. He takes this seriously, and so should anyone who dares speak or write of the things of God, regardless of how many speak flippantly and pridefully about such matters.

Buechner also says preaching is an act of “whistling in the dark.”11 Our task is to discern between all the whistles of this world—trusting that both sheep and humans have that innate part of them that knows the shepherd’s voice—and echo back something beautiful, something enmeshed in what theologians might call a Trinitarian act of creation.

“It is worth scratching on the wall that God is Love and Life because, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it may just be true.”12

My words—our words—are merely scratches, but they may be of some use to God yet.

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