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A quick post, as I wanted to share a section of the text I am reading this afternoon. From the anthology “Spiritual Quests, the Art and Craft of Religious Writing,” an excerpt from Frederick Buechner’s essay entitled “Faith and Fiction.” Well worth a read in its entirety, including the other essays in the book, but just an excerpt for now.

Is that why we write, year after year, people like me – to keep our courage up? Are novels like mine a kind of whistling in the dark? I think so. To whistle in the dark is more than just to try to convince yourself that dark is not all there is. It’s also to remind yourself that dark is not all there is, or the end of all there is, because even in the dark there is hope. Even in the dark you have the power to whistle. And sometimes that seems more than just your own power because it’s powerful enough to hold the dark back a little. The tunes you whistle in the dark are the images you make of that hope, that power. They are the books you write.

And in the same way, faith could also be called a kind of whistling in the dark. The living out of faith. The writing out of fiction. In both, you shape and you fashion and you feign. And maybe, finally, what the two have most richly in common is that they are a way of paying attention. Page by page, chapter by chapter, the story unfolds. Day by day, year by year, your own story unfolds – your life story. Things happen. People come and people go. The scene shifts. Time runs by. Time runs out.

Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues. If it’s God we’re looking for, as I suspect we all are, maybe the reason we haven’t found Him is that we’re not looking very hard.

So pay attention. As a summation of all that I’ve ever had to say as a writer I’d settle for that. And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I’d settle for that, too.