Frederick Buechner – On Memory

Last updated on: July 21, 2011 at 11:09 am by Tim Suttle

Frederick Buechner – On Memory 2011-07-21T11:09:00-06:00 Tim Suttle

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I re-reading Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner. It is a stunning thing to read an author’s account of their own worst moments. Reading Buechner’s account of his father’s suicide, his mother’s emotional distance/shallowness, and his daughters eating disorder, I feel as though I now know what it’s like to be a priest hearing confession – so dark, so sad. You just want to go back in time and grab him at that age and take him – take his brother – into your home and give them love, support, and counseling. But he would have probably ended up in some depressing profession instead of becoming a once in a generation author. Il faut souffrir pour être belle, he points out… “You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.” This book is a thing of beauty.

Buechner describes these memories; what his dad was wearing the day he killed himself, his mother’s routine of putting on her make-up, especially his emotion and inner dialog as he tried to help his daughter escape her eating disorder. The details of the memories and the thematic synergy he weaves within them. It is classic Buechner prose, beautiful and sad, dark but never without at least a tinge of hope. His account of memory is so powerful. I’m reminded of how memory is so determinative for the way we live our lives. He writes:

“I’m inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time around, we can still have another go at it now. We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings… It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later. Another way of saying it, perhaps, is that memory makes it possible for us both to bless the past, even those parts of it that we have always felt cursed by, and also to be blessed by it.”

I have been allowing myself to explore old memories this week – things I hope to live down but don’t know if I ever will. Telling the truth about ourselves and our past is a powerful thing. That we struggle to tell our own secrets is surely tied to our own need to self-justify. From Buechner I think I’m learning once again that the ability to be blessed by our past hurts is part and parcel to the resurrection. Resurrection isn’t merely something which awaits us, but something which we experience when we learn to tell our secrets.

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