I grew up in a part of America known as “the grass seed capital of the world,” Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I learned my religion in the small community churches my family attended. We sat together in folding chairs—the families of farmers, fabricators, laborers, and the occasional small-business owner. We were homeschooled or went to small Christian schools to avoid the corruption of the public school system (and the kids in it). Dancing, drinking, gambling, swearing, alcohol, and tobacco in any form were forbidden (though I knew my father to keep a pinch of wintergreen Skoal between his cheek and gum from time to time when he was out in the garage). Our faith was fundamentalist, Baptistic, and cessationist, allergic to anything that smelled of either sin or sacrament.
I must say that I am deeply grateful for my upbringing, regardless of any changes in my own belief, practice, or religious affiliation. It taught me to be morally serious. I learned early of the need for personal conversion. I was probably preserved from many genuinely destructive “things of the world.” And the folks who raised me in this culture were mostly good, loving, salt-of-the-earth people. I was not a rebellious teenager, either. I went to church. I read the Bible. I toed the line. Yet something was missing.
I could not have named it, but it had something to do with beauty and something to do with integrity—a way of reading the world that held together. On the one hand stood my tradition’s firm commitment to Biblical truth and morality. On the other hand stood the tragedy and mystery of life, those elements of human existence that resist easy explanation. I found myself drawn to poetry, art, music, and books to help me explore that latter category, but my religious tradition seemed to have no place for such things. At best, they were marginal; at worst, a distraction from the real business of Christian life.
This tension grew increasingly uncomfortable and finally became a full-blown crisis. It seemed like I was going to have to choose between my own humanity and the only form of holiness that had ever been on offer. Many of my friends from those days who felt similarly torn eventually lost any attachment they had to traditional Christian religion. Some lost their faith altogether. So I have an idea what direction my life might have taken had one of its central events not occurred.
Into my hands fell a book—Frederick Buechner’s novel Godric. Here was an unapologetic Christian author who spoke like no Christian I had heard before. Published in 1980, the novel retells the life of a 12th-century English saint, Godric of Finchale. And it spoke to me as powerfully as the voice Augustine heard calling to him, “Take up and read.”
Most of the events of the novel are taken from The Life and Miracles of Saint Godric, Hermit of Finchale, a hagiography by Reginald of Durham, one of Godric’s contemporaries. Medieval hagiographies (biographies of saints) were written primarily for spiritual edification and moral instruction. But they also remain a valuable source of historical information, and what we know of Godric we know from them. The real-life Godric was born in Norfolk to Anglo-Saxon peasants at the time of the Norman Conquest. It was an inauspicious beginning, but his entrepreneurial spirit allowed him to rise in the world. Beginning as a local peddler, he eventually became a merchant, served several prominent men, and ended the first half of his long life as the partial owner of at least two commercial ships that he used for trade, pilgrimages, and perhaps a bit of piracy on the side. He even played a minor role in the world’s great affairs. In 1102, after the disastrous Second Battle of Ramla, it was Godric’s ship that rescued King Baldwin I from an Egyptian siege and returned him to Jerusalem.
Then, sometime around the age of forty, Godric had a spiritual awakening, vowing to give away his considerable wealth and adopt a monastic life. Returning to County Durham for good, he first served as a sacristan of a local church and even attended school with a group of choirboys. Eventually, however, Godric realized that he needed solitude, so he asked the bishop for a plot of land and was granted a place near Finchale by the River Wear. He spent his next sixty years there, only rarely leaving the grounds.
Godric’s entire world consisted of a small hermitage, a Marian chapel, and the river in which he regularly immersed himself as penance for his sins. He planted his own vegetables, cultivated barley for bread, wore a hairshirt and a metal breastplate, and used a stone for a pillow. Twice he was nearly killed: once by a flood and once by Scottish brigands.
Despite his isolation, Godric developed a reputation as a holy man. Several miracles of healing were attributed to him; he had clairvoyant visions (especially of other people’s deaths); and he became known for his friendship with wild animals (even snakes). His hymns to Mary and prayer to St. Nicholas are recognized as among the earliest poems in Middle English. He received visits not only from commoners but also from abbots, priors, canons, and even once from William I, King of the Scots. Thomas à Becket and Pope Alexander III were correspondents.
Towards the end of his life, the Bishop of Durham sent Reginald to serve both as Godric’s caregiver and as his biographer. Godric of Finchale died in Reginald’s care on May 11th, 1170. He was over a hundred years old.
It is a story ripe for novelization. It is also a story that a man like Frederick Buechner would be drawn to. Like Godric, his early life was marked by roaming from place to place, rubbing elbows with the cultural elite, and achieving no small worldly success. Then, like Godric’s, his life began to tilt. After an extraordinarily well-received first novel, his second novel flopped. He quit his job and moved to New York to regain his footing, but he was unable to push through crippling writer’s block and found himself alone and rudderless in a great city.
Then one Sunday he decided he would go to church. He went only because the church was on his block, he had heard the preacher was a good one, and he had nothing better to do with his Sundays. The preacher was George Arthur Buttrick, minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian church, and Buechner was deeply affected by his sermons. They had a literary quality he admired, but even more important was their spiritual depth and complexity. In his memoirs, Buechner avoids talking in the conventional language of conversion, but it was one particular phrase that “did it” for him—Buttrick’s assertion that God was crowned in the hearts of believers “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.” The inclusion of “great laughter” especially struck him. After church, he confessed to his grandmother that he thought he had found God. Later that week, he reached out to Buttrick, wanting to learn more about “whatever it was that had taken place.” The following fall, at Buttrick’s suggestion, he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary.11. Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (HarperCollins Publishers, 1982), 107-110. He would later write of the decision, “I felt something of what Saint Francis must have felt when he decided, to everybody’s astonishment, to give everything away to serve Christ’s poor. I too succeeded in astonishing almost everybody including myself, but the difference was that I was no saint.”22. Buechner, Now and Then (HarperCollins Publishers, 1983), 5. Over the next four years, he met and married his wife, took his ordination vows in the Presbyterian church, and accepted a position at Phillips Exeter Academy. There he taught classes, served as the school chaplain, preached sermons, and performed the duties of priest; but his primary task was to revive the dying religion department at one of the country’s elite institutions for the education of young men. Most of these boys were from families of privilege and wealth; but at the same time, this was the late sixties, so many of the brightest of Buechner’s pupils were also “anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-God, and anti-authority in any form whatsoever.” He understood the pedagogical challenges he faced:
I was ordained as an evangelist, but apologist, I suppose, would have been, and continues to be, the more appropriate word. My job, as I saw it, was to defend the Christian faith against its “cultured despisers,” to use Schleiermacher’s phrase. To put it more positively, it was to present the faith as appealingly, honestly, relevantly and skillfully as I could.
He had his students read the most challenging theologians and Christian writers he could find, authors like C.S. Lewis, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth. But he also had them read books like King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Power and the Glory. He made sure that they really understood Sartre and Camus and what the disappearance of God from human life would actually mean. The war he was fighting was, in his words, “to convince as many as I could that religious faith, even if they chose to have none of it, was not as bankrupt and banal and easily disposable as they most of them believed.”
He was by any measure wildly successful. In eight years, he had grown the department from one teacher (himself) and around twenty students to four full-time faculty and around three hundred students enrolled in religion courses. Then, to even his own surprise, Buechner abruptly decided to withdraw from the world, retiring with his wife to a farmhouse in a small Vermont town to dedicate himself again to full-time writing.
Frederick Buechner’s career spanned six decades, during which he published thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, essays, and memoirs. He was an O. Henry Prize winner and finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He died in his home in 2022 at the age of 96. This year would have marked his one hundredth birthday.
Thinking back on his time at Exeter he wrote:
[I]n one form or another we all of us share the same dark doubts, the same wild hopes, and what little by little I learned from those years at Exeter was that 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.
This more than anything is the spirit that pervades Buechner’s writing. What he learned as a post-modern apologist to the cultured despisers of religion he put into practice as a writer.
Godric is perhaps Buechner’s greatest work. The novel is framed as a first-person narrative, told from Godric’s perspective near the end of his life (with a brief afterword by Reginald). The style is antiquated, borrowing masterfully from the principles of Old English poetry and leaning into Anglo-Saxon diction. “Five friends I had, and two of them snakes,” the novel opens. “Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man’s arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit’s heart.”33. Buechner, Godric (HarperOne, 1983), 3. But the narrative structure is distinctly modern, a set of episodes from the life of the saint retold in a non-linear fashion and alternating between the wandering of his early life and the settled pattern of his later years. The episodes do have a spiritual order, though, circling around and eventually arriving at a confessional revelation that very much makes sense of sixty years of penitence and self-denunciation. (For the sake of the reader, I will not reveal that event here.)
As Godric unravels his story, three tensions emerge: the narrative tension between the hagiographer and the autobiographer, the interpersonal tension between intimacy and brokenness, and the ultimate spiritual tension between holiness and humanity.
The first of these tensions takes shape in Godric’s literary battle with Reginald. Godric knows himself to be a man seriously flawed by sin, but the monk keeps trying to spin his life into a conventional hagiography. At the beginning of their interaction as “saint” and “biographer,” Godric tries to frighten Reginald off from the project altogether.
There’s much you’re better not to know, I say, but know you this. Know Godric’s no true hermit but a gadabout within his mind, a lecher in his dreams. Self-seeking he is and peacock proud. A hypocrite. A ravener of alms and dainty too. A slothful, greedy bear.
Not worthy to be called a servant of the Lord when he treats such servants as he has himself like dung, like Reginald. All this and worse than this go say of Godric in your book.
At this rebuke, tears begin to run down Reginald’s cheeks. He has come to tell the story of a holy man, and all that Godric will give him is a litany of his sins. Though Godric despises the softness and piety of the younger monk, he is also moved by pity and loathes his own instinctive cruelty towards him. So he finally makes a concession: “Well, but say this also if you like … Say yes, it’s true that Mary came. She came though who knows why. Clad all in skyblue mantling with the crown of Heaven on her head. She smiled at me.” Godric then sings one of his hymns for Reginald.
Reginald is delighted, but despite this concession, the tension between his version of Godric’s life and Godric’s self-understanding persists throughout the novel. Reginald keeps trying to tell a story that will “unbushel the light” of Godric’s life “for the schooling of children.” Godric keeps refusing to give in to Reginald’s sanitizing instincts. “Did he but know where Godric’s path has led or what sights his light has lit,” Godric laments, “he’d bushel me back fast enough. I’ve told Mother Reginald tales to rattle his beads and blush his fishbelly tonsure pink as a babe’s bum, but he turns them all to treacle with his scratching quill.” And yet, Godric cannot ultimately deny the miracles that God has worked through him any more than he can deny his sins. There are two sides to his story that Godric himself cannot ignore, even if Reginald manages to do so.
The second major tension concerns the intimacy possible between human persons and the struggle we face to connect even with our truest friends. The novel does not shy away from the fact that such friendships bring some of our greatest sorrows—the departures unlooked for, the distances between us, the anticipation and reality of death, the words we wish we could take back but know we cannot. Even in our friends (perhaps especially there), we encounter the unbridgeable otherness of fellow human beings. We hardly know ourselves. How can we know another? Early in the novel, Godric offers a melancholy expression of the sorrows that come to one who loves too closely: “What’s friendship when all’s done, but the giving and taking of wounds?” Likening his five friends to stigmata, he tells the tale of his wounding:
When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too nevermore to come again. And it’s Godric’s flesh that Ailred’s cough cleaves like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric’s sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric’s joy.
But as his friends’ stories weave in and out of Godric’s own, it is clear that these his “wounds” are also his greatest treasures. “What a man was Mouse!” he proclaims of the seafaring companion of his youth. “What a sinner too was Mouse, but none was ever a fonder friend.” He and Ailred become old men together, talking about time and kneeling “hours on end under the low thatch without a word to clutter the silence save for the prayers they heave heavenward braided together.” Of Gillian he says, “I have forgotten my father’s face. I have forgotten my own face when I was young … But her face I’ll remember ever.” He even wonders about the two snakes, the companions that he sent off one day in a fit, “Have they withstood the years? Do they drape themselves like garlands over dead limbs still and coil themselves for sun on rocks too high for Wear to wet? Have they found it in their hearts to pardon Godric?” The wounds we give one another will persist at least as long as we see only through a glass darkly; yet friendship is still somehow worth those wounds. In the end, Godric prays for them all, asking of Christ, “Be thou in us and we in thee that Godric, Gillian, Ailred, Mouse and thou may be a woundless one at last. And even Reginald if thy great mercy reach so far.”
Finally, we arrive at the core of Buechner’s retelling of the story of this medieval saint—the tension between holiness and humanity. On the one hand, the novel is aggressively “human.” It is earthy, bawdy, even vulgar. There are bottoms and bums and other unmentionables aplenty. Godric’s friend Mouse “had an eye out ever for the willing maids,” whether they were “old as earth or cherryripe for the plucking.” Godric himself confesses to Reginald in one of his rants: “I tumbled all the maids would suffer me and some that scratched and tore like weasels in a net. I planted horns on many a goodman’s brow and jollied lads with tales about it afterward.” The novel contains scenes of violence equal to the Book of Judges, horrors of human making, and stories of people overcome by shame, disgust, and despair.
Nor does religious life offer any refuge from the darker side of humanity. On their pilgrimage to Rome, Godric and his mother encounter a city whose “very grin was ghoulish … a corpse without a shroud.” After climbing St. Peter’s stairs on their knees, Godric and his mother encounter the gold vessels, paintings, and priests with tapers they might have expected. But right alongside these, they also find:
A crone so old she looked like Caesar’s nurse sat selling badges crossed with Peter’s keys to stitch upon our cloaks. A lass so young the tender breasts she bared were scarcely more than pigeon eggs made clear enough the wares she sold although she spoke no word I understood. A silk-capped cardinal with pretty boys in cowls to serve him sang mass at the high altar like a love-sick maid, and from his hands we took the blood and flesh of Christ.
Was there beauty in Rome? Yes, and even perhaps glory. But even on the very steps of St. Peter’s, he finds grotesqueries, hypocrisy, child prostitution, abandonment, and spiritual decay. “We found no God in Rome,” he proclaims. “And yet to pray we’d come and pray we did.”
“And yet…” That phrase occurs twenty times in the text of Godric, often in the turn from raw nature, sin, frailty, and human failing towards extraordinary grace that comes despite it all. In the final telling, it is only in the light of this “and yet” that Godric can reconcile the discontinuity between his own brokenness and the miracles that God nonetheless works through him. Of the many pilgrims who seek him out for healing, he can only say:
To touch me and to feel my touch they come. To take at my hands whatever of Christ or comfort such hands have. Of their own, my hands have nothing more than any man’s and less now at this tottering, lamewit age of mine when most of what I ever had is more than mostly spent. But it’s as if my hands are gloves, and in them other hands than mine, and those the ones that folk appear with roods of straw to seek. It’s holiness they hunger for, and if by some mad grace it’s mine to give, if I’ve a holy hand inside my hand to touch them with, I’ll touch them day and night. Sweet Christ, what other use are idle hermits for?
In Godric, miracles are no more the product of moral perfection than is salvation. Frailty is a given, and yet miracles still take place. And the greatest miracle of all may be the complexity of the human condition into which and ultimately out of which divine life speaks. And as a young man, what I found in Godric was not a mere resource to navigate these tensions, but a way in which holiness and humanity could be truly married, a version of Christianity that was unwaveringly honest about real life but still offered redeeming grace within that landscape.
To use C.S. Lewis’s phrase, Godric was the book that baptized my imagination; and coming up from the waters of that baptism, I saw everything with new eyes. Faith was no longer something that could not be questioned, and I began to discover, as if for the first time, the very questions to which faith was the answer. The moral life ceased to be a matter of mere obedience to a human code, and I found that it was far more worthwhile than I had ever imagined. I was not afraid of darkness anymore (whether in the world or in myself), so I began to find the sacred in surprising places. This new way of seeing was particularly powerful in transforming the way I read the scriptures. The Psalms became for me the rich poetry they are. The stories of the Old Testament took on a depth equal to that of a great novel. And the characters in the Gospels sprang to life. Even Paul’s letters began to speak with an authentic voice to real human concerns.
To put it in more directly theological language, what I learned from Buechner in story form was something Martin Luther had taught in his Commentary on Romans five hundred years prior, that a Christian really can be “at the same time justified and yet a sinner (simul iustus est et peccator)”44. Martin Luther. Commentary on Romans (Kregel Classics, 1976), 114-15. and that this condition is normative and inescapable. Perhaps herein lies the key to a robust Protestant imagination that can sustain the marriage of holiness and humanity. There is certainly nothing wrong with moral fervor, with a longing for revival, with the desire to be “unspotted by the world,” or even with a culture of disciplined temperance—nothing wrong, that is, unless these things generate an enveloping religious culture that blinds us to the reality of our true spiritual condition, our true human condition. We are a Romans 7 people in need of a Romans 8 God; and so we will be until that far off day when all things are made new.
In a sense, Godric and the rest of Buechner’s stories are not all that unlike medieval hagiographies. They are written with a kind of moral formation and spiritual enrichment in mind, but the context has changed. The heresies and half-truths towards which we tend in a secular age are different from those of Christendom. The forces that operate against Christian formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (both outside of the Church and within it) are not the same as those that operated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This side of Shakespeare and Renaissance humanism, it’s probably not possible to simply pick up Reginald’s version of Godric’s story. But in novel form, Buechner borrows the framework of a hermit’s life that was once enough and reanimates it for a new time, for a faith that is ever ancient, ever new and always in need of an honest teller of tales.
