Frederick Buechner's Godric

My book review from Goodreads:

This is without doubt the most important book that I've read thus far this year, perhaps that I've read as a teenager. Not that it's my favorite — it's too personally vulnerating for me to say it's my favorite — but that it's the book I need. There are full-blown theological treatises on sin out there; I daresay none of them are as effective as Godric. I have never read anything like it — and never read anything so slowly: it spans a measly 175 pages, with large font to boot, but took me nearly a month to finish. I never read more than ten pages in a sitting. Sometimes four pages was enough for a day. One chapter was so stunning and painfully relatable that I was left almost physically dazed and too scared to open to the next. What's more, the language Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister, uses is simply gorgeous, imitative, if only speculatively so, of English cadences predating King James:

Once in a while the sea would crest, but mostly it was great blue hills with foam for heather. A swell would rise and glitter in the sun, then slide and sink into a dale. A dale would heave into a hill.

Every sentence seems as if calculated with a poet's precision, and hardly one comes along that sounds prosaic, although prose is Buechner's chosen vehicle.

The book could be thought of as the confession of Godric to the reader, of an aged hermit to a novice monk. Godric dwells on his impiety, his wicked youth, the evil he did and does and the good he left and leaves undone, but Buechner manages to avoid all mawkishness. He even manages to avoid any allusions to an actual "Confessions", although Augustine is a rather obvious influence. But the monk Godric "confesses" to, Reginald, wishes to write a biography. It's the middle ages, and he doesn't conceive of Godric's recollections the same way. Reginald's final product, a hagiographic biography (a chapter of which is tacked on as a sort of epilogue), is nothing like the wizened Godric intends. Where Godric deprecates himself for his sin, Reginald the scribe writes of the unflinching piety of his subject. Godric often retorts with an explanation of his less than holy intentions and this leads to some of the best humor in the book, the beginning of Reginald's interviews being perhaps the funniest, yet remaining insightful, a la Flannery O'Connor:

"The god means God.... The ric is Saxon reign. So God and ric means God reigns, Godric....." 

"Fetch me a bowl to puke in," I tell him. He's got him such a honeyed way I'm ever out to sour it. 

"Godric will have his little jest," says Reginald. 

So then I teach him other ways to read my name. "God's god for sure. You hit that square. But ric is Erse for wreck," I say, not knowing Erse from arse. "God's wreck I be, it means. God's wrecked Godric for his sins. Or Godric's sins have made a wreck of God." 

... 

"There are other ways as well," I say. "Rip Godric up another seam, and what you get is goand drick." 

"What's drick?" says Reginald. 

"A foul Welsh word not fit for monkish ears," I say. 

"How great is your humilitas, Father," Reginald says. 

I say, "Yet, Mother, not so great as is my drick." 

Why is it that the best in him calls forth the worst in me?

You read that passage you've read all the conversations between Godric and Reginald.

Godric spends most of his hermit life praying, praying "the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast". His prayers are striking in style and content:

Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press thy bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin.

Dear Lord, strew herbs upon my hermit's dreams to make them sweet. Have daylight mercy on my midnight soul.

While on a parade through the streets of Durham, being touched by all sorts of people and being given all sorts of presents, Godric prays silent:

Dear Father, see how these children hunger here. They starve for want of what they cannot name. Their poor lost souls are famished. Their foolish hands reach out. Oh grant them richer fare than one old sack of bones whose wits begin to turn. Feed them with something more than Godric here, for Godric's no less starved for thee than they. Have mercy, Lord. Amen.

Buechner fosters a healthy irony throughout the tale. Once, when Godric uncharacteristically had no inclination to pray, lying on the grass and wallowing in sin's "drowsy peace so deep [he] hadn't even will enough to loathe [him]self", he receives a vision of a "man's green, leafy face". "When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior's face itself I saw," he says, and you can see him shaking his hoary head in wonder.

Like Homer's Nestor ("Well might I wish, could mortal wish renew / That strength which once in boiling youth I knew; / ... But heaven its gifts not all at once bestows, / These years with wisdom crowns, with action those." Pope's translation), Godric, his head filled with memories of his youth's adventures, laments his infirmity in old age (but eagerly anticipates his death: "You're tough, old man," Godric is told, who responds: "Though I deserve it, God would never be so cruel."). He exerts titanic effort to move his decrepit arm. Sometimes he speaks for paragraphs, until he realizes that no sound has come out of his mouth. He still continues to pray, and becomes God's reluctant means of grace to many who meet him, although he says that his "war" is all private and inside himself. 

Godric is a saint, undeniably, but he is a saint who is not the superhuman holy man Reginald would have us imagine: he is a saint, weak, struggling, and human.

I had never heard of Godric of Finchale before. I have never read his Wikipedia page, and have no desire to do so (lest I be disillusioned; I am a romantic coward). The portrait of Godric Buechner paints might not resemble the Godric of history one fig; but I suspect Buechner wasn't out to be constrained by a historical-factual vice. With an earthy, sensible imagination, Buechner explores depravity, newness in Christ, and the Christian struggle against the flesh, the world, and the Devil; and does so without so much as an expressly theologizing or philosophizing passage. He chronicles a Christian life without resorting to allegory, and tells a story steeped in visceral and disarming honesty. I have a presentiment that this won't be my only read.