Mining Literature for Its Explorations of Religious Faith

Edna O’Brien once said that “literature is the next best thing to God.” While that point is debatable, it’s clear that lasting literature provides a comfort not unlike that of religious faith and tackles the very questions that so preoccupy religion: What’s the point in living a moral life when evil constantly swamps us? Are we alone in the universe or is there more to this life than meets the eye? And most urgently: How are we to face tragedy, failure and unrestrained grief without being consumed?

Frederick Buechner, a novelist, spiritual writer and Presbyterian minister, mines solace from his favorite writers. In “Speak What We Feel” he selects the four pieces of literature that have most influenced his own faith and slowly, piece by piece, explicates them. In this quiet book, a hybrid of literary criticism and theological reflection, Buechner ushers readers into his own reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ dark, enigmatic late-in-life sonnets, Mark Twain’s masterpiece “Huckleberry Finn,” G.K. Chesterton’s figurative novel “The Man Who Was Thursday” and William Shakespeare’s unrivaled play “King Lear.” Buechner unfolds each work in an accessible, inviting way, making what might otherwise seem esoteric easy to approach. Providing biographical details on the writers, he then ponders how tragedy, melancholy, spiritual crisis and guilt may have influenced the tales. In doing so, he shows readers the pain and darkness each writer encountered and how, through transforming anguish into art, the writer learned to endure. Buechner believes that by reading these works a kind of literary osmosis occurs so that we “learn something about how to bear the weight of our own sadness.”

In the sonnets he’s selected by Hopkins, for example, we read of Hopkins’ life as a priest and academic, estranged from his family, living away from his native England, a writer whose poetry was not easily embraced. In the later sonnets, found only after his premature death, Hopkins fully communicates the anguish and alienation he felt as well as his personal struggle to continue believing in the power of prayer: “Like dead letters / Sent to dearest him that lives alas! away” is the way Hopkins viewed his unheeded prayers, Buechner tells us. “[I]t is a devastating image to come from anyone, let alone from this man whose 15 Jesuit years had been centered beyond all else on praying.” Through these sonnets, Buechner uncovers the slight traces of trust that may have carried the poet along until Hopkins was able to write about the smile of God and what he “finally found on the far side of darkness. . . .”

In similar ways, Buechner takes on the work of Twain, Chesterton and Shakespeare, looking not so much for examples of Christian faith as an acknowledgment of our common wounded humanity. Twain’s work was influenced by the politics of his time as well as the deaths of two of his children, Buechner tells us. Yet Twain, who lost all religious faith, still writes of the world in which “[t]he lonesomeness and the dark are always there, but so is the river.” Chesterton, who suffered from an obsession with sadistic sexual violence in his late teens, later wrote a book in which “there is nothing anywhere solid and real enough to get your bearings by because everything refuses to stay put for long and nothing is ever as it seems.” “The Man Who Was Thursday” is informed by Chesterton’s state of mind during his own dark night of the soul, when, as Chesterton himself put it, “he had dug quite low enough to discover the devil.” As for Shakespeare, there is little specific biographical information known, yet Buechner finds “[b]eneath the level of Lear’s sad story bits and pieces of Shakespeare’s own.”

It’s no news that writers often create out of their own pain. What Buechner shows us here, though, is that writers are sometimes able to eke faith out of their own writing--not necessarily a religious faith, but something equally abiding and consoling.

In reading these works, Buechner is not searching for models of piety--”My faith has never been threatened as agonizingly as Chesterton’s or Hopkins’, or simply abandoned like Mark Twain’s, or held in such perilous tension with unfaith as Shakespeare’s,” he tells us--but clues to surviving the heartache of life. One needn’t be religious, a literary scholar, nor even have read the works in question to enjoy the depth of Buechner’s examination.

The gratitude Buechner feels for the writers who’ve preceded him is apparent throughout but most especially when he quotes a passage from Chesterton’s notebooks; this is the gratefulness shared by those who’ve been deeply touched by the life-sustaining power of great literature:

“You say grace before meals. / All right. / But I say grace before the concert and the pantomime, / And grace before I open a book, / And grace before sketching, painting, / Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; / And grace before I dip the pen in ink.”

This book is a fitting celebration of the grace, courage, honesty, and yes, of the sacredness inherent in remarkable literature.