Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner

Most daily devotionals that I have worked with in the past have often been sentimental drivel.Buechner's excellent, concise and often poetic writing boldly confronts the daily battles a person of faith encounters. Eschewing simple HALLMARK CARD sentimentality and post-modern sound bite obsession, Buechner lays out a series of daily meditations that comfort, challenge and re-enforce as well as affirm one's faith.I particularly admire Buechner's constant celebration of the purity of silence- the need for listening and contemplation.An excellent daily devotional written by one of our finest contemporary theologians.

I return to this book again and again. It doesn't ask that you believe anything in particular. It ranges over all kinds of topics. Buechner gives us his wisdom, wonder, doubt and love in equal and generous measure.I have found his works to be deeply liberating because there is no dogma... mostly there is hope, poetry, some new visions of faith, room to doubt, room to soar... Mostly, he shows us his deep deep humanity.Thank you, Mr. Buechner.

Frederick Buechner articulates the beauty, pain, and irony of life so wonderfully. This book helped me see the mundane, trivial, and routine of my life as a source of joy and a gift of nothing but the grace of God...Buechner is an artist, a poet, a musician of words...This is a great book to "sample" his great works and choose which one of them to read next! Buechner helped me to recognize that the sadness and tragedy of life don't have to be ignored or explained away to retain faith in the goodness of God...We have to appreciate the stark and the empty and the need before we can find a fix or a salve...I can read one of these passages and it stays with me for days...definitely a recommended read, for believers or searchers of any denomination...

Frederick Buechner is one of our greatest treasures--a wonderful prose writer, a great story-teller, an insightful theologian. His body of work is as diverse as any writer I've ever heard of--fiction, myth, sermons, lectures, memoirs, lexicons, humor, etc. This book provides a great overview of 30 years of his writing--all in brief daily doses. While some of the exerpts suffer from being pulled out of their contexts, they have been well and carefully chosen, and stand alone well. Buechner's recurring theme is that God exists and acts in our lives today--we just have to learn to listen for him and recognize those acts. Read as a devotional, this book provides many flashes of insight and understanding, and many gentle reminders of the Truth that undergirds our lives.