Book Review: The Hungering Dark

What a thrill it was, in my early twenties, to sit under Frederick Buechner's teaching! I spoke with an old college friend on the phone this past December, and she mentioned our rare opportunity. She said she wished she had spoken personally with him. In my memory (granted, my memory is faulty sometimes), I went in during his office hours to speak with him about my final paper. After she mentioned him, I spotted my old copy of The Hungering Dark and plowed through it once again.

Here are a few sound-bites I gleaned:

"We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously."

"The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt."

"One life on this earth is all that we get.... we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can."

On why we struggle with accepting Christ's sacrifice to save us, he writes: "To accept such a gift from another would be to bind us closer to him than we like to be bound.... if another man dies so that I can live, it imposes a terrible burden on my life. From that point on, I cannot live any longer just for myself. I have got to live also somehow for him, as though in some sense he lives through me now as, in another sense, I live through him."

On how the world has never been riper or hungrier for God's return: "In some way we cannot imagine holiness will return to our world. I know of no time when the world has been riper for its return, when the dark has been hungrier. Thy kingdom come... we do shew forth the Lord's death till he come... and maybe the very madness of our hoping will give him the crazy, golden wings he needs to come on. I pray that he will come again and that you will make it your prayer. We need him, God knows."

Those words could well have been written yesterday instead of 50 years ago. Buechner sits in the doubt and the struggle. He acknowledges that this world is dark and full of woe, but he recognizes that a light shines in the darkness. We can still choose to accept that light. I say, with Buechner, come Lord Jesus, come!