The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days

This slim volume is one of the best conversion narratives I've read, reminiscent in some way of Augustine's Confessions, yet also uniquely the voice of Buechner. It is not a complete narrative of the author's childhood and youth, but episodic in form. Even the incidents he includes are told elliptically. Its diffident, evocative style is clearly the result of careful craftsmanship, but also gives a feeling of what it would be like to sit and talk with the man. The triadic structure of childhood - once below a time -, youth - once upon a time -, and of the gifts received from beyond time is built not only, perhaps not even primarily, to recount the author's own life, but with the aim of sensitizing the reader to see his or her life, as show more well as the lives of all others, as a sacred journey. Highly recommended. show less

"A child takes life as it comes because he has no other way of taking it," Frederick Buechner writes in this first of his autobiographical books. With this statement he attempts to explore the event that is at the center of this book, and which forms the (missing) center around which so much of Buechner's fiction and essays take shape: the suicide of his father when he was 10 and his brother 8.

This is the second Buechner book I’ve read and it won’t be the last. I enjoyed his poetic style of writing. God works and speaks through incidents in our lives that often seem random and unconnected. Only by looking back can we sometimes see that God was at work, leading us and loving us. Lovely book. Short book, but not a quick read! There’s a lot here.

The renowned Godric (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) shares his personal and professional journey in a literary, wise and moving memoir. "Fascinating . . . striking . . . a beautifully successful experiment".-- The New York Times Book Review.
"A child takes life as it comes because he has no other way of taking it," Frederick Buechner writes in this first of his autobiographical books. With this statement he attempts to explore the event that is at the center of this book, and which forms the (missing) center around which so much of Buechner's fiction and essays take shape: the suicide of his father when he was 10 and his brother 8

"For me The Sacred Journey' was not just the interesting story of the maturation of a very talented artist, but also the awesome story of God in the life of an attentive human being." Henri J. M. Nouwen

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