My favourite Buechner

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe the truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used wither way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others wants us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well - except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known...



Father and Lord,

Most near and most far, listen to our silence before thee as well as to our prayers, because often it is the silence that speaks better of our need. Speak thy joy into our silence. Breathe thy life into our less than life, not for our own sakes only but for the sake of those whom, with thy life in us, we may ourselves bring life.

Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holsds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another's burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and the good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad. We know that today as every day our lives will be touched by thee and that one way or another thou wilt speak to us before we sleep, for the very moments themselves of our lives are thy words to us. Give us ears to hear thee speak. Give us hearts to quicken as thou drawest near. Amen.

...

"Is that really me? Am I my face?" And although the answer is of course Yes, the answer of course is also No. I am my face, and I am not. A strange and confusing business.

Beneath the face there are many layers of self, and the deepest layers are for the most part hidden from us. You read a letter that you wrote or you remember something that you said or did, maybe even as recently as yesterday, and you think, "How could I ever have written such a thing, said such a thing? Is that even who I once was, let alone who I am now?" And because of the way the world goes, the sad truth seems to be that the face that you disclaim responsibility for is more often than not apt to be worse than the person you feel that you know yourself to be beneath the face. There is a self beneath the self, and the language that the inner self speaks could welll be the language of St Paul when he wrote to the church at Rome: 'I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.' In order words, I am confused by my own face. Poor Paul. Poor all of us.



Fathoms down into the mystery of yourself you go - into the darkness of guilt and beyond, into the darkness of loneliness and need and beyond. Deeper and deeper you go until at last the darkness begins to be tinged with gold, as the poem says (poem by japanese poet..), whch is the gold of light. And in that light you begin to see, as in a dream at first, your own true face. "Not my face nowadays, nor my face when I was young, nor the face of the noblest of angels," but a face that surpasses all these because it is the face of love, a face lik Christ's...

Selfhood in the sense that you are one self and I am another self begins to fade. You begin to understand that in some way your deepest self is the self of all men - that you are in them and they are in you. You begin to understand not as an ideal but as a reality, an experience, that their pain is your pain, their need your need; that there can really be no getting ahead at their expense, there can be no joy for you until there is joy for them...

Lord, give us eyes to see each other and ourselves more nearly as thou seest us, to see beneath each face we meet, and beneath even our own faces, thy face.
Help us to know that for each thou hast died as though he were the only one. Amen.