Beyond Words Quotes

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“The other danger is that apologists put so much effort into what they do that they may end up not so much defending the faith because they believe it is true as believing the faith is true because they have worked so hard and long to defend it.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“ETERNITY IS NOT ENDLESS TIME or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time. If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colors blend into a single color—white—which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. If you spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined. As human beings we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of which everything passes away—including ourselves. As human beings, we also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a death, a marriage—some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what “it’s all about” involves not just the present, but the past and future too. Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot in eternity. God, as Isaiah says (57:15), “inhabiteth eternity,” but stands with one foot in time. The part of time where he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is all about, and what we ourselves are all about too.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“IF I CAN’T SEE YOU FOR SOME REASON but can only hear you, you don’t exist for me in space, which is where seeing happens, but in time, which is where hearing happens. Your words follow one after the other the way tock follows tick. When I have only the sound of you to go by, I don’t experience you as an object the way I would if you stood before me—something that I can walk around, inspect from all angles, more or less define. I experience you more the way I experience the beating of my own heart or the flow of my own thoughts. A deaf man coming upon me listening to you would think that nothing of importance was going on. But something of extraordinary importance is going on. I am taking you more fully into myself than I can any other way. Hearing you speak brings me by the most direct of all routes something of the innermost secret of who you are. It is no surprise that the Bible uses hearing, not seeing, as the predominant image for the way human beings know God. They can’t walk around God and take God in like a cathedral or an artichoke. They can only listen to time for the sound of God—to the good times and bad times of their own lives for the words God is addressing to, of all people, them.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“Glory is to God what style is to an artist.

Glory is what God looks like when, for the time being, all you have to look at Him with is a pair of eyes.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith