KNOWING JOY:

Let me begin by pointing out what Buechner's novels are not, lest I give the wrong impression right from the start. They are not conventional hagiographies, in which good deeds are held up for believers to imitate. They are not didactic parables of virtue triumphing over evil, nor pious models of godliness. As Buechner himself said, these novels are "not Sunday School stories with detachable morals at the end" and contain no easy lessons. There are no sanctimonious preachers scoring points against unbelievers in his fiction, or holier-than-thou types for whom real human concerns are only abstractions. His saints do not moralise or proselytise. Buechner knew as well as anyone that we are rightly wary of didacticism, and of novels masquerading as sermons. ("When I have the feeling the someone is trying to set me a good example", he once put it, "I start edging toward the door.") His saints are not plaster saints, they are not particularly decorous or polite, and are just as likely as the rest of us to fail themselves and others.

More surprising still, perhaps, is the fact that they offer little by way of comfort or reassurance -- instead, they unsettle and provoke. The popular conception of saints, as meek-and-mild types with their heads in the clouds, detached from ordinary human experience, is nowhere to be found. Nor are these novels edifying tales of triumphant faith. In Buechner's fiction, virtue is by no means always victorious. Though Buechner was himself an ordained Presbyterian minister (who studied at Union Theological Seminary under some of the giants of twentieth-century theology, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenburg), he went to great lengths to avoid using his novels as pulpits. "I lean over backwards not to preach or propagandize in my fiction", he told one interviewer. "I don't dream up plots and characters to illustrate some homiletic message." These novels do not seek to give fictional illustrations of Christian doctrine, nor to convert readers to the Christian faith.

Instead, Buechner saw saints as being simultaneously flawed and majestic, with the power to capture our imagination in a way that familiar religious language cannot. "In his holy flirtation with the world", he wrote, in a characteristically startling and mystical image, "God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints." Saints, for Buechner, "are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive." Elsewhere, he expanded on this conception:

To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy.

It was precisely these kinds of saints that Buechner spent most of his life writing about.

There are two key precedents in twentieth-century literature for such a project: Albert Camus's The Plague, in which Meursault famously poses the question of whether one can "be a saint without God" as "the only concrete question that I know today"; and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, in which the whiskey priest, on his deathbed, sees how his life could have been so much more than it was, with nothing more than a little "courage" and "self-restraint":

He was not at the moment afraid of damnation -- even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint, and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted -- to be a saint.

Buechner wrote movingly on both these texts, but the second played a particularly important role in shaping his own literary project. He said that The Power and the Glory was where he "learned that a saint is not what people normally think of -- a moral exemplar." Instead, he realised, saints "can be just as seedy and hopeless as the whiskey priest."

Buechner stumbled across his subject matter unexpectedly, recognising that, like Greene, he had unwittingly produced a flawed and "seedy" and "hopeless" saint in a quartet of novels on Leo Bebb, a religious charlatan who nonetheless lights up other people, giving them new life. Buechner called him "a religious crook" who is also "a bearer of grace." The Bebb novels are populated with hucksters and con-men, and are full of bawdy comedy, sexual exploits, exhibitionism, even infanticide. Yet somewhere in the writing of the novels' central character, Buechner realised that he had accidentally created a saint:

When I first began, I thought of Bebb as an Elmer Gantry figure whom I would expose in the process of writing about him. But I came to like him more and more and to see more clearly what was saintly about him.

From this point on, he resolved that he would only write about saints -- that he could only write about saints: "Saints with feet of clay are the only subjects that interest me now." For reasons mysterious even to him, Buechner believed that he was unable to bring any other kinds of characters to life.

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