607 - The Son of Laughter

The Son of Laughter
By Frederick Buechner
San Francisco, HarperCoIlins, 1993. 274 pp. $19.00.

Hagiography, writing about holy men and women, is a notoriously, is a notoriously failed genre. It gets high marks in boredom and dishonesty, and not

608 - The Son of Laughter

much else. I very much doubt whether Fox's Book of Martyrs, the staple hagiography of my childhood, did much to further holy living in me or my friends. Mostly, as I remember, it replaced fear of God with the fear of Catholics. And Butler's Lives of the Saints, a work of unquestioned usefulness, is as often used, by scholars at least, to debunk sanctity as to confirm it.

There is a shyness inherent in holiness that does not welcome direct attention. So how does one write about holiness without, in the very process, distorting or falsifying what you set out to render?

Frederick Buechner has found a way, and the way is fiction. First with his Bible Belt American, the unlikely Bebb (in The Book of Bebb), then into the Middle Ages for Godric, followed by Brendan, and now the biblical Jacob, The Son of Laughter.

All of us have impulses from time to time to live a holy life-life lived as it should be, life true and good and beautiful, life lived for and in and by means of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. And then someone telephones with an invitation to the hockey game, or we notice that the salad needs oregano, or the crabgrass in the lawn suddenly becomes a pressing priority. We are distracted by the mundane and forfeit, for yet another time, the holy. Or so we assume.

Buechner shows us what all the saints would tell us if we could only get past their hagiographers, that it is the crabgrass and the hockey game and the oregano that provide the raw material for holiness.

Jacob holy? Yes. An earthy, flawed, confused, deceitful, scared saint. A holy life.

Holy because a holy God, however dimly understood, or confusedly perceived through a web of superstition, is the sovereign presence in Jacob's life. Holy because Jacob, continuing in the faith of his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac (Laughter), lived under the long range terms of the holy covenant of the invisible God instead of by the immediate terms of the reassuringly tangible and visible gods readily available to him.

Buechner does for us what most of us cannot do for ourselves: He enters that austerely narrated Genesis story and disciplines his imagination to work only with what is given in the text. Our habit is to read back into the Jacob story the intricately articulated spirituality that has accumulated through our readings of Moses and David and Isaiah. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived without benefit of most of the preaching and prayers and wisdom that we take for granted. Seventy years ago, Albrecht Alt did the philological and theological work on "the God of the Fathers" that Buechner has now used to bring us the life of Jacob in a form that is both accessible and honest.

Ironies abound in this story. Isaac, "Laughter," left a legacy of apprehension to his sons. The Fear, the name used throughout for God, evokes expectations of hope and covenant blessing. Jacob, the bearer of the blessing, bears it more like a curse than a blessing.

610 - The Son of Laughter

Buechner's rendering of Jacob's thoughts as he reflects on his escape from Canaan after having deceived his father, Laughter, into giving him the blessing, gives a flavor of the ironies and ambiguities that attend a holy life:

"Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you,' he (Isaac) said.

"I was doubly cursed then because I cursed myself. I made enemies of my father and brother. I became a fugitive. Twenty years I slaved for Laban. I lost my beloved on the road to Ephrath.

"The blessing was more terrible still.

"When the camel you're riding runs wild, nothing will stop it. You cling to its neck. You wrench at its beard and long lip. You cry into its soft ear for mercy. You threaten vengeance. Either you hurl yourself to death from its pitching back or you ride out its madness to the end.

Nothing and no one, not even the blessing, can be taken at face value-the invisibilities continually erupt and overwhelm the visibilities.

No biblical story provides less material for imitation than Jacob's. Both the morals and the manners in this story leave a lot to be desired. I always marvel that parents permit their children to learn about him in Sunday School. But by rendering with such careful regard the crudity of both morals and manners in what Buechner imagines the Bronze Age world to have been, he has provided a story of holiness that can never be confused with niceness. For a holy life isn't a matter of men and women being polite with God, but of humans who accept and enter into God's work of shaping salvation out of the unlikely materials of our sin and ignorance, our ambition and waywardness-also our loves and aspirations and nobilities, but never smoothing over our rough edges. Holiness is not polish.

All of us, in some way or another, are about the business of holy living, whether we have a acquired a suitable vocabulary for it or not. But it is difficult to know exactly what it consists of. We hardly know what to look for anymore. For the last hundred years or so, those who have set themselves up as our authorities in how to live have been taking us on thrilling roller-coaster-ride prospects of either social utopianism or psychological fulfillment-or both. And we are worse. The only things that have improved, if that is the word for it, are our capacities to move faster and spend more.

Our ancestors were wiser. They looked around for saints-looked for the men and women whose lives were courageously conversant with God-and let them be their teachers in how to live as human beings, which is to say, how to live holy lives. Buechner's magnificent fiction restores the saints to the center stage that they occupied for so long and to such good effect.

Eugene H. Peterson

Regent College
Vancouver, BC