LoginThe Book of Bebb: Four Novels in One Volume
Description:
Pulitzer Prize finalist Frederick Buechner's quartet of outrageously witty, inspirational Bebb novels in one volume.
*Lion Country*
To be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime and the pedestrian — that only the knight of faith can do, and this is the one and only prodigy. — S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Frederick Buechner is an accomplished novelist who is also an imaginative Presbyterian minister. This is his sixth novel since he began writing twenty years ago. Lion Countr
Pulitzer Prize finalist Frederick Buechner's quartet of outrageously witty, inspirational Bebb novels in one volume.
*Lion Country*
To be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime and the pedestrian — that only the knight of faith can do, and this is the one and only prodigy. — S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Frederick Buechner is an accomplished novelist who is also an imaginative Presbyterian minister. This is his sixth novel since he began writing twenty years ago. Lion Country is about a twentieth century knight of faith who is able to fall down in such a way that at the same second it looks as if he were standing and walking. Leo Bebb is a former Bible salesman who now runs a mail-order ordination business out of his garage in Armadillo, Florida. His life is an absolute expression of both the sublime and the pedestrian.
The narrator of Lion Country is Antonio Parr, an ex-school teacher who meets Bebb in New York City and feels compelled to write a journalistic expose on him. He describes Bebb as a "plump and implausible man." Leaving his cat Tom and his sexless girlfriend, Antonio jets down to visit Bebb at his headquarters, the Church of Holy Love, Inc. There he talks with Bebb's wife Lucille, whose face "like the TV set, looked as if the color had been turned wrong." He meets Brownie, Bebb's assistant, whose gift is "to make the rough places of Scripture smooth." For instance, Brownie interprets: "It's not meet to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs — Poochie would be closer to the original meaning of G. Zuss." Then, there's Sharon, Bebb's sensual daughter, who teaches him the meaning of play.
After several encounters with Bebb, Antonio learns that he brought Brownie back from death after he was struck by lightning. He finds that he has revitalized the life of Herman Redpath, a "Chocolate colored Choctaw" millionaire. As a result of Bebb's influence on his life, Antonio finds the courage to accept the death of his twin-sister Miriam and to marry Sharon. He finally realizes that the holy man is a clown who bestows the lilt of life to those he meets.
Frederick Buechner's Lion Country is a sophisticated and highly controversial work which out to both astound and enrich Christendom — that is if Christendom is capable of accepting a modern day Kierkegaard.
*Open Heart*
The Messiah is Crucified whenever the word he brings is reduced to its literal meaning, the inference to be drawn is that the Messiah is risen from the dead whenever his word is given free play, allowed to strike lightning, heard as the disclosure of the really real . . . the pristine grammar of the church is the parable, the similitude, the aphorism — a secular, literal non-literal language, comic in mode. — Robert Funk, Myth and the Literal/Non-Literal
The highest comedy is the comedy of faith, the religious individual has as such made the discovery of the comical in large measure. He is one who has seen that our deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Here is the highest madness: a passionate belief in the absurd. — Soren Kierkegaard
The old master's voices whispered in our ears, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene. They told us tales infused with a respect for Christian patters of thought and the rituals of the institutional church. But their voices are muffled under today's geodesic domes. Many recent writers allude to the language, metaphors, and ideas of Christianity, but few contemporary novelists seem to have a sustained vision of the holy in our midst. The gods of gut and glistening steel dreams seem to surround us until we spy a clown in the corner — Frederick Buechner.
Twenty years of standing in the corner—oftentimes hidden by the conspicuously Christian novels of John Updike—Buechner has been writing the kind of fiction that gives the Word free play. Open Heart is a sequel to Lion Country. It's his best novel to date.
This former Phillips Exeter Academy chaplain has always known that the secret of real Christian communication is metaphor. In Alphabet of Grace, he wrote:
The language of God seems mostly metaphors. His love is like a red, red rose. His love is like the old waiter with shingles, the guitar-playing Buddhist tramp, the raped child and the on who raped her. There is no image too far-fetched, no combination of sounds too harsh, no spelling too irregular, no allusion too obscure or outrageous. The alphabet of grace is full of gutturals.
And because Buechner has a Kierkegaardian beat to his blood and af eel for the comic in his bones, you aren't really thrown off balance when he introduces you to Harry Bebb, one of fiction's most likeable and incredible creations. In case you weren't along for Buechner's Lion Country, let me bring you up to date regarding Harry. He's an ex-Bible salesman who has founded Holy Love Church and runs a mail-order ordination business out of his garage in Armadillo, Florida. His wife Lucille finds her husband hard to believe. His assistant, Brownie, adores him as exemplar of the faith and has a gift for making "the rough places of the Scripture smooth."
When we join Bebb in Open Heart, he has inherited one hundred thousand dollars from a Choctow millionaire called Herman Redpath. Our narrator, Antonio Parr, who married Bebb's sensual daughter Sharon in Lion Country, has flown down to Texas for the funeral. He learns that the preacher wants to bring his mission to the North. Before you know it the man has started a church called "Open Heart" in a barn near Antonio and Sharon's home in Connecticut. He tells them:
Jesus is cooling his heels right there at the door of your heart, and he's knocking. All you got to do is open up and he'll enter in and sup with you. Talk about your open heart surgery. Why, Jesus has got all the rest of them beat a mile. Once you open your heart up to him, I tell you it stays open.
But Antonio has problems of his own. He believes that his wife with the "three-star spectacular" smile is having an affair. So in New York City one day, he commits adultery with a student from the English class he teaches — it's all in his mind, of course. He later comes to realize that his life is "less like a book that tends and more like a comic strip where episode follows episode without ever getting anyplace in particular."
The only one in the book who seems to take anything in stride is Harry Bebb. Lucille runs away from him back in Florida. When Antonio pleads with him to go and fetch her — "If anything happens to her, you'll never forgive yourself" — Bebb answers — "Suppose nothing happens to her ever again. Can I forgive myself for that?" Lucille eventually dies believing that her husband is from outer space.
The Church of the Open Heart doesn't work out — "It's the right angle but it's the wrong place with the wrong people." Mr. Golden, a mysterious fellow who tracks Bebb throughout the book, appears to scratch a life history of the preacher on the walls of the barn. He turns out to be Bebb's former cellmate — and perhaps he's an angel as well. Who knows what strange mysteries take place on this planet in the name of God? Bebb tells Antonio "I believe everything" — there's no limits to God's working or the crazy course of everyday events.
Open Heart doesn't really end; it meanders around your logic and toys with the perimeters of reason. Are we to take seriously that Bebb — this faith-healing charlatan, spiritual visionary, sexual exhibitionist, ex-con — is an emblem for the faith in our time? Certainly Buechner has discovered and exemplified the comical in his anti-hero's adventures. All the episodes show us that the deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Assuredly to believe in Bebb's vision of the faith is the highest form of madness. Perhaps in this age of geodesic domes, the Word does strike like lightning and the alphabet of grace spells out faith with many gutturals.
*Love Feast*
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. —Frederick Buechner
God must have loved words in the beginning because he made so many of them. I envision some of my favorite Christians in a parade — they march proudly down the streets of my mind beating the drum for Jesus, um-pha-phaing the good news of the Gospel, making merry music out of words. Some of them are novelists: John Updike, D. Keith Mano, Peter DeVries, Walker Percy, John L'Heureux. Others are political or literary commentators: Garry Wills, Nathan Scott, John Killinger. And one of them, Robert Farrar Capon, is unclassifiable. They are all enthralled with both the Word and what makes words tick, hum, dance, and sing. They give Christianity and imagination a good name.
Various authorities have told us that theology is basically a serious word game. Yet there is the widespread feeling abroad nowadays that storytelling is the most viable and revealing way to make theology. If this is true, then the merry-makers in my parade are the best hope we have to unravel the mystery of creation and discover the meaningful revelations of the Word. Frederic Buechner belongs in my parade. He's a rare one, this writer-poet-theologian. This is his eighth novel and I am still — to quote the psalmist — drinking the wine of astonishment. Mr. Buechner has helped me to see that one dimension of the religious quest is to discover by means of words and images how tricky the Holy One can really be! In the midst of cold toast, bad dreams, small triumphs, and the seemingly catastrophic disasters of everyday life, we are sustained by the miracle of Grace. After all, this turf is not only the killing ground — it is the clown's arena!
Leo Bebb — the inimitable lead character in Lion Country, Open heart, and now Love Feast — is one of God's most colorful handkerchiefs. In the first two novels, we follow the zany escapades of this ex-Bible salesman, ex-con, evangelist, founder of the Church of Holy Love, Inc. and the Open Heart Church, and International President of Gospel Faith College. Now the sixty-five-year-old Bebb has rejuvenated his ministry by setting up "love feasts" at Princeton University. He preaches the Gospel to the Pepsi Generation with exuberance: "Dear hearts, we got to love one another and Jesus or die guessing." But despite the brief success of his fellowship dinners (replete with confession, testimony, and "transubsustantiated Tropicanas"), our preacher has some monumental problems. He's wanted by the law for income tax evasion and insurance fraud. Besides that, Princeton wants to close down his parable-inspired banquets.
The narrator of Love Feast, Antonio Parr, has his difficulties too. His wife, Sharon, Bebb's daughter, and he are having trouble in their marriage: "It wasn't exactly a pain but it wasn't a picnic either." In Buechner's fictional world, life's separations are God's way of drawing people close together. Antonio confesses at the end of the book that he has achieved "a capacity if not for rising above irony like the saints, at least for living it out with something like grace, with suspicion if not the certainty that maybe the dark and hurtful shadows all things cast are only shadows." Fleeing from the law, Bebb and his faithful friend Mr. Golden hide in Bull's International Fireproof Storage where the preacher sums up his ministry:
All I've done up 'til now, it's all been small potatoes. A soul here, a soul there . . . I reached out far as I could. The unchurched millions I tried to catch with the mail order ads of Gospel Faith College, the great whore of the North I set up Open Heart to wean away from the cup of fornication, the Pepsi Generation, how I made them stay with flagons and comfort them with apples.
Buechner delights in being with the children of his imagination. And we do too. This stylish and witty writer makes the faith seem both expansive and mysterious. Reading Love Feast gives one a marvelous sense of joy in being.
*Treasure Hunt*
Frederick Buechner more than any other Christian novelist writer today fulfills G. K. Chesterton's call for wonder-full artistic and spiritual digging. Treasure Hunt is probably the closing volume in a series of books (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast) centered around the zany pratfalling and abundantly loveable religious quest of Leo Bebb — ex-Bible salesman, ex-con, evangelist, and God's holy buffoon. In his last will and testament recorded on cassette tape, Leo gives his daughter Sharon and her husband Antonio and old house in Poinsett, South Carolina. They are admonished "to do something nice with that old place. And I want you to do it for Jesus." So it happens that these relatives and some of their friends converge on Bebb's old homestead where unbeknownst to them, Leo Bebb's twin brother Babe and his wife Bertha are living!
The get together proves to be a Bebbsian bash with faith and unfaith wrestling with imminent tragedy, and much philosophizing about how the end time leads to hopeful beginnings. Antonio, the narrator, as usual is carried along by events ("You must reconcile yourself to spending the rest of your middle age making the best of things because you can no longer make the most of them"). Brownie, Leo's old disciple, has lost his faith ("Scripture says where your treasure is, here shall your heart be also. The trouble is my treasure's turned out to be a bad check. Spiritually speaking, I don't have a nickel to my name"). Gertrude Conover, a close friend of Leo's, is convinced that he's an "always-returner"; she believes he is reincarnated in a blind baby who looks like W. C. Fields. Her optimism is indomitable ("Thank your stars there is always and yet. This side of Paradise, perhaps it is the best you can hope for . . . My dear everything that happens is absolutely seething with miracle . . . ").
Beside the catalytic effect the deceased Leo has upon these pilgrims, there is the impact of his red-haired twin brother. Babe runs an outer space project called Uforium, gives life-ray treatments, and has his teeth wired for messages from outer space. As Antonio puts it, he's "a trickster, ventriloquist, hypnotist, and impersonator." Babe hypothesizes that Jesus is a space man who one day will "climb out of a saucer. Sunshine in his hair. Gather his own up just like it says."
Treasure Hunt is an outlandish novel zigzagging from improbably incidents to totally refreshing seriousness. I always come away from a Buechner novel with fresh imagery for my preaching and teaching. Here are a few nuggets. An image of a believer as a weightlifter — Antonio describing Leo "hoisting his faith off the ground grunt by grunt like an overweight weightlifter, the eyes bulging, the sweat rolling down." An image of Jesus as "Don Giovanni, the great lover himself, with a little gold earring in one ear and an Errol Flynn smile as he runs Satan through with a sword and puts Death to rout." Or the memorable response Antonio gives to Babe's question: "Father, Son, and Holy Smoke, you ever laid eyes on the crowd? —The only answer I have is that I know what I've looked at but not what I've seen." What I see in Treasure Hunt is a sturdy, expansive, daring, and very appealing vision of the faith — one that is thumpingly alive with wonder. ... (more) (less)
*Lion Country*
To be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime and the pedestrian — that only the knight of faith can do, and this is the one and only prodigy. — S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Frederick Buechner is an accomplished novelist who is also an imaginative Presbyterian minister. This is his sixth novel since he began writing twenty years ago. Lion Country is about a twentieth century knight of faith who is able to fall down in such a way that at the same second it looks as if he were standing and walking. Leo Bebb is a former Bible salesman who now runs a mail-order ordination business out of his garage in Armadillo, Florida. His life is an absolute expression of both the sublime and the pedestrian.
The narrator of Lion Country is Antonio Parr, an ex-school teacher who meets Bebb in New York City and feels compelled to write a journalistic expose on him. He describes Bebb as a "plump and implausible man." Leaving his cat Tom and his sexless girlfriend, Antonio jets down to visit Bebb at his headquarters, the Church of Holy Love, Inc. There he talks with Bebb's wife Lucille, whose face "like the TV set, looked as if the color had been turned wrong." He meets Brownie, Bebb's assistant, whose gift is "to make the rough places of Scripture smooth." For instance, Brownie interprets: "It's not meet to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs — Poochie would be closer to the original meaning of G. Zuss." Then, there's Sharon, Bebb's sensual daughter, who teaches him the meaning of play.
After several encounters with Bebb, Antonio learns that he brought Brownie back from death after he was struck by lightning. He finds that he has revitalized the life of Herman Redpath, a "Chocolate colored Choctaw" millionaire. As a result of Bebb's influence on his life, Antonio finds the courage to accept the death of his twin-sister Miriam and to marry Sharon. He finally realizes that the holy man is a clown who bestows the lilt of life to those he meets.
Frederick Buechner's Lion Country is a sophisticated and highly controversial work which out to both astound and enrich Christendom — that is if Christendom is capable of accepting a modern day Kierkegaard.
*Open Heart*
The Messiah is Crucified whenever the word he brings is reduced to its literal meaning, the inference to be drawn is that the Messiah is risen from the dead whenever his word is given free play, allowed to strike lightning, heard as the disclosure of the really real . . . the pristine grammar of the church is the parable, the similitude, the aphorism — a secular, literal non-literal language, comic in mode. — Robert Funk, Myth and the Literal/Non-Literal
The highest comedy is the comedy of faith, the religious individual has as such made the discovery of the comical in large measure. He is one who has seen that our deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Here is the highest madness: a passionate belief in the absurd. — Soren Kierkegaard
The old master's voices whispered in our ears, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene. They told us tales infused with a respect for Christian patters of thought and the rituals of the institutional church. But their voices are muffled under today's geodesic domes. Many recent writers allude to the language, metaphors, and ideas of Christianity, but few contemporary novelists seem to have a sustained vision of the holy in our midst. The gods of gut and glistening steel dreams seem to surround us until we spy a clown in the corner — Frederick Buechner.
Twenty years of standing in the corner—oftentimes hidden by the conspicuously Christian novels of John Updike—Buechner has been writing the kind of fiction that gives the Word free play. Open Heart is a sequel to Lion Country. It's his best novel to date.
This former Phillips Exeter Academy chaplain has always known that the secret of real Christian communication is metaphor. In Alphabet of Grace, he wrote:
The language of God seems mostly metaphors. His love is like a red, red rose. His love is like the old waiter with shingles, the guitar-playing Buddhist tramp, the raped child and the on who raped her. There is no image too far-fetched, no combination of sounds too harsh, no spelling too irregular, no allusion too obscure or outrageous. The alphabet of grace is full of gutturals.
And because Buechner has a Kierkegaardian beat to his blood and af eel for the comic in his bones, you aren't really thrown off balance when he introduces you to Harry Bebb, one of fiction's most likeable and incredible creations. In case you weren't along for Buechner's Lion Country, let me bring you up to date regarding Harry. He's an ex-Bible salesman who has founded Holy Love Church and runs a mail-order ordination business out of his garage in Armadillo, Florida. His wife Lucille finds her husband hard to believe. His assistant, Brownie, adores him as exemplar of the faith and has a gift for making "the rough places of the Scripture smooth."
When we join Bebb in Open Heart, he has inherited one hundred thousand dollars from a Choctow millionaire called Herman Redpath. Our narrator, Antonio Parr, who married Bebb's sensual daughter Sharon in Lion Country, has flown down to Texas for the funeral. He learns that the preacher wants to bring his mission to the North. Before you know it the man has started a church called "Open Heart" in a barn near Antonio and Sharon's home in Connecticut. He tells them:
Jesus is cooling his heels right there at the door of your heart, and he's knocking. All you got to do is open up and he'll enter in and sup with you. Talk about your open heart surgery. Why, Jesus has got all the rest of them beat a mile. Once you open your heart up to him, I tell you it stays open.
But Antonio has problems of his own. He believes that his wife with the "three-star spectacular" smile is having an affair. So in New York City one day, he commits adultery with a student from the English class he teaches — it's all in his mind, of course. He later comes to realize that his life is "less like a book that tends and more like a comic strip where episode follows episode without ever getting anyplace in particular."
The only one in the book who seems to take anything in stride is Harry Bebb. Lucille runs away from him back in Florida. When Antonio pleads with him to go and fetch her — "If anything happens to her, you'll never forgive yourself" — Bebb answers — "Suppose nothing happens to her ever again. Can I forgive myself for that?" Lucille eventually dies believing that her husband is from outer space.
The Church of the Open Heart doesn't work out — "It's the right angle but it's the wrong place with the wrong people." Mr. Golden, a mysterious fellow who tracks Bebb throughout the book, appears to scratch a life history of the preacher on the walls of the barn. He turns out to be Bebb's former cellmate — and perhaps he's an angel as well. Who knows what strange mysteries take place on this planet in the name of God? Bebb tells Antonio "I believe everything" — there's no limits to God's working or the crazy course of everyday events.
Open Heart doesn't really end; it meanders around your logic and toys with the perimeters of reason. Are we to take seriously that Bebb — this faith-healing charlatan, spiritual visionary, sexual exhibitionist, ex-con — is an emblem for the faith in our time? Certainly Buechner has discovered and exemplified the comical in his anti-hero's adventures. All the episodes show us that the deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Assuredly to believe in Bebb's vision of the faith is the highest form of madness. Perhaps in this age of geodesic domes, the Word does strike like lightning and the alphabet of grace spells out faith with many gutturals.
*Love Feast*
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. —Frederick Buechner
God must have loved words in the beginning because he made so many of them. I envision some of my favorite Christians in a parade — they march proudly down the streets of my mind beating the drum for Jesus, um-pha-phaing the good news of the Gospel, making merry music out of words. Some of them are novelists: John Updike, D. Keith Mano, Peter DeVries, Walker Percy, John L'Heureux. Others are political or literary commentators: Garry Wills, Nathan Scott, John Killinger. And one of them, Robert Farrar Capon, is unclassifiable. They are all enthralled with both the Word and what makes words tick, hum, dance, and sing. They give Christianity and imagination a good name.
Various authorities have told us that theology is basically a serious word game. Yet there is the widespread feeling abroad nowadays that storytelling is the most viable and revealing way to make theology. If this is true, then the merry-makers in my parade are the best hope we have to unravel the mystery of creation and discover the meaningful revelations of the Word. Frederic Buechner belongs in my parade. He's a rare one, this writer-poet-theologian. This is his eighth novel and I am still — to quote the psalmist — drinking the wine of astonishment. Mr. Buechner has helped me to see that one dimension of the religious quest is to discover by means of words and images how tricky the Holy One can really be! In the midst of cold toast, bad dreams, small triumphs, and the seemingly catastrophic disasters of everyday life, we are sustained by the miracle of Grace. After all, this turf is not only the killing ground — it is the clown's arena!
Leo Bebb — the inimitable lead character in Lion Country, Open heart, and now Love Feast — is one of God's most colorful handkerchiefs. In the first two novels, we follow the zany escapades of this ex-Bible salesman, ex-con, evangelist, founder of the Church of Holy Love, Inc. and the Open Heart Church, and International President of Gospel Faith College. Now the sixty-five-year-old Bebb has rejuvenated his ministry by setting up "love feasts" at Princeton University. He preaches the Gospel to the Pepsi Generation with exuberance: "Dear hearts, we got to love one another and Jesus or die guessing." But despite the brief success of his fellowship dinners (replete with confession, testimony, and "transubsustantiated Tropicanas"), our preacher has some monumental problems. He's wanted by the law for income tax evasion and insurance fraud. Besides that, Princeton wants to close down his parable-inspired banquets.
The narrator of Love Feast, Antonio Parr, has his difficulties too. His wife, Sharon, Bebb's daughter, and he are having trouble in their marriage: "It wasn't exactly a pain but it wasn't a picnic either." In Buechner's fictional world, life's separations are God's way of drawing people close together. Antonio confesses at the end of the book that he has achieved "a capacity if not for rising above irony like the saints, at least for living it out with something like grace, with suspicion if not the certainty that maybe the dark and hurtful shadows all things cast are only shadows." Fleeing from the law, Bebb and his faithful friend Mr. Golden hide in Bull's International Fireproof Storage where the preacher sums up his ministry:
All I've done up 'til now, it's all been small potatoes. A soul here, a soul there . . . I reached out far as I could. The unchurched millions I tried to catch with the mail order ads of Gospel Faith College, the great whore of the North I set up Open Heart to wean away from the cup of fornication, the Pepsi Generation, how I made them stay with flagons and comfort them with apples.
Buechner delights in being with the children of his imagination. And we do too. This stylish and witty writer makes the faith seem both expansive and mysterious. Reading Love Feast gives one a marvelous sense of joy in being.
*Treasure Hunt*
Frederick Buechner more than any other Christian novelist writer today fulfills G. K. Chesterton's call for wonder-full artistic and spiritual digging. Treasure Hunt is probably the closing volume in a series of books (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast) centered around the zany pratfalling and abundantly loveable religious quest of Leo Bebb — ex-Bible salesman, ex-con, evangelist, and God's holy buffoon. In his last will and testament recorded on cassette tape, Leo gives his daughter Sharon and her husband Antonio and old house in Poinsett, South Carolina. They are admonished "to do something nice with that old place. And I want you to do it for Jesus." So it happens that these relatives and some of their friends converge on Bebb's old homestead where unbeknownst to them, Leo Bebb's twin brother Babe and his wife Bertha are living!
The get together proves to be a Bebbsian bash with faith and unfaith wrestling with imminent tragedy, and much philosophizing about how the end time leads to hopeful beginnings. Antonio, the narrator, as usual is carried along by events ("You must reconcile yourself to spending the rest of your middle age making the best of things because you can no longer make the most of them"). Brownie, Leo's old disciple, has lost his faith ("Scripture says where your treasure is, here shall your heart be also. The trouble is my treasure's turned out to be a bad check. Spiritually speaking, I don't have a nickel to my name"). Gertrude Conover, a close friend of Leo's, is convinced that he's an "always-returner"; she believes he is reincarnated in a blind baby who looks like W. C. Fields. Her optimism is indomitable ("Thank your stars there is always and yet. This side of Paradise, perhaps it is the best you can hope for . . . My dear everything that happens is absolutely seething with miracle . . . ").
Beside the catalytic effect the deceased Leo has upon these pilgrims, there is the impact of his red-haired twin brother. Babe runs an outer space project called Uforium, gives life-ray treatments, and has his teeth wired for messages from outer space. As Antonio puts it, he's "a trickster, ventriloquist, hypnotist, and impersonator." Babe hypothesizes that Jesus is a space man who one day will "climb out of a saucer. Sunshine in his hair. Gather his own up just like it says."
Treasure Hunt is an outlandish novel zigzagging from improbably incidents to totally refreshing seriousness. I always come away from a Buechner novel with fresh imagery for my preaching and teaching. Here are a few nuggets. An image of a believer as a weightlifter — Antonio describing Leo "hoisting his faith off the ground grunt by grunt like an overweight weightlifter, the eyes bulging, the sweat rolling down." An image of Jesus as "Don Giovanni, the great lover himself, with a little gold earring in one ear and an Errol Flynn smile as he runs Satan through with a sword and puts Death to rout." Or the memorable response Antonio gives to Babe's question: "Father, Son, and Holy Smoke, you ever laid eyes on the crowd? —The only answer I have is that I know what I've looked at but not what I've seen." What I see in Treasure Hunt is a sturdy, expansive, daring, and very appealing vision of the faith — one that is thumpingly alive with wonder. ... (more) (less)
Manufacturer: HarperOne
Release date: 1 October 2001
ISBN-10 : 0062517694 | ISBN-13: 9780062517692
Release date: 1 October 2001
ISBN-10 : 0062517694 | ISBN-13: 9780062517692
Tags: Grace (1), SnP (1), Questing (1), Wonder (1), Protestant (1), Joy (1), Meaning (1), Emotions (1), Heart (1), Love (1), Spirit (1), Christianity (1), Play (1), Faith (1), Relationships (1), Lovers (1), Fiction (1), Death (1)
My tags:
Add tags
Separate tags with commas, spaces are allowed.
Use tags to describe a product e.g. for a movie
Themes heist, drugs, kidnapping, coming of age
Genre drama, parody, sci-fi, comedy
Locations paris, submarine, new york
| Read | |
| Condition | |
| Added date | |
|
Private notes Only visible to you |
|
or cancel |
|
|
Explore Content Lists Reviews Pictures Update feed |
Other Contact Privacy policy Terms of Service Copyright/DMCA |
© 2024 Listal.com