For some reason I can’t remember now, I got out of order. Usually, I read books of a series in the proper chronological sequence. This time was different. I began with the last one in a trilogy of autobiographical memoirs by Frederick Buechner.

As it turned out, it was not a mistake, but a gift of grace and healing. Scanning at my highlighted sections, I was again drawn into the beautiful poetic prose of Buechner, unable to put it down. He has a way of speaking the truth powerfully about the human condition — about his condition: the family secrets surrounding his father’s suicide and his powerlessness over his daughter’s battle with anorexia nervosa — and also about my condition.

He explains: “By and large, the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition — that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.”

Buechner was among the first of my “story-telling” theologians. He taught me that nothing is more important than keeping track of the stories of who we are, paying attention to what is happening to us, and discerning how God is present to us in them, offering us the possibility of new life and healing.