One of the authors that I've been introduced to in the past few years is Frederick Buechner. As I've been perusing for Lent readings and prayers to help me through, I realize that it is not so much that I've given up beer or that Bev has given up chocolate or that my friend Joel has given up coffee, but what am I replacing it with?
I've posted these questions on our fridge, partly because they are Buechner, partly because that is where my cold beer is now lying in wait for forty more day, and partly because I want to look like an academic, but mostly because these are the questions I want to wrestle with, the questions that are the "replacement", so that somehow I want to be doing addition by subtraction. I don't think Lent is just about stopping something, but it is also about doing, and maybe even more it is about being. Buechner offers us a set of questions for Lent, questions that transcend any one faith tradition, which Buechner seems to do quite often. These questions are not uniquely Christian. They are just as much Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or... As one person said, "These questions are human questions." They are also tough questions.
“If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?”
“When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?”
“If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty five words or less?”
“Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?”
“Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?”
“If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?”
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