Frederick Buechner's The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life is an amazing collection of previously-unreleased lectures that bring together rich insights for a theme that has been just at the surface of so much of Buechner's earlier work: How to discern your life and God's work and message within it.I've written a fair amount of book reviews just this morning, but I'm honestly at a loss for where to begin with a review of a book like The Remarkable Ordinary. That's because, how can I -- a budding writer and spiritual director -- ever rise to the level of offering a critique of a spiritual friend who is also a master on the way of living with discernment?
Buechner has the great ability to cause you to "stop, look, and listen" to your life. He does this by telling his story in such a way that you find your own story somewhere beneath the surface. In one chapter he talks about his relational connection with Maya Angelou. One time they both spoke at the same event and after Buechner finished his speech, the person introducing Maya said, "Ms. Angelou will now get up and tell you her story, and it will be a very different story from the one that you have just heard from Frederick Buechner". Buechner writes that as the man said that Maya Angelou was shaking her head no. She got up and said, "I have exactly the same story to tell as Frederick Buechner". Pondering this Buechner writes that "that's the only reason I have, the only justification, to tell you my story. Who gives a hoot about my story? But you can give a hoot about it because it's in many ways your story". Mission accomplished. (For the record, I've given a hoot about Buechner's story since first reading his Sacred Journey memoir in college.)
If you've read anything Buechner has written, you've probably heard some of the stories he has to tell in The Remarkable Ordinary. But what you'll find here is a freshness to the telling of those stories -- a way of weaving them together to offer spiritual wisdom in learning the difficult (even counter-cultural) lessons of stopping, looking, and listening. What you'll find here is nothing short of a Remarkable Ordinary that we all share.
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Handlebar blogger review program in exchange for my honest review here.