Books That Changed Me
- God’s Way Of Reconciliation by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1)
- Basic Christianity by John Stott (2)
- The Forgotten Spurgeon by Iain H. Murray (3)
- The Gospel Story Bible by Marty Machowski (4)
- A Very Contemporary Mediaeval Saint (5)
Godric by Frederick Buechner
Most Christian leaders will list books that have influenced their discipleship and ministry without much difficulty. The usual suspects will turn up and rightly so: Lloyd-Jones and Owen, Stott and Packer, Baxter and Spurgeon. It is not so common to find fiction. The novel I’m suggesting was by an American minister in the mainline and decidedly mixed Presbyterian denomination, the PCUSA. Even stranger, its narrator is an Anglo-Saxon hermit who lived out his final years in a cave near Durham. He actually existed. Born in Norfolk around the Norman Conquest, he would subsequently be revered as a saint (although was never officially canonised): Godric of Finchale.
The novel was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, hailed for its brilliant writing and evocation of the distant past. But what on earth is it doing here?! In short, it is because Buechner understands the fickleness, deceptions and agonies of the human heart profoundly.
The book’s opening line is arresting. This is going to be a story that unsettles: ‘Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.’ Is that a metaphor or literal? We have to read on to discover. Godric is by now old, calloused by years of a hermit’s hardships; he knows he doesn’t have long. He is incensed by the latest scheme of a senior churchman, the Abbot of Rievaulx. A young monk called Reginald is sent to share Godric’s cave, to care for him but also, more irritatingly, to write his biography. There seems no way to avoid this trial, so Godric resolves to tell his story, warts and all.
‘There’s much you’re better not to know,’ I say, ‘but know you this. Know Godric’s no true hermit but a gadabout within his mind, a lecher in his dreams. Self-seeking he is and peacock proud. A hypocrite. A ravener of alms and dainty too. A slothful, greedy bear. Not worthy to be called a servant of the Lord when he treats such servants as he has himself like dung, like Reginald. All this and worse than this go say of Godric in your book.’
Godric has fluctuated between apparent visions of God that have called him to piety and devotion, and a life of crime and worldly excess. He has left a trail of destruction and heartache, not least when he starts working with Roger Mouse to build a fortune by defrauding pilgrims to Jerusalem, among other things. He is especially haunted by memories of even darker actions that irrevocably changed his beloved sister’s life. He visits Rome but is disappointed by what he finds there. Yet he has such a powerful vision of God’s goodness that he eventually gets baptised in the River Jordan and vows to serve him: first in service to the Bishop of Durham, and latterly, as a hermit. The problem is that Reginald will have none of Godric’s more lurid or scandalous deeds. Those are completely omitted from the book as unbecoming in a saint’s life. Reginald has been commissioned to write a hagiography.
One reason for the impact, and even the importance, of this book is Godric’s relentless honesty about his sin. He has no time for Reginald’s whitewashing and knows that his only option is to cast himself on God’s mercy as revealed through Christ’s wounds. Of course, he doesn’t grasp the niceties of substitutionary atonement, salvation by faith alone or the full assurance of faith. But then he wouldn’t, would he? Buechner is evoking a different, pre-Reformation era. The important thing is that his Godric wrestles with his wretchedness and this drives him to the Lord.
As such, it is one of the most remarkable, insightful and affecting accounts of honest introspection I have ever read and it has stayed with me ever since. To recognise ourselves in Godric is to have a renewed sense of our own desperate need for, and wonder at, the gospel of divine grace. There are few writers that have done that for me quite as effectively as Buechner.
