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"The weight of these sad times we must obey," writes William Shakespeare in King Lear. Frederick Buechner, in his latest nonfiction book, Speak What We Feel (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), says Lear is Shakespeare's seminal work because it is written with his life's blood. Since Tim Jones profiled him in CT a dozen years ago (Oct. 8, 1990), Buechner has written nearly as many books, all of them masterfully confronting issues of faith. Like the bard, he wrote all of them with his life's blood.

His recent stories, as much as the earlier ones, make one groan, guffaw, and gape. But they ring true and strangely move. Buechner reaches to the human core and takes us to the place of shadows and helps us see that the human heart itself resides in those shadows, and that only in facing them can one get beyond them. Then comes light. Anyway, a kind of light.

I met Buechner last spring in the Magic Kingdom, the place he retreats to read or write, and where he collects doodads people have sent him. I asked if I could pull a chair nearer to where he sat. He said he'd prefer I didn't. He liked everything in its place. I sat on the window seat at his right elbow.

Buechner, 76, has a tribe of grandsons, all under 10. "I can only imagine what they get into when they visit," I say to him. He groans and rolls his eyes in agreement. I picture the grandsons climbing the bookshelves with Buechner's first editions of Anthony Trollope (among others). I see the grandsons throwing pillows and fondling the rocks in a collection on the ledge; the brilliant green malachite; the frothy purple amethyst; the geode, round like a cannon ball. I see them poking the eyes of the bust of James Merrill, the now deceased Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was Buechner's lifelong friend.

Maybe he likes everything in its place because when he was a boy nothing was ever in place. His early life was one chaotic twist followed by another, and this was before his father's suicide.

Rewind to 1936. I see shadows of two little heads against a window, one a 10-year-old boy, the other nearly 8. They are looking down from two stories up, a still-life shot of light and dark shrouded in gray. I see a man on the ground growing cold and turning blue. It's their father, who died from car fumes while sitting on the running board of his idling Chevy in the garage. I see the mother, still in her nightgown, her hair unfurled, haplessly moving cold arms and legs in a futile attempt to bring life back to her husband's body.

The 10-year-old boy was not a prophet. But he had intuited that the line between normalcy, such as it was, and disaster was negligible in his life. The morning he stood with his brother looking down at their father, Buechner's apprehensions played out and his childhood ended, along with its dreams. Or maybe that was when the dreams began. Since the loss of his father, Buechner has been on a quest for the man he remembers only in shadows. His fiction has been the vehicle for this search, giving expression to losses through autobiographical incarnations, and rendering narratives to fill the empty places that defined his early life. His crowning achievement, the Pulitzer-nominated Godric (HSF, 1980), is dedicated to his father in Latin, he says, because of the obscurity that still hangs over his remembrance of him. The novel, "in a funny way, grew out of my memory and non-memory of my father," he told me. "Godric was a voice speaking to me."

Fast forward to a rainy day on Rupert Mountain, Vermont, in May 2002. Buechner is serving tea, no cream, no sugar. I ask him what he means when he writes frequently about God's silence. He answers, "It was John Updike who said God saves his deepest silence for his saints. Some people might say, 'The hell with it.' His silence throws me back upon myself and I must search my own depths. I'm still searching, aren't you?" He bobs his tea bag. "If we're not searching, we're dead."

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March 2003, Vol. 47, No. 3