from Frederick Buechner – “Love Feast” ( Chato & Windus; London:1975)

p. 6

He said, “It’s like Christopher Columbus, Antonio. To discover the New World you have to scrap the Old.”

p 60

The kingdom of God is a love feast where nobody’s a stranger.

pp. 154 -155

I caught him by surprise. A Preacher talking about things like-Antonio, shit is what Preachers have been talking about since Moses except the word they’re More like to use is sin. Only Roebuck didn’t know that. It shut him up for a minute. Then, he said, ‘If the World’s mostly shit, Bebb, where’s God? Just like that-where’s God? As if I could say, ‘Look, there he is, Roebuck, He’, squeezed into one of those books you got on your shelves. He’s out there a zillion miles northeast of the Milky Way. He’s catching forty winks over in Alexander Hall till the next Love Feast gets off the ground.’ That Roebuck was like a bird floating in the sky asking where’s air, only I didn’t say that then because I didn’t think of it till later.

I said, ‘I’ll tell you about shit Roebuck. Take it from an expert. There’s two main things about it. One thing is it’s stink and corruption and waste. The other thing is if you don’t pile it up too thick in any one place, it makes the seeds grow.’ I said, Roebuck, God’s where there’s seeds growing. God’s where there’s something no bigger than the head of a pin starting to inch up out of the stink and dark of shit towards the light of day.’ I said, ‘Roebuck, God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son down here into the shit with the rest of us so something green could happen, something small and green and hopeful.’

p. 157

“But when you come right down to it, the war we’re in is the same war. Antonio, we’re far from home, all of us are. Who’s going to judge which of us has got the farthest way to go through all the shit and the dark?”

p. 229

“Nobody’s got a corner on the God’s truth, and there’s nobody has the right to dump on somebody else’s version of it.”