I’m reading Telling the Truth by Frederick Buechner. I don’t know why I’ve never heard of him or read anything by him before, but I know I’ve found a kindred spirit. This book is about the gospel and how it is like a tragedy, a comedy, and a fairy tale. So far I’m on the tragedy part. I was an English Ed major and had some incredibly gifted English teachers in high school and in college. They passed on their love of literature and writing to me and hundreds of other students over the years. I want to give you a taste of how Buechner writes, and maybe he’ll resonate with you too. You will feel like you are in the classroom with these kids, and you will be swept along to the tragic conclusion.

Here we go:

“This scene takes place in a high-school English class where a group of seniors are being taught the play [King Lear] by a teacher who is himself the narrator of the scene. He describes it this way:

“The Lear class had gone better than usual. It was the third act that was up for grabs that day—Lear on the heath with Kent and the Fool, the storm coming up—and nothing could have seemed more remote from our condition, yet there was a moment or two when for some reason it worked, came alive, no thanks to me.

There they all sat drowsy and full of lunch. There was a gym class going on outside. You could hear somebody calling out calisthenics, one and two, and one and two. There was a bumblebee softly bumping his way back and forth across the ceiling, but nobody was paying much attention to him. I sat on the windowsill in my shirt sleeves asking some boring questions somebody had written in the margin of my teaching copy and wondering idly who had written them and when, and not caring much whether anyone tried to answer them or not.

“What evidence do you find in Act Three for a significant change in Lear’s character?” was one of the questions, and a fat boy named William Urquhart surprised me by answering it. He was sitting all bend over with his head in his arms on the desk, and I’d thought he was asleep. His voice came out muffled by his arm. He said, “He’s gotten kinder.”

I said, “What makes you think so?”

The second question coming so quick on the heels of the one he’d just answered was more than William Urquart had bargained for, and he shifted his head to the other arm without saying anything. You could see where his cheek had gotten all moist and red where he’d been lying on it, and there was the imprint of wrinkles from his sleeve.

The ball was picked up by a boy named Greg Dixon. He was the pimpliest member of the class and the least popular. He said, “Well, when it starts to rain, he thinks about the Fool keeping dry, too. He says it right here someplace, ‘Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy?’ Here it is. He says, ‘Poor fool and knave, I have one part of my heart / That’s sorry yet for thee’ He’s getting kinder to people, just like Urquhart said.”

Also, he says a prayer for people.” It was Laura Fleischman who had spoken up this time. She always sat in the back row next to a good looking basketball player named Carl West, who knew he could have any girl in the class but for the time being anyway had settled for her. Usually she didn’t speak at all or spoke with a kind of startled breathiness as if she was surprised herself that anything beside Carl West could get a rise out of her.

Somebody horselaughed not so much at what she’d said, I thought, as at the fact that it was she who’d said it. Carl West sat there beside her with his stocking feet stretched out as far as they would go and his head lolling back as if to watch the bee on the ceiling.

“Nobody says a prayer in my book,” Greg Dixon said.

“Line 35,” Laura Fleischman said.

“That’s no prayer,” Greg Dixon said. “That’s not like any prayer I ever heard of. It doesn’t even say God in it.”

I said, “Go ahead and read it out aloud will you, Laura.”

Carl West sat humped over sideways now as far from Laura Fleischman as he could get without standing up and changing his seat. He was staring down at the wooden writing arm, tracing some scar on it over and over again with one finger.

In a small, half-apologetic voice with the calisthenic count going on in the background, she read;

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then. Her long hair dividing over her bare shoulders, her lashes dark against her cheeks as she looked down at the page, she could go nowhere from this moment except away from it. She still had a long way to go before she left it for good, but I felt like Father Hopkins anyway as I watched her—

How to keep…Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,…from vanishing away?

“Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,” she read, “That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just” …and two and one and two, the voice floated in through the open windows. Carl West had one hand up to his eyes as if to shield them from the sun… The bee drifted heavily down from the ceiling and hit the blackboard with a little thud, then crawled drunkenly along the chalk tray.

I said, “Who are these poor naked wretches he’s praying for, if she’s right that he’s praying?”

Greg Dixon said, “We are.”

He said it to be funny—they were the poor naked wretches to have to sit there and listen to Laura Fleischman read blank verse when they could be off somewhere having whatever Greg Dixon thought of as fun—but nobody laughed. Maybe I just ascribed my own thoughts to them, but it seemed to me that for a moment or two in that sleepy classroom they all felt some unintended truth in Greg Dixon’s words.

Laura Fleischman in the fullness of her time. William Urquhart in his fatness. Greg Dixon with his pimples. Carl West handsome and bored with the knowledge that he could have any girl in that room. They were the poor naked wretches, and at least for the moment they knew they were. All of us. The “pitiless storm.”

I’m just soaking in this book and can’t wait to read more of his stuff. Want to read it with me? Because the gospel starts with the poor naked wretches, but it doesn’t end there.

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