I am looking over the paragraphs that I had marked in Fredrick Buechner’s book Telling Secrets. The following passage intrigues me. I have re-imagined events from my past, too. I think that being willing (or is it able?) to do that can help us integrate painful memories freeing energy that can now be used to live with more imagination for good.
Buechner describes a character that he created in his novel, The Wizard’s Tide. He tells us that this child represents the boy he was when he suffered in silence after his father’s suicide. The boy, Teddy, decides that he wants to talk about his father and so he does. Teddy just mentions his name, he doesn’t say anything about him.
“ . . . but as I wrote that story, I knew that was enough, it was enough to start a healing process for the children in the story that for me didn’t start until I was well into my fifties. Stranger still, it was enough also to start healing the child in me the way he might have been healed in 1936 if the real story had only turned out like the make-believe story in the book. By a kind of miracle, the make-believe story became the real story or vice versa. The unalterable past was in some extraordinary way altered. Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits." (Telling Secrets: 34-5)
Buechner describes a character that he created in his novel, The Wizard’s Tide. He tells us that this child represents the boy he was when he suffered in silence after his father’s suicide. The boy, Teddy, decides that he wants to talk about his father and so he does. Teddy just mentions his name, he doesn’t say anything about him.
“ . . . but as I wrote that story, I knew that was enough, it was enough to start a healing process for the children in the story that for me didn’t start until I was well into my fifties. Stranger still, it was enough also to start healing the child in me the way he might have been healed in 1936 if the real story had only turned out like the make-believe story in the book. By a kind of miracle, the make-believe story became the real story or vice versa. The unalterable past was in some extraordinary way altered. Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits." (Telling Secrets: 34-5)
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