January 7 — Beautiful and Terrible

Frederick Buechner Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words (2004)

About Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) was one of the most beloved spiritual writers of the twentieth century — a Presbyterian minister, novelist, and theologian whose prose carried both the ache of honest doubt and the warmth of deep faith. Born in New York City, he suffered a wound early that would shape everything: when Buechner was ten years old, his father walked into the family garage and took his own life. That morning, and the silence that surrounded it for years afterward, became the invisible subtext of his life’s work — the reason he wrote so precisely about grief, beauty, and courage.
He was educated at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, and ordained under the mentorship of George Buttrick, one of the great preachers of his era. But Buechner was never quite at home in the institutional church. He wrote twenty-seven books of fiction and nonfiction — including the celebrated Wishful Thinking, The Sacred Journey, and the Bebb novels — and became one of the rare figures who could write theology that novelists wanted to read and novels that theologians could not put down.
He spent the last decades of his life writing from a farmhouse in Vermont, close to his family, tending a prose style that C.S. Lewis once called among the finest in the English-speaking world. He died in August 2022 at age ninety-six — a man who had looked at the world’s terrible beauty for nearly a century and still found it worth the looking.

Historical Context

Buechner wrote this sentence in Beyond Words, a collection of short meditations published in 2004, when he was seventy-eight years old. By that point he had outlived his father by sixty-eight years, survived the silence of suicide in his family, watched the turbulence of the twentieth century, and emerged not bitter but luminous. The sentence carries the full weight of that long life.
The phrase “Don’t be afraid” appears more than three hundred times in the Bible — from Genesis to Revelation — more than any other single command. God says it to Abraham, to Hagar, to Moses, to Joshua, to Mary, to the disciples trembling at the empty tomb. Buechner had studied those words for decades. When he finally wrote his own version, it arrived not as a theological argument but as a pastor’s hand on the shoulder: Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
It is the kind of sentence that can only be written by someone who has actually been afraid, and found — slowly, imperfectly — that fear was not the last word.

Scripture Cross-References
Old Testament

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” — Joshua 1:9
“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.” — Isaiah 41:10

New Testament

“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7

Restoration Scripture

“Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.” — D&C 6:36
“Be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you.” — D&C 68:6
“Perfect love casteth out all fear.” — Moroni 8:16

A Story to Sit With

On the morning of November 27, 1936, a ten-year-old boy woke to find his father gone. The note left on the kitchen counter read, in part: “I adore and love you all.” Carl Frederick Buechner Sr. had driven into the garage, closed the door, and started the engine. He was thirty-seven years old.
The family never spoke of it. They moved. They continued. They became, as Buechner later wrote, “a family of people who did not speak of painful things.” He grew up learning that silence was the price of belonging.
Decades later, writing about his father in The Sacred Journey, Buechner finally named what had happened. In doing so, he became one of the first prominent American Christians to write openly about suicide within his own family — a subject still draped in shame in 1982. The response was overwhelming: thousands of letters from people who had carried the same silence, who had never had words for it, who finally felt seen.
That is the man who wrote, “Don’t be afraid.” He did not write it from safety. He wrote it from the other side of fear.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear children and grandchildren,
January seventh falls in the stillness after the holidays — when the lights come down and the ordinary days resume, and sometimes a quiet dread settles in. What will this year hold? What beautiful things, and what terrible ones?
Buechner does not promise you that only beautiful things will come. He is too honest for that. He says: beautiful and terrible things will happen. Both. Woven together. That has been my experience in medicine and in life. I have sat with patients on the most terrifying days of their lives, and I have also sat with them on mornings filled with more grace than I could explain. The two are not separated cleanly. They are braided.
What I want you to know — what I have learned slowly, over thirty years of practice and a lifetime of faith — is that the presence of fear does not mean the absence of God. Fear is honest. It is appropriate. The man who says he is never afraid is either not paying attention or not telling the truth. But fear does not have to be the governor of your life.
The scriptural phrase appears more than three hundred times: Be not afraid. If it appears that often, it is because the people God loves are afraid that often. He is not surprised by your trembling. He knows you intimately — the way a father knows his child, not just from the outside, but from within.
Here is my prayer for you as this new year unfolds: May you face it with open eyes — seeing both its beauty and its difficulty without flinching — and may you find, again and again, that you are not facing it alone.
With all my love,
Grandfather