The Messiah is Crucified whenever the word he brings is reduced to its literal meaning, the inference to be drawn is that the Messiah is risen from the dead whenever his word is given free play, allowed to strike lightning, heard as the disclosure of the really real . . . the pristine grammar of the church is the parable, the similitude, the aphorism — a secular, literal non-literal language, comic in mode.
— Robert Funk, Myth and the Literal/Non-Literal
The old master's voices whispered in our ears, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene. They told us tales infused with a respect for Christian patters of thought and the rituals of the institutional church. But their voices are muffled under today's geodesic domes. Many recent writers allude to the language, metaphors, and ideas of Christianity, but few contemporary novelists seem to have a sustained vision of the holy in our midst. The gods of gut and glistening steel dreams seem to surround us until we spy a clown in the corner — Frederick Buechner.
The highest comedy is the comedy of faith, the religious individual has as such made the discovery of the comical in large measure. He is one who has seen that our deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Here is the highest madness: a passionate belief in the absurd.
— Soren Kierkegaard
Twenty years of standing in the corner —- oftentimes hidden by the conspicuously Christian novels of John Updike — Buechner has been writing the kind of fiction that gives the Word free play. Open Heart is a sequel to Lion Country. It's his best novel to date.
This former Phillips Exeter Academy chaplain has always known that the secret of real Christian communication is metaphor. In Alphabet of Grace, he wrote:
"The language of God seems mostly metaphors. His love is like a red, red rose. His love is like the old waiter with shingles, the guitar-playing Buddhist tramp, the raped child and the on who raped her. There is no image too far-fetched, no combination of sounds too harsh, no spelling too irregular, no allusion too obscure or outrageous. The alphabet of grace is full of gutturals."
And because Buechner has a Kierkegaardian beat to his blood and af eel for the comic in his bones, you aren't really thrown off balance when he introduces you to Harry Bebb, one of fiction's most likeable and incredible creations. In case you weren't along for Buechner's Lion Country, let me bring you up to date regarding Harry. He's an ex-Bible salesman who has founded Holy Love Church and runs a mail-order ordination business out of his garage in Armadillo, Florida. His wife Lucille finds her husband hard to believe. His assistant, Brownie, adores him as exemplar of the faith and has a gift for making "the rough places of the Scripture smooth."
When we join Bebb in Open Heart, he has inherited one hundred thousand dollars from a Choctow millionaire called Herman Redpath. Our narrator, Antonio Parr, who married Bebb's sensual daughter Sharon in Lion Country, has flown down to Texas for the funeral. He learns that the preacher wants to bring his mission to the North. Before you know it the man has started a church called "Open Heart" in a barn near Antonio and Sharon's home in Connecticut. He tells them:
"Jesus is cooling his heels right there at the door of your heart, and he's knocking. All you got to do is open up and he'll enter in and sup with you. Talk about your open heart surgery. Why, Jesus has got all the rest of them beat a mile. Once you open your heart up to him, I tell you it stays open."
But Antonio has problems of his own. He believes that his wife with the "three-star spectacular" smile is having an affair. So in New York City one day, he commits adultery with a student from the English class he teaches — it's all in his mind, of course. He later comes to realize that his life is "less like a book that tends and more like a comic strip where episode follows episode without ever getting anyplace in particular."
The only one in the book who seems to take anything in stride is Harry Bebb. Lucille runs away from him back in Florida. When Antonio pleads with him to go and fetch her — "If anything happens to her, you'll never forgive yourself" — Bebb answers — "Suppose nothing happens to her ever again. Can I forgive myself for that?" Lucille eventually dies believing that her husband is from outer space.
The Church of the Open Heart doesn't work out — "It's the right angle but it's the wrong place with the wrong people." Mr. Golden, a mysterious fellow who tracks Bebb throughout the book, appears to scratch a life history of the preacher on the walls of the barn. He turns out to be Bebb's former cellmate — and perhaps he's an angel as well. Who knows what strange mysteries take place on this planet in the name of God? Bebb tells Antonio "I believe everything" — there's no limits to God's working or the crazy course of everyday events.
Open Heart doesn't really end; it meanders around your logic and toys with the perimeters of reason. Are we to take seriously that Bebb — this faith-healing charlatan, spiritual visionary, sexual exhibitionist, ex-con — is an emblem for the faith in our time? Certainly Buechner has discovered and exemplified the comical in his anti-hero's adventures. All the episodes show us that the deepest experiences come to us in the form of contradictions. Assuredly to believe in Bebb's vision of the faith is the highest form of madness. Perhaps in this age of geodesic domes, the Word does strike like lightning and the alphabet of grace spells out faith with many gutturals.