[Frederick Buechner has been, and still is, one of the most gifted preachers of our time. He has an ingenious way of wordsmithing his sermons. Here is an excerpt from one he preached on the occasion of the 250th birthday of Princeton University, based on Mark 4:35-41, titled: "A 250th Birthday Prayer." Dim Lamp]
Keep going, Jesus says, because to keep going is to keep living and to stop going is to stop living in any way that much matters. "Let us go across to the other side," he says, though who knows how far the other side is or what awaits us when we get there, if anything awaits us at all. And go bravely because if we are the boat and the storm and the fishermen in their helplessness, we are also, we have in us also, the holy one asleep in the stern with a pillow under his head whose presence gives us hope and courage.
I think there is a holiness that sleeps in the heart of all of us even when we do not know its name or seek to know it. I think that, however dimly, we have all of us glimpsed that holiness especially at those moments when we were wiser or braver or more loving than left to ourselves we know how to be, at those moments when we are overwhelmed by the joy of life and the tragedy of life and the indestructible beauty and holiness of life that lie deeper than either. I think that just our longing for it, our listening for it, can stir that holiness to life within us.
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