Frederick Buechner Quote

I have recently finished Now and Then, a memoir by one of my new favorite authors, Frederick Buechner. He has a knack for writing all of the things that you've wanted to say but never been able to put into words. I highly suggest his writing. I want to highlight an extended quote from the book that I found quite interesting and ponderment-worthy.

"For that reason only the most radical dissenters attended, and it was one of those -- a lean, freckle-faced senior -- who turned to me once, thin-lipped with anger, and said, "So what's so good about religion anyway?" and I found myself speechless. I felt surely there must be something good about it. Why else was I there? But for the moment I couldn't for the life of me think what it was. Maybe the truth of it is that religion the way he meant it--a system of belief, a technique of worship, an institution--doesn't really have all that much about it that is good when you come right down to it, and perhaps my speechlessness in a way acknowledged as much.

"Unless you become like a child, Jesus said, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and maybe part of what that means is that in the long run what is good about religion is playing the way a child plays at being grown up until he finds that being grown up is just another way of playing and thereby starts to grow up himself. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until--in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignance and mystery of it--you start to see that the playing is itself the first-fruits of the Kingdom's coming and of God's presence within us and among us."

--pg. 73, HaperCollins Publishers