The Hungering Dark

In the first essay in this beautiful collection of reflections on biblical themes, Frederick Buechner reminds us of a famous scene in the film La Dolce Vita: a helicopter is flying overhead, and suspended below it is a statue of Jesus. It flies over a swimming pool where a group of girls lounge; the men flying above circle back, trying to get the girls' phone numbers. All of this is immensely amusing to everyone in the audience, Buechner writes, until the camera zooms in on the statue itself, "until just for a moment the screen is filled with just the bearded face of Christ. For a moment, he continues, the theater was silent, "as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them." This, he concludes, "is much of what the Christian faith is."

We catch a glimpse of something true, Buechner tells us, and after that glimpse we are never again the same, try as we might to forget it. And the point of these essays, of course, is to remind us. --Doug Thorpe