At the heart of this moment, and of many such moments in Buechner’s writing, is a barely-spoken revelation of that which we take most for granted: the marvellous procession of all things out from their first cause. The seed, found situated in friendly earth; the hidden germination of its heart; the slow and steady downward reach of its roots towards deep treasuries of moisture and nutrients; the upward search of the sprout until, finally, it scents air above and unfurls its face to the residual heat and light of a myriad hydrogen protons smashing into one another at the core of a sun that burns at twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit ninety-three million miles away. Radiating through the empty vestibules of space and terminating on the outspread palms of the seedling’s leaves, the light meets favourably with air that is itself the collective sigh of all plants everywhere, and with water droplets borne from distant seas along the secret pathways of the wind. Thus, seedling becomes sapling, and the sapling — grown to maturity, its wooden arms outstretched and bearing fruit — is the product and continuation of a miracle. […]
Standing in a pulpit before the “cultured despisers” of his day, the upturned faces of staff and students alike, he returns time and again to this message — the ordinary, for Buechner, is extraordinary enough to exhaust the mind with holy wonder at the work and presence of God. […]
[Jesus] ate, he drank, he sat down and walked around, and the soft footfall of his feet of flesh upon the earth left imprints in the ordinary way. He was ‘the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us’, and he ate meals ‘like any other meal’, and this was enough to flood the world with light.