From “Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons” by Frederick Buechner
Add to that, as I looked out from all those different lecterns at all those different congregations, I always remembered that first congregation of some forty years ago now, who by and large thought the whole religious enterprise was for the birds, as in my darker moments I am sometimes tempted to believe may indeed be the case. It seems to me there is an Exeter student in each of us, even those of us who are churchiest and most outwardly conforming, who asks the ultimate question “Can it really be true?” and every time I have ever preached I have tried to speak to that question – not just to proclaim the Yes in its glory, but one way or another to acknowledge and do justice to the possibility of the No. In other words what I have been essentially doing from the pulpit all these more than fifty years is to tell the story of my life.