The Demand of Love

For my money, the greatest devotional book ever written is “The Magnificent Defeat,” by Frederick Buechner. It is a collection of meditations based on talks he delivered to college students long before I was born. His words, decades later, are as relevant and as profound as ever.

In one of the meditations Buechner relates a terrible tale of how a teenager, driven mad by rage, took a gun and killed his own father with it (Tragically, such events were less common when Buechner first wrote than today). The boy was quickly arrested and asked the obvious question: Why? Why had he committed such a horrible crime?

The boy answered that he hated his father, and the reason he hated him was because his father had been far too demanding. Much later, after the boy had been incarcerated, a guard was walking down the prison corridors late at night when he…