Faith & Spirit Quote by Frederick Buechner

God, in Buechner's telling, is not a remote monarch but a daring romantic who keeps leaning into creation despite the mess it makes. The phrase "holy flirtation" is a deliberate provocation: it yokes the sacred to the lightly scandalous, insisting that divine love is not only dutiful but playful, risky, and intimate. Flirtation implies desire without coercion, attention without possession. That nuance matters in a religious landscape where God is often framed as judge, architect, or manager. Buechner is after a God who woos rather than controls.

Then comes the handkerchief: a small, almost embarrassing object to lose, the opposite of thunderbolts and tablets. The image shrinks sainthood down to something humble and human-scale. Saints aren't trophies of spiritual achievement; they're trace evidence, dropped accidentally in the ordinary churn of the world. A handkerchief also carries something bodily - sweat, tears, breath - suggesting that sanctity is not antiseptic. It's incarnational, touched by grief and effort.

Calling saints "handkerchiefs" reframes their function. They're not meant to eclipse God, but to signal proximity: signs that the divine has been here, brushing up against the everyday. As a 20th-century cleric writing amid modern disillusionment, Buechner softens piety into metaphor that can survive skepticism. He gives believers permission to imagine holiness not as escape from the world but as God losing things in it, leaving behind people who, by their lives, make the flirtation visible.