discovering where "telling the truth" came from

Well, I finally found my way (thanks Matthew) to the amazing Frederick Buechner book for which our conference name came from: "Telling the Truth: The Gospel and Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale". We should have made it prerequisite reading for the conference. If you haven't read it yet, and you liked anything at all about the conference, you need to find a copy and read it. The vision that Buechner shares is irresistibly inviting. Beyond the poetry of his language and drama of his story telling, Buechner leads the reader to the very places where truth may be found and then creates the opportunity for us to dwell there ourselves. He entices us to make the vision our own and follow Christ in telling the truth: in our churches, our communities, and our world.
Here's a short excerpt from the end of the book that I keep running over in my head: So let the preacher remember this and preach to us not just as men and women of the world but as children, too, who are often much more simple hearted than he supposes, and much hungrier for, and ready to believe in, and already in contact with, more magic and mystery than most of the time even we are entirely aware of ourselves….Let the preacher stretch our imagination and strain our credulity and make our jaws drop because the sad joke of it is that if he does not, then of all the people he is almost the only one left who does not. ……
Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in that silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people ...….and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of the truth that we have.
While Buechner addresses these words to "preachers", there is clearly an implication for artists, musicians, writers, leaders and all who follow Jesus in our world...
Reading this has me both motivated and unsettled. What do others think? Look forward to further discussions, maybe some ideas on how artists [broader sense] can help create holy silences?