Today I delivered a sermon on the Wedding at Cana, and I didn't like what was written. Not that I am ever completely satisfied with my efforts of course, but this one really bothered me. All it all it was a collapsed souffle. It was lumpy, it was uneven; it crammed too much in and then dealt with its contents too lightly, and yet it was still too long. This sorry undercooked effort felt like it had all the charisma of a broken sledge.
Attempts were made at consolation; this is often the way with the second sermon I was told sagely before the first delivery. Yet I had had such a buoyant feeling about this one, I had actually sketched a plan out, I had made it link to the topic of last week and I had by happy coincidence (or perhaps there are no accidents...) been asked a question related to the topic and so had actually cracked open a number of books on the subject.
Still, there I was racking my brain into the small hours. I had actually gone to bed at three this morning thinking it was almost as lucid and erudite in execution as conception, so naturally when I read it back to myself at six, I concluded somebody had sabotaged the whole thing. Lucidity and erudition just didn't as detectable in this thicket of simple sentences.
So after some long thought I've decided to return to the practice of blogging. It struck me that the ideas might well have been there, but it just didn't 'ring true', I was not communicating particularly well. This would however be Blogging as a literary discipline if I stopped merely at writing for the sake of expressing a point, and whilst making offerings on the altar of improved writing is of some public good, this blog could potentially go deeper.
I think I once read somewhere in the writings of Evagrius of Pontus the observation that humans exist largely absent from themselves- that is, their bodies occupy one point in time, but their minds often seem to be wandering somewhere else- either mulling over some event of the past or peering ahead into the murky future, barely registering what is going on around it. This strikes me as being rather true, even now my thoughts are oscillating back to this morning and the pulpit and to tomorrow morning and an assembly that needs giving. This inability to notice my immediate surroundings I think has some consequences to it. Whilst I was fretting this morning, the curate said one relaxing technique was to try and look through one's peripheral vision, when we get nervous our vision tends to narrow and close in on the one point of anxiety. I must say it worked remarkably well and I can recommend it to anyone to do in a tight corner. But I also think an analogy can be drawn from the effort to blog. By committing to write something down on a regular basis, the practice demands that one finds something to write about. Which means I too need to start expanding my peripheral vision to my whole life, to notice those things of interest that might be worth sharing, and just seeing what there is to see rather than obsessively focusing on the few small, and probably ultimately rather insignificant tasks I have to hand, and in that I may well find things to be grateful for or to marvel at. It means I have to be more attendant to my feelings and reactions to things so it's not (hopefully) a boring recounting of events. If blogging helps me achieve these things to some extent, then I think it is of no small spiritual value.
I don't know if it will produce better sermons. Something written to be spoken requires a different structure to something written to be read of course, but even if it just means I have a collection of anecdotes, quotations and ideas, to drawn on, that's a better position than a headache and frenzied couple of hours typing on the wrong side of midnight. Even though, I am somewhat nervous that this is just going to publicise my mental decline since leaving university as I drift from the thoughts of greater minds to little domestic details, the sort that help Miss Marple unravel crimes. I'm not sure I want to be a Miss Marple figure.
Coincidentally, there was one bit I was proud of in my sermon. I sat down and did the maths on the 'Six stone water jars, each holding 20 or 30 gallons'. It would seem Jesus' response to the problem of running out of wine was a little excessive. It amounts to between 545.5 and 813.3 litres, or 727 bottles and one large glass of wine at the least to a little over 1091 bottles at the most. I just thought it was worth reminding the reader before I embark on this journey that there's often something redeemable in every pile of dross which may ooze from my keyboard.
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