Ostriches

 A friend of mine in the ministry gave a sermon the other day for which he felt particularly keyed up. "How did it go?" I asked. He replied that the feedback he received had been uniformly positive, but somehow distinctly unsatisfying. 

People had lined up afterwards and told him how much they appreciated the service. Then they would add: "I especially liked the part where you said..." and whatever came next would be completely off. Sometimes, it was the opposite of what he had intended to say. Other times it was simply irrelevant. 

I tried to reassure him that this experience was a near-universal in the ministry. Everyone who's preached has had the same thing happen to them. The dream of course is to convey one's deepest feelings to another—to vibrate in synchrony with them on precisely the same emotional wavelength. (To "touch without touching," as William Gass's preacher protagonist puts it in Omensetter's Luck). But this rarely happens. So often the result is instead a complete miscommunication. 

Why does this happen? The answer is simple: people aren't really there to hear you talk. They want to have their own say. And in the absence of this opportunity, they end up hearing in your words whatever it is that they really wanted to say themselves, and then paraphrase it back to you, as a way of getting their own chance to take a turn in the pulpit. 

The miscommunication, then, is a product of the artificiality of the form. For some reason—probably historical—we still insist on organizing church services around a twenty-minute speech by a single person. All the time, the building is full of people who would love to have it otherwise. They are writhing in agony in their seats, desperate for a chance to say their piece instead. 

This desire is so potent that it will quickly overflow any limited channels left open to receive it. It therefore, as every minister soon learns, must be strictly regulated. A moment to "share joys and concerns" in the service, for instance, or to "pass the mic," or an open invitation to add "announcements" at the start of the service, or a post-service "question and answer" period, can all quickly snowball into an hours-long affair, if left unchecked.

The phenomenon is not unique to sermons, but—the homily being the sort of ur-form of Western oratory—it is here it occurs in its most prototypical form. Vladimir Nabokov's fictional poet John Shade makes the comparison himself, after he encounters this problem while delivering a lecture on poetry. "I gave my sermon, a dull thing but short," he writes, in the titular poem of Pale Fire: 

As I was leaving in some haste, to thwart

The so-called 'question period' at the end,

One of those peevish people who attend

Such talks only to say they disagree

Stood up and pointed with his pipe at me.

Of course, to the minister or lecturer, the phenomenon always appears to be the product of distinctly peevish people. But in truth it is a result simply of human nature. People want a turn to have their say. There is nothing they enjoy more than being able to speak uninterrupted. 

There's a memorable episode in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which the author introduces a character who is popular precisely because she never adds anything herself. She is a blank slate onto which people can project whatever reactions they prefer while monologuing to their heart's content. 

Driving his point home, Kundera has the character encounter a herd of ostriches in a pen, in the final scene of the chapter. The ungainly flightless birds all descend upon her, opening their beaks to issue wordless squawks. What was it they were trying to communicate? Kundera explains: "They came, each one of them, to tell her about themselves. About how they ate, how they slept, how they ran up to the fence, and what they saw on the other side. …" (Asher trans.)

Are we doomed, like the ostriches, to simply squawk at each other until the end of time: each of us trying to talk about himself and never listening to the others? Will no sermon in the world ever be heard, because each of us is listening to it only for the sermon that we would have wished to give ourselves; each of us waiting only for the chance to get up and deliver a new and better sermon all about us? 

That's surely putting it too strongly. No doubt it feels this way in a church context only because the audience has been forced during the preceding hour to sit there silently and listen only to you, and during all that time a great backlog of unspoken thoughts has been accumulating. If we arranged our services instead in a more egalitarian fashion—something like Quaker meeting—and everyone who wanted one got a turn to speak, people might not feel so glutted with their own unexpressed thoughts and could actually listen to others. 

It was something like this possibility that occurred to me all the way back in 2014, during the second year of my own divinity school education. It led me to come up with a proposal, which I memorialized on this blog in verse:

Supposing everyone in the world

Was given five minutes each

To uncork themselves

And suppose everyone else—you and me included

Absolutely had to listen

No buts

What a stream of pain and anger

And misery!

Would be released

What horrible abuses and regrets and rages

Would come pouring out!

Yuck!

That would be minutes 1-4.

And assuming we all actually listened all this time

And didn’t check the time or our emails or shoelaces

Then Minute number 5

I suspect

Would be different.