“The Person of the Preacher – Authenticity” – Keynote Presentation ACU Xavier School of Preaching 3 August 2024
One of the delights of a speaker of being given a topic without too much commentary – but what might fill the sponsors with a certain nervousness – is that the speaker may develop the topic given in their own way. This morning, we are exploring the person of the preacher, and the question of their authenticity – presumably how their authenticity, or otherwise, might inform their preaching. How do the words of the preacher become truly authentic?
In some ways, the answer has already been given in the readings, and I refer particularly to the article by Darrell W Johnson, “The Person of the Preacher.”[1] He cites the 19th century Puritan preacher, Phillips Brooks, who declared, Preaching is truth through personality.” However, let us use this time to explore the question from a slightly different angle.
The question of authenticity is, indeed, one that is uppermost in our modern minds. Ours is an Age of Authenticity, according to the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. This is, what he terms, the social imaginary in which we are embedded. As he wrote, “Deeply felt personal insight now becomes our most precious spiritual insight . . . To give this reign and voice in oneself is more crucial than getting the right formula.”[2] The experience of passion has now become a critical component for spiritual experience. [3]
We see in our own time, the rise of a generation who,
resonate with the “Peggy Lee” response [i.e. “is this all there is?”], but also [who] are seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self, a reclaiming of the place of feeling, against the one-sided pre-eminence of reason, and a reclaiming of the body and its pleasures from the inferior and often guilt-ridden place it has been allowed in the disciplined, instrumental identity. The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality . . .[4]
And yet here we confront a fundamental dilemma. Creativity and integrity do not necessarily coalesce. F or me, personally this has been a profoundly disturbing recognition. I have lived and worked with the most creative and intelligent of individuals who have been amongst the most complex and challenging with whom to live.
How can this be so? Surely, great oratory and beautiful writing are the outcome of an integrated personality? But this is not so. Creativity – and indeed, genius – belong to a portion of the mind not influenced by emotional congruency. This conundrum was powerfully portrayed in Miloš Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus which brought to the screen the fictional confusion of Antonio Salieri encountering the brash and immature Amadeus Mozart. Salieri was a renowned and highly competent musician at the court of Joseph II. But he simply did not possess the flair, the pizazz, of Mozart so much his younger. He could not understand how someone as disintegrated could produce such sublime sound.
Extraordinarily, just as great writing does not come necessarily from an integrated personality, the same could be said of the great preacher. Great preaching may not come, necessarily, from a holy life. And this can be confusing. We might recall the response of Patrick White, the one Australian Nobel Prize winner for literature, who when urged to enter therapy, refused, “lest if the demons left so might his creativity vanish.” By analogy, the great preacher may not the be the one who has no demons, but rather the one who knows their demons well and constantly does battle with them.
Preaching, in fact, emerges from the intersection of many, many different factors: personality, experience, culture, education, worldview, theology, spirituality and literacy by which I mean one’s capacity to read and reflect. I often get frustrated when I hear the demand for an improvement in homilies, as if constructive feedback to the homilist or a workshop could address the quality of homilies. This is not to suggest that schools in preaching are not helpful! It is to remember, however, that preaching – good preaching – is a complex amalgam of an entire personal experience that is situated on so many different levels of the preacher’s being that is not immediately changeable. How might we change someone’s preaching? Really, the underlying question is how do we change the preacher’s very personality? Doubtless to say, that does not occur easily. And is this desirable, in any event? Notwithstanding, it is true that when one listens to a preacher, one is listening not just to their words but to an entire world of being, fashioned as it is by very diverse and multiple factors.
It has always struck me that good preaching during a homily, which as we have learnt these days is only one form of preaching, at the least, demands serious reading, and that the depth of preaching is contingent in no small way to the breadth of reading – not just scriptural commentaries on a text on which one is preaching, but reading across literature, culture, philosophy, theology, spirituality.
Well, for the astute, the experience of a preacher may present as a fascinating endeavour for deconstruction. But, of course, for most it is a matter between boredom and engagement.
So, whatin the midst of all this, might be the essential ingredient in the preacher that bestows truly in their preaching this elusive character of authenticity?
Perhaps we find the answer in a story the late Irish writer John O’Donohue tells about himself when he was a deacon in a London parish. He was sent to a parish in London to train for a summer. During his first week working in the parish, John found an old down-and-out man at the back of the church one evening. He was eating a burger and drinking a bottle of Guinness. The correct young priest-to-be went up to him and informed him that this was a church not a restaurant and asked him to leave. The old man took no notice of him and just continued to babble away to himself.
The deacon went later in exasperation to the parish priest. He smiled and said, “Ah that is David.” It turned out that years ago he had come over from Ireland with his young wife and family. He had a great job. They were very happy and had the prospects for a wonderful future. One day a car hit David. He lost his memory totally and could never again remember who he was or recognise his family anymore. He ended up on the street. He had made the back of this church his shelter during the day.
This story changed the young deacon’s view of the old man. Over the summer he often watched him muttering away to himself at the back of the church. He has a very unusual way of praying. He would kneel into a pew and babble while milling the air with his outstretched hands. The deacon never heard him utter a clear word or a coherent sentence; yet the touching image of this haunted and forsaken man always at prayer at the back of the church began to move him.
On his last evening there, he went down and knelt beside the man. He told him that tomorrow he would return to Ireland to finish his study and become a priest. He asked the old man to say something to him about what a priest should be. For one moment the old man focused, looked at him and said: “The sympathy of God.” It was the only sentence anyone had ever heard him say.
The sympathy of God. Preaching is authentic when the preacher, whatever of their personal complexity, speaks the sympathy of God.
This is borne out by another story of a young priest who was to give homily in a church in Rome. He told against himself, “I was convinced,” he said, straight-faced, “that as soon as I opened my mouth a fire would ignite faith upon this earth, that people in far-off lands would fall to their knees and be converted. I began preaching. After about five to ten minutes, I noticed people pinching their babies to make them cry and setting off their wristwatch alarms. I got angry. I was so furious that I don’t think I even listened to the last two pages of my text as I gave it.”
Mass over, he went back to meet his preaching mentor at the seminary “How did it go?” the mentor asked. And the young priest replied: “It was one of the worst experiences of my life.” His mentor asked, “What do you mean?”
“They’re stupid,” the young priest answered. “They didn’t understand a word of what I said.” His mentor looked back and said, “Did you love them?” “No‟, said the young priest. “What do you mean, did I love them? I was casting pearls before swine.” His mentor repeated, “Did you love them?” The young priest said, “No, I didn’t love them.”
And his mentor replied, “If you don’t love them, you don’t have a right to open your mouth.”
If you don’t love them, you don’t have a right to open your mouth.
It is the love of the preacher for their people that gives their preaching its authenticity
This brings us to the teaching of Pope Francis on preaching. As he remarked, “The preacher speaks like a mother does to her child[5] . . . This setting . . . should be encouraged by the closeness of the preacher, the warmth of his tone of voice, the unpretentiousness of his manner of his speaking, the joy of his gestures.[6] The homily is the touchstone for judging a pastor’s closeness and ability to communicate to his people.”[7]
Therefore, as Francis teaches, “A preacher has to contemplate the Word, but he also has to contemplate his people . . . He needs to be able to link the message of a biblical text to a human situation, to the experience that cries out for the light of God’s word . . . If preachers want to speak out to people, they need to listen, they need to share in [people’s] lives and pay loving attention to them.”[8] For Francis, this is expressed in the single, but complex, term of ‘mercy’. “True mercy takes the person into one’s care, listens to them attentively, approaches the situation with respect and truth, and accompanies them on the journey of reconciliation.”[9] This, of course, is a language which is “expressed in gestures and attitudes even before words.”[10] This is “closeness to the people, closeness among ourselves; prophesying with our witness, with a burning heart, with the apostolic zeal that warms the hearts of others, even without words . . .”[11]
If you don’t love them, you don’t have a right to open your mouth.
It is the love we have for those entrusted to us that renders our preaching with authenticity or otherwise.
In another film, Bruce Beresford’s 1991, Black Robe, the main character is a young missionary part of the European expansion into Canada. He is named as Paul Laforgue, and he saw his mission as one to convert the Canadian Indians to Christianity. He was a sensitive and cultured man and at first seemed unable to appreciate the people to whom he had come to minister, people who lived in a Huron village 1500 miles from Quebec.
At some stage on a journey away from the village in which he was based, however, another tribe, the Iroquois, captured him. Eventually, he escaped. Full of doubt and despair, broken and overwhelmed with the sense of his own fragility, he arrives back at the village that in the meantime has become stricken with fever and European disease. For the first time, Laforgue sees the Indians as people, not just as a category of “souls to be saved.” He appears more vulnerable; his eyes convey compassion. His defences are down. He is powerless and poor.
The Huron chief comes up to Laforgue and asks him a question. Surrounded by the sick of the village, the warriors and the medicine man, he asks, “Do you love us?”
In other words, “will you now enter into communion with us as we are, today, in our neediness, in our disbelief, in our desperation?” For this is the test as to whether you are truly with us, for us.
“Do you love us?”
This is the question that the preacher must hear every time before they open their mouth. It means, then, that for our preaching, “dialogue is our method” as Pope Francis teaches,
Dialogue is our method, not as a shrewd strategy but out of fidelity to the One Who never wearies of visiting the marketplace . . . I cannot ever tire of encouraging you to dialogue fearlessly. … Do not be afraid to set out on that ‘exodus’ which is necessary for all authentic dialogue. Otherwise, we fail to understand the thinking of others, or to realise deep down that the brother or sister we wish to reach and redeem, with the power and the closeness of love, counts more than their positions, distant as they may be from what we hold as true and certain. Harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor, it has no place in his heart; although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing. … We need to … remember that Jesus’ Church is kept whole not by ‘consuming fire from heaven’, but by the secret warmth of the Spirit, who ‘heals what is wounded, bends what is rigid, straightens what is crooked’.[12]
This is not an easy task in our current climate, but one which surely must remain uppermost. The 20th century scholar of spirituality, Michel de Certeau wrote how in our current context we can feel as if have fallen from a sinking ecclesial ship, “lost in the vast and uncertain poem of an anonymous reality which comes and goes.”[13] Civil society has “replaced the Church in the role of defining tasks and positions, leaving the Church with only a marginal possibility of correcting . . .”[14] In response, he outlines we can be tempted to create alternate sites of meaning. However, the risk, then, is that we become, as it were simply, a religious ghetto, a museum piece that can exercise no agency in our society – what the American philosopher of religion, David Tracy, calls “a private reservation of the spirit.”
The task forward, however, according to De Certeau, is not simply to try to fortify the Church’s bulwarks such that it reclaims a power stronger than the prevailing trends, but rather for each baptized person to take up their personal responsibility, and precisely in the anonymity of their situation to seek to exercise this imperative. He calls this moment, for the Church, our “empty tomb.”[15] The body of the Church, as it were, is absent, at least in the social culture; it has no force. As he contends, no longer can we enjoy the litany of past strengths – ecclesial property with cultural prestige. Indeed, the capacity of the Church as an institution to speak on any moral issue has been severely weakened by our own history of the abuse of children and of our neglect to act properly in response.
What we do have, however, now is our own personal voice, a voice that is not afraid to be different. In the silence of an apparent absence, we must learn ourselves to speak. But the word that we speak must, De Certeau proposed, be ‘interrogative’ – that is, a voice ready to ask questions, ready to suggest different perspectives, even though our proposals may sound very feeble even to us. Each of us is commissioned to speak out a word as the Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann details, “neither in rage or cheap grace, but with the candour born of anguish and passion.”[16]
As De Certeau alludes, we cannot now issue a dogmatic word, a word that demands. We must train ourselves in the word which is humbler, and which invites. The French-Canadian philosopher, Paul Ricoeur once wrote, “any ethic that addresses the will in order to demand a decision must be subject to a poetry that opens up new dimensions for the imagination.”[17] In other words, “don’t tell me what to do; tell me how it can be.” This is the word which all of us must learn, for this alone will be the word that can be heard today. This is the word which nurtures, which nourishes. It cannot be a moralizing word, but a word which seizes people’s imagination because it deeply respects them, and evokes in them the desire for something more, something different – that ‘new beginning’ which is the mark of the Spirit.
This is the word which nurtures, which nourishes and always invites.
. . . the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness. (Ja. 3: 17-18)
This is prophetic wisdom. Each of us as a minister is commissioned to speak with this wisdom. We need not fear. If we are speaking such a word people will respond. It is bread for the hungry and the hungry do not ignore quality bread. But if we speak in cliché, giving answers to questions no one is asking, then, to use a famous phrase of Karl Rahner’s, our words “will fall like dead birds out of a winter’s sky.” They oppress; they alienate; they petrify. They do not make the lame dance, they do not bring the dead to life, the blind to see and the deaf to hear.
We are to offer, instead, a ‘poetic’ word ‑ that word which seizes others’ imagination, and which can only come through intense listening and waiting. Such watchfulness is imbued with that an analogical imagination, the ability to see similarity in difference. With this imagination, the prophetic minister who speaks out the ‘poetic’ word listens to people’s stories, reads the newspapers, watches the television, listening for the deeper currents, listening for how the presenting story represents the vaster, eternal story of slavery seeking freedom, of death giving way to life, of despair being transformed into possibility and confidence. The analogical imagination is constantly alert to the revelation of God in and through nature, in and through people’s ordinary experience. When we approach life with this analogical imagination then we recognise that the stories of Scripture are actually being lived out in front of us, before our own eyes. They are not simply the stories of 2000 years ago. They are the expressions of what the Spirit effects even no in our midst.
As we stumble and stutter to offer the word of life to both us and to our world, we regain the prophetic voice which belongs to ministry. May we then speak with that same imagination as “the young Galilean poet of the haunted spirit. He who was able to image the incarnation and inhabit it, and who thereby opened out one of the most amazing imaginative symbols and sources of all time: the Trinity as source of distance and intimacy, belonging and dislocation, selfhood and otherness.”[18]
In our ministry, do we dare to be that authentic?
[1] Darrell W Johnson, “The Person of the Preacher,” in the Glory of Preaching: Participating in God’s Transformation of the World (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2009), 172-190.
[2] Taylor, A Secular Age, 489.
[3] Taylor, A Secular Age, 487.
[4] Taylor, A Secular Age, 507.
[5] Evangelii Gaudium
[6] Evangelii Gaudium
[7] Evangelii Gaudium
[8] Evangelii Gaudium
[9] Pope Francis, Address to the Parish Priests of the Diocese of Rome, 6 March 2014
[10] Pope Francis, Address to Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation, 14 October 2013.
[11] Pope Francis, International Congress for Consecrated Young People, Vatican City, 17 September 2015.
[12] Pope Francis, Address to United States Bishops, Washington, DC, 24 September 2015.
[13] Michel de Certeau, “The Weakness of Believing: From the Body to Writing, a Christian Transit,” translated by Saskia Brown in The Certeau Reader, edited by Graham Ward (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 229.
[14] De Certeau, “The Weakness of Believing,” 226.
[15] De Certeau, “The Weakness of Believing,” 224.
[16] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 50.
[17] Paul Ricoeur quoted by Frederick Herzog in “Liberation and Imagination,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology Vol 32 (July 1978), 228.
[18] John O’Donohue, “The Agenda for Theology in Ireland Today I,” The Furrow 42 (1991), 698.
