Perspective. Or. Perhaps, the sin talk. But mostly Perspective.
Telling the Truth by Buechner says this:
"You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world, but a world lives in you. You are a world.
All of those men were worlds in their time with their whiskers on their chins, some of them, their clean shirts, their steel-rimmed glasses, their freshly polished shoes. As surely as each of them brought a toothbrush with him, he also brought with him his loves and his hates, his fears of death and his fears of life, his anxieties, his longings, his pride, his dark doubts. Each carried his world on his back the way a snail carries his shell, and so did the ones who traveled to New Haven to hear them lecture.
So one thinks of them too, the hearers as well as the givers of the lectures. There were fat ones and thin ones, old ones and young ones, happy ones and sad ones, some bright and some not so bright. They also brought their worlds with them and when they looked in their mirrors saw, if not adulteries of the flesh, then adulteries of the spirit, failures of faith, hope, love, failures of courage.
Like Henry Ward Beecher, like all of us, each of them too had bled a little. "All have sinned" (Rom. 3:23), Saint Paul says, which is another way of saying it, or all are human, which is another.
We have all cut ourselves. We all labor and are heavy laden under the burden of being human or at least of being on the way, we hope, to being human.
The distances between the inner world that each of us is are greater in their way than the distances between the outer worlds of interstellar space,but in another way, the worlds of all of us are also the same world...An occasional bad night, not feeling well. A ten o' clock arrival, a two o' clock nap. The same old face in the mirror day after day. An empty feeling in the pit of the stomach. A little blood. We are all of us in it together.
So if preachers or lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private inner part too, to the part of us all where our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams, the inner part where thoughts mean less than images, elucidation less than evocation, where our concern is less with how the Gospel is to be preached than with what the Gospel is and what it is to us. They must address themselves to the fullness of who we are and to the emptiness too,
the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all."
Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's both. The things we carry.
The typical flow of humanity and life and the Story every single person is a part of decidedly happen this way..
The bad always comes before the good. And the Good frees us from the bad in a weird fairy tale sort of way.
But this isn't necessarily good news. The only good news about the bad coming first is that every single soul must do this.
"The weight of these sad times we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
-Edgar in King Lear
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