Secular Sermon: “My Testimony”

I loved sermons. I went to church three times a week for most of my childhood and saw them live. I listened to tapes of sermons that my folks had. Those preachers sermon-ed me to sleep at night. I put their words and thoughts in my ears and in my mind.

And that’s been a lot of the problem for me. I sort of come at the world through a haze of narcissism and defense mechanisms and misbegotten coping strategies and a sometimes overwhelming habit of disappearing inside my own head. Unless someone was making me do something else, for most of my childhood you would have seen me sitting on a couch with a stack of books next to me and body language that screamed “GO AWAY AND TORMENT SOMEONE ELSE. SUFFER THE CONTRARY AT YOUR PERIL”

I saw my folks reading the Bible urgently. Have you seen that? People looking for life in the words of a book? Looking for it like they had to find it. Looking for truth and salvation in those words with intensity. Not with the intensity of a miner looking for gold. No, they looked with the intensity of two drowning psyches looking for the tiniest of air pockets just to stay alive. They read and studied and listened, and they made me read and study and listen. They found God and He changed their lives and saved them, and so they would do the same for me, only right from the start, and without all that pesky choosing and autonomy getting in the way.

And as it turns out there’s quite a lot of difference between finding God on one’s own journey, and having someone else forcibly cram their God down your neck like grain down the gullet of a soon-to-be foie gras goose. I spent a lot of my life binging and purging belief systems like different slugs of grain going down my gullet, then coming back up. Find a belief system, expect it to make me happy, fall in love with it, ravish and devour it, become nauseated by it, get it out to make room for another. Repeat until death.

Now I follow a different philosophical eating plan. No more solid belief systems for me. Only the liquid diet of curiosity and questions and wandering and searching and accepting what I find inside and out, and living my own life in my own body.

And that’s how all this relates to secular sermons and this video series. My life had been slowly coming apart, and I was aware of a growing desire to express myself creatively. At the time, it manifested as little more than an inarticulate primal scream. I wrote things without even beginning to imagine an actual audience outside my head. There was no outside my head as far as I was concerned. Not really.

The idea of doing a sermon burst into my mind. It ultimately turned into this hour-long piece. What I see watching it now is a man who did not think that Ben Johnson could speak in his own direct voice, but instead had to present something different if he wanted to connect. And now I think the opposite is true.

A preacher has a stance to the audience of one who is delivering The Truth. I don’t have that stance now. If I wrote and performed this again the ideas would be the same, but the preacher would be gone, along with the hat.

It is my hat, but it doesn’t really fit me anymore. I still like it, though.