My Testimony: A Secular Sermon in Four Parts
[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]
I’m Ben Johnson, and this is my home on the web. I live in Vermont, and work and write and get in front of people sometimes. I practice the banjo and try to follow the tagline of my own website, to learn and become what I am. If I can squeeze in a few of those, it’s generally a good day.
I am a man who was a boy that loved sermons. I went to church three times a week for most of my childhood and saw them all the time. It’s an American art form, The Sermon. 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 personas laced with 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 ever seen that? or something like it? 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. They read with the intensity of two drowning psyches looking for the tiniest of air pockets they needed in order 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. I read and I studied and I listened, to them.
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 as if it were grain down the gullet of a soon-to-be foie gras goose. I spent a lot of my life bingeing and purging belief systems. I sent slugs of idea-grain down my gullet, then heaved them back up.
The 19th century German philosopher Hegel remarked somewhere that we are all High Priests of our own Religion of Ourselves. That’s my paraphrase of what I want him to have said. I dove into that idea. I developed a method:
Find a belief system
Expect it to make me happy
Fall in Love
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 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 on a trip to Oklahoma with my younger son. It ultimately turned into this hour-long piece. What I notice when I watch it now is that I 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. The perspective and grammar elements of first and third person may have gotten away from me; I think the psychological thicket reflected in the words is just is intricate.
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 and perhaps even every word would be the same, but the preacher would be gone, along with the hat.
It is my hat and I do have a strong preacher living inside me, but neither really fit me anymore. I still like ‘em, though.