Subpoenas and Sermons

The netrage is out there, about everything, about anything, and one rage-meme that's been popping a whole bunch in my feeds lately has to do with the subpoenas issued to five Texas area pastors for copies of their sermons.

The reason has to do with a fight over a Houston ordinance protecting the rights of transgendered persons.  A coalition of conservative megachurch pastors actively opposed it, using the same odd tactic that's been attempted in my region.  They also used their large congregations as their political base in their attempt to overturn the law.  After a petition attempt to put the issue on the next ballot as a referendum failed, the coalition filed a lawsuit to stop the ordinance.

So the lawyers for the city, acting in defense of the municipality against the lawsuit filed by the churches, chose to subpoena the sermons of five representative communities.

This has created the netrage, as the pastors now stand firmly on the principle of the separation of church and state.  It has nothing to do with the LGBT community!  This is about the Constitution!  This is about religious liberty!

Of course, this is also coming from pastors who are using their pulpits and their congregations how?   To engage in political endeavor.  Complaining about the separation of church and state when you've actively used your congregation to mobilize politically is...well...mildly ironic.

Two particular things seem problematic about this carefully cultivated outrage.

Thing number one: why would you ever need to subpoena a sermon?  If a congregation and/or their pastor is doing their job, a sermon is not a secret.  This isn't a closed business meeting.  It's something you share, not just with the true believing Pureblood Christians, but with anyone and everyone.  It's not "inside the silo" speech.  It's a message to the whole world.  Anyone can hear it.  You should never, ever, need a subpoena to shake loose a sermon, any more than you'd need to subpoena the front page of the Washington Post or the Houston Chronicle.

Sermons are public speech, and speech you should be willing to have out there in the world in front of everyone.

I post the full text of every single sermon I preach online.  Thanks to the good work of folks at my church, the audio is also available...on iTunes, streamable, and downloadable.  Every single one of those sermons is there, my weekly efforts to interpret these ancient sacred texts with as much accuracy and grace as I can. Why?

Because what I preach is intended to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's the whole point of preaching, isn't it?  Not to affirm what my congregation already believes as we whisper to each other in secret, but to challenge anyone who hears me to be more loving, more merciful, more compassionate, and more gracious.  If I'm doing my job right, it's a message of grace to anyone...the stranger, the visitor, anyone.

If one so chose, you could keyword search through my sermons, looking for anything and everything.  Go ahead.  I stand by those words.  They represent my best effort to articulate the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the world.

So if anyone ever says to me, I demand a copy of your sermons?  Sure.  Here's the link.  Go to town, buckaroo.

Which gets me to thing number two:  It's an effort to shame us, the pastors argue, and to tar us as anti-LGBT bigots.  We're being bullied by those mean government folks, just because we've used our pulpits in an effort to overturn a law that prevents discrimination against a tiny minority of Americans.  We will never turn over our sermons, they cry.  They're just trying to shame us with our own words!  We'd rather go to jail than turn over our preaching to these shamey bullies!  Because...liberty!  Because...Constitution!

From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, I can sort of see that.  We don't like being told what to do, not by anyone, for any reason.  It's an affront to my sovereign individuality to force me to do anything.

But from a Gospel perspective, a servant-of-Jesus-Christ perspective, this is completely insane.  If those messages contain the Gospel, then they're nothing to be ashamed of.  I want you to hear them.  I want you to read them, whoever you are, wherever you are.

If what they are would appear hateful in the sight of a neutral, objective third party, then they're not the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Rome, laid that out pretty clearly.  What we do and say, if we are acting and speaking as Christians, must be noble in the sight of all.  Following Jesus is self-evidently loving, self-evidently merciful, self-evidently just.

As preaching should be, if it is really and truly the preaching of the Gospel.

The Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Sermon

It wasn't a particularly rushed morning, two Sundays ago.

I'd finished up the sermon, then putzed around with it for a few minutes as I always do before printing it up on a Sunday morning.  There's a final read-over, an edit here, an addition there, and I'm ready to go.

Some mornings, it's a mad rush, as I realize that I've botched a transition or failed to include something vital, which surfaces in my mind only at the very last minute.  But I was generally pleased with the manuscript, which I'd dance in and out of as I moved through the message.  There were the jokes, the images, the transitions, and the results of my review of scholarly commentaries, all woven up together.  I was content.

I went upstairs, showered, snagged another cup of coffee, and then went back downstairs to the study and hit print.  Out came the pages, one-two-three-four, single spaced, 1600 words and change.

I snagged them from the printer as soon as they printed out, then bounded upstairs.  I dropped them in my bag, suited up, and got on my bike to motor to church.

The adult ed study went well, as we wrapped up thirteen weeks of studying Paul's Seven Letters.

I bopped into my office with five minutes to go before worship, put on robe and stole and cross, and popped open my bag.  Out came the sermon manuscript.

It was a sermon.  But it was not the sermon.

It was the sermon from the previous week, which--as I discovered later--had still been spooled up in the buffer for the printer.  The actual sermon must have printed about ten seconds later, where it sat patiently all Sunday long wondering why I hadn't picked it up.

Ack.

I reviewed my options.  Four minutes to worship.  The sermon was in the cloud, in my Googledrive.  I could get to it.  Only...I didn't have my laptop.  Hum.  Surely, surely I could access that through the browser on my iPhone.

I attempted this, sitting there in my office, but something wasn't working.  I tried again, as I sat there in the sanctuary.  Still not working.  Ack.  I found myself coveting, for a moment, an Android phone.

My music director finished the prelude, and nodded and smiled as she does to let me know to get my behind out there.  I went to welcome folks into the worship.  I was preoccupied, and could feel it distancing me.

During the first readings, I tried again to get to the sermon, but for some reason, it would only bring up an account affiliated with my older son's schoolwork.  I found a workaround, and got to my Google account, but then--with ten seconds to go before I'd lead the time with children--the browser crashed.

Ack, again.

And so in the all-too-short hymn before the sermon, my mind fished for the words I had used.  They were there, somewhere.  The echo of my writing remained, but it was imperfect.  How had I said that?  How had I started?  How had I worked that transition?

I can do off-the-cuff or improvisational preaching.  That, I'm comfortable with.  It's energizing.

But my mind was still on the words that weren't quite there.  I struggled through the message, I'd remember that I'd forgotten to say this, or forgotten to say that.  I was not in the moment or non-anxious, and I could feel it distorting and interfering with my connection to the good folks of my little church.  They were trying gamely to stay with me, they were, but it just wasn't happening.

Because to preach the Word, you have to be present in it.

Sigh.  There's always the next Sunday.

Pastoring and Comedy

It's a sustained meme, a thread of thought that keeps popping up in the conversations pastors have about themselves.

You'd think we'd be psyched to be in ministry, filled with joy at the prospect of proclaiming the Good News, about sharing both the Spirit and the ethical teachings of that kwazy Nazarene.  But instead, many of us are struggling.

Why are we so exhausted?   Why are so many of us burned out and miserable and so sick of it all that we're seriously thinking about going into retail?  Or just walking the earth. 

There's been some interesting conversation about this lately, but one sustained theme I've seen reposted I find myself having some trouble processing.   In a post on the need for wholeheartedness in ministry, Todd Bolsinger suggests that part of the reason pastors burn out on ministry is this:

People now demand that their pastors be part shrewd cultural commentator and part comic.  We must entertain, inspire and instruct a little, all the while never really challenging the worldview or tribal instincts that make us Christians seem little different than anyone else.  

This is a significant factor we are burned out, or so the argument is presented.  We're just so tired of entertaining people.  Laugh, pastor, laugh, and we weep.  I'm down with the wholeheartenedness thing he presents.  Bolsinger makes some other excellent points in the article, which is well worth the read.   But I struggle with his take on "comedy."  Being "part comic" is a source of exhaustion?  

Pastors get exhausted, in my experience, by the [bovine excrement] parts of ministry.  Dealing with the awkward political dynamics of institutions?   Making sure you've filed your old-line-mandated 27 B/6 in triplicate?   A church leader who thinks "Here I stand, I can do no other" was Martin Luther referring to the tile selection in the Wittenberg foyer?  These things can be draining, dispiriting, and exhausting.   

Gossip and whispering and powerplays within the local church and in our broader church are also tremendously draining, but again, this is an inescapable reality of human gatherings.

Churches should resist this, but in my experience, they often do not.  We are, after all, flawed beings.  And those flaws exhaust us.   So it goes.  The good fight is tiring.  It's our task to do battle against them...or, rather, to teach those around us about the Way that challenges the power dynamics of every human condition.   Honestly, that's not all that tiring, because I'm not the one doing the challenging.  You got a problem with the Gospel?  I'm just the errand boy.  Take it up with Jesus.  

Where I diverge here is in some of the assumptions about expectations.   Or expectations about assumptions.  Or maybe it's both.

A congregation has a right to expect that their pastor will be a shrewd cultural commentator.  There's not a single thing wrong with that expectation.  If you're going to be prophetic, you'd danged well better be aware of culture.

And being a comic?  If they're a comedian, well, all the better.   

Because comedy isn't treacle.  It's not fluff.  Not the comedy I enjoy, anyway.

Neither is it canned, culled from the pages of some "1001 Ways To Start that Lousy Sermon With A Laugh" book.  

Real comedians use humor to challenge and transform.  They subvert and undercut the garbage, the false assumptions and the self-righteousness and the illusions that tear apart our society.  They speak truth in a way that resonates deeply, and in a way that entertains, disarms, and forces us to think.

Laughter connects us.  It opens us up a little bit.  And then, if it's being used rightly, it teaches.

I'm thinking Jon Stewart, whose "comedy" is some of the best political commentary out there today.  I'm thinking George Carlin challenging the powers that be.  I'm thinking Flip Wilson subversively tearing a generation's hearts out at the injustice of segregation.  I'm thinking Patton Oswalt lately.  

I'm thinking of what it was like to read the Onion on September 12, 2001.

It's just a particularly potent way of talking about what matters.  That it makes us laugh is just a bonus.

In Defense of Sermons

I've seen this thread surface in a variety of places, all stemming from the below post in Patheos:

The sermon?  She is dead.

The idea behind this is rather simple.  We no longer process information in lecture format.  Someone gets up?  Talks for a while?

YAAAWN.

We need snickity snackity multimedia interactivity!  None of this blah blah talkiness!  No one thinks this way, or processes information this way, we say.   This is teh age of teh inter webs, we say!  Time for us to reconsider the sermon!

I'll freely admit there are other forms of worship, ones that are more relational and conversational.  We should explore these, and celebrate them.  Praise?  Bring it.  Contemplative worship?  Absolutely.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

But into that mix we need to consider how badly the oldline often fails to grasp the place of the sermon in the first place.  Oh, we do them.  But do we really know how to do them?

Because honey child, in the Big Parking Lot Churches where most folks now go to get their church on, the sermon is alive and well.  AmeriChrist, Inc. isn't doing away with it any time soon.  Those big shiny Jesus Nordstroms?  They're as culturally relevant as it gets, and still, there it is.  The sermon.  Oh, sure, they repackage it as a "message."  But a rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

The issue here may not be that we no longer need the "sermon."  It may be that we've forgotten the importance of the spoken word.  I say this not as the world's greatest preacher.  Just give our podcasts a listen.  I mean, I'm OK.  Perhaps above average, in that Prairie Home Companion sort of way.

But my ability to deliver an effective sermon wasn't even considered as I worked my way through the ordination process.  It wasn't even a factor.  Oh, I had to submit an exegesis, and a homiletic treatment of said exegesis, which were then assessed as if they were a graduate-level written assignment.

I never once had to get up there and preach it.   Not once.   My capacity to convey the goodness of the Gospel through the spoken Word wasn't even a factor as folks considered my ability to be a pastor.

This struck me as a nontrivial oversight at the time.

The focus of the Patheos article approaches proclamation using a similar frame, that of academe.  That oldliners - Presbyterians particularly - use an academic lens to understand preaching is a significant part of our failing on that front.  A sermon should bear no resemblance to a lecture.  It is not a lecture.  It is not a carefully constructed academic discourse, in which information is conveyed and everyone takes notes so they'll be ready for the test later.  This is how we learn in college, or was.

Sermons exist to delight, enlighten, persuade, and inspire.  Data transfer is subordinate.  That, we can do through blogging, or books, or classes.  Those forms work better for conveying information relationally.

Preaching, brothers and sisters, preaching should not feel like a droning lecture.  Think of it like a TED talk.  Or Jon Stewart's opening monologue.  Or it should feel like spiritual standup.  Or it should feel like sacred beat poetry.  It is more akin to music, or to storytelling.  There should be laughing.  With, and not at, preferably.

I'm just not quite ready to give that up.

The Boundaries of Preaching

In a recent conversation about how to speak in worship with a member of my congregation, I found myself suddenly realizing something about my own preaching.  I have a pattern of sorts, one that has formed over the years.  

My sermons typically begin with a framing image or story, something that establishes a mood or a ground or evokes common ground.  In terms of classical rhetoric, it establishes a common ethos...but it's also an opportunity for plain ol' storytelling.   From that, I move towards the scripture for the day, calling out both details about the content and the central theological point.  Then, the movement is towards the implications for our response to that encounter.  What does the theology and the spirit we've just engaged with tell us about how we are to live, and how we are to act?

It's a fairly consistent pattern.  But I'd never really thought about where that pattern came from.  It was just there.   But then I realized, in the middle of a conversation about how to be creative and yet maintain form, that the pattern of my preaching had a familiar movement.

It was the classical Reformed pattern of worship.  In that, we prepare for the Word, receive the Word, and respond to the Word.  Huh, thought I, as I mused on this.  Go figure.  Somehow, the structure of worship outside of the sermon had moved into the sermon, acting as the strange attractor that gave form and shape to the energies of my preaching.

This recent realization played interestingly against a recent blog @landonwhittsit about the varying approaches to preaching.  Do we go with texts or go with presentation software?  Do we preach rocking hard against the pulpit, or wander wild and free amongst our congregants?  There were a range of responses...but as I mused over my own techniques, I began to wonder where exactly the boundaries of preaching are for me.  

I work from a manuscript, more or less, for a range of reasons.  But the message embedded in that sermon doesn't begin and end when I start and stop talking.  The whole worship resonates with it, by design and intent.  It's an organic part of a greater whole.  The prayers harmonize with it, the readings ground it, and the hymns sing it out.  I'm not really done preaching until I've finished the benediction.  Just as the worship presses its way into the preaching, so too does the preaching radiate out into the rest of the worship.  

Sunday Morning Mathematics

When I walked into the first service on Sunday, robe and stole more or less neatly on and sermon in hand, folks were relieved to see me.  I wasn't late, not technically.  I mean, seriously, the service wasn't supposed to start for another two minutes.  No sweat.

Well, there had been sweat, of the mental kind.  It wasn't just that I had to recraft my sermon following the horrific events at Sandy Hook.  It was that on Saturday, I rewrote it, and then set it aside, prayed and let it leave my mind, and then returned to it late Saturday.  It felt stale and dead and formal, so I anguished it into what could have passed for completion.   And then I got up early on Sunday morning, and again, it did not feel graceful or real or comforting.   So I wrote and rewrote paragraphs, deleting some, recreating others, until it felt close enough the sermon I needed to hear myself.

As I wrote, I was also doing some simple math in my mind, a little subroutine that clacked away in the background of my consciousness.  "If a pastor gets on his motorcycle and leaves his house in Annandale at 8:15 am, and his church is 37 miles away in Poolesville, what is the average speed that pastor will have to travel in order to arrive at his office five minutes before the church service begins at 9:30 am?  What if he leaves at 8:20 am?  How about 8:30?"   That equation kept shifting,  the numbers rising like the needle on my tach.   I finally left at 8:47 am, my prayers for green lights and open roads mingling with the eager snarl of a willing 650 twin that almost never gets to play, my eyes on the digital clock on the instrument panel.

I arrived at my office at 9:25 on the dot, no muss, no fuss, and no riding done that would seem alarming to my mother.  Or, rather, nothing more alarming than the mere fact of riding.  Who says pastors don't need math?

It was, I hope, worth it...but it was worth it when it came to my duty to my calling.  Great care and caution needs to be taken when you are endeavoring to articulate the Gospel into a tragedy.  It must challenge, but it must also be good news.  It must demand repentance, but offer grace.  It must speak from your heart, but be guided by that which transcends you.  It must call us towards that Kingdom that is Not Yet, but it must also be grounded in the reality of what is broken.

That, more than anything, is the burden so many pastors bore on Sunday.  It's why so many of the pastors I'm connected to through social media were struggling so mightily late into the evening.  If your heart is busted up and your mind is a mess, it's easy to fall back on old tropes and generic answers.

And those do damage.  More on that later.

Preaching and Third Rail Theology

This last week, I had a conversation I'd been anticipating with someone.   The question posed was where I stood on the whole "gay thing," and did I concur with my... um ... "evolving" denominational position on the subject?  And so we talked for a while.

I and my conversation partner did not share perspective on the issue, nor to my knowledge were any minds changed on the issue, but we did share prolonged conversation, and it was civil in disagreement.   Following the conversation, I found myself reflecting a bit on my own approach to preaching on the issues we argue about the most.   When it comes to the "gay thing," I really don't have it as a central theme of my preaching.  On occasion, I have.  I likely will again.  But it's not been a core theme for me.  Is this just pastoral wussiness?  Maybe.  But there are other things at play.

In part, this is because when I preach, I discipline myself to preaching from the fullness of the Bible. That means following the three year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, which touches on the entirety of Scripture.   If you do that, well, the "gay thing" is just not a central explicit theme.  Our culture-war obsession with it is entirely out of whack with the narrative of Scripture.  On a verse-weight scale, it's of considerably less significance than menstruation, skin disease, and the sin of Jeroboam son of Nebat.

So on 95% of Sundays, I stick to justice, grace, mercy, and Christ's radically inclusive love for the stranger and the outcast, and let folks figure it out for themselves.

But in larger part, it's because as much as I value preaching, I'm strongly aware that it has limitations.  If you're in a community of like-minded souls, or a community that has formed around one strong personality, then you can get away with preaching whatever you like, as did that preacher in the video making the rounds this week.  You know the one, the guy who suggested that gays should be rounded up and sent to concentration camps.  Sigh.  I have it on good authority that he'll be obligated to spend his forty-seven thousand years in purgatory preparing and delivering graphic Powerpoint sermons on menstruation, skin disease, and the sin of Jeroboam son of Nabat to a bored throng of texting succubi.

Whichever way, preaching can mask the truth of an exchange.  You can pitch out your passionately held position, and be strong and outrageous about the things you're "agin", and everyone will laugh and say Amen, except for those one or two souls who are silently seething on the receiving end.  I've inadvertently done that on occasion myself, and when I've been called on it, it's been a convicting moment.

But in authentic community, we're not all identical.  There's difference.  And where there's difference, there needs to be openness and conversation.  Otherwise, you're just monologuing.  I know, I know, you need to stand up and be counted.  You need to be a prophetic witness, an overturner-of-tables, a declarer of the Way Things Are.

I'm perfectly willing to do so in my writing here, and in conversations, and in small-group study.   And in sermons, but only if there's safe space for difference to be explored and expressed.   In these places, questions can be asked.  Disagreement can be articulated and explored.  I prefer it because it is both harder and the risk is higher.   The risk comes when you look at the other with eyes that are not glazed-over with the scales of your presuppositions, and see the depth of common being you both share.   Are we willing to have our assumptions about others changed as we engage with them across the boundary of difference?

The hardness comes in taking that into account.   This person you disagree with is another soul, no matter how you may differ, and even if you are strongly convicted of the inherent rightness of your position.   And if you allow yourself to really see them, and not have your eyes scaled over, then it becomes considerably more difficult to view them through the polarizing lenses of our adversarial, binary culture.

Entertaining Preaching

I am not the world's best preacher.  A reasonable appraisal of my own abilities, measured against those I've heard preach, leads me to figure I'm above average.  Not stellar, but not half bad.  Not earth-shaking, though enough Sundays lately seem to resonate with folks to keep me encouraged.

Here, I find myself musing over an article...a few years old...that recently wended my way through the Facebookery of the Vice Moderator of the denomination.  In an opinion piece from the New York Times, a Congregationalist pastor lamented the tendency for pastors to burn out, and gave his thesis as to why that is such a frequent occurrence.  His appraisal?  

According to that pastor, the problem is that congregations don't want to be taught.  They want to be entertained.  Rather than seeking the clear moral instruction that they should be seeking, they're looking to be affirmed in what they already know.  And they want a couple of jokes thrown in.  Oh, and it can't run more than 10 minutes.  Here we are now, entertain us!  Does this smell like church spirit to you? 

There is some truth in this, of course.  But I've known many pastors, and have heard their laments about their personal and spiritual exhaustion.   What I haven't ever heard is "entertaining sermons" presented as the problem.  Leaders of congregations burn out when they're overburdened with administrative requirements, when church is all about facility and carpets and task force meetings about liability exposure.

What burns out pastors are the seemingly endless interpersonal dramas that groups of human beings generate.  What fries pastors are the flames they have to stomp out, particularly the heat rising from the smoldering whisperings of those apparently inextinguishable human tire-fires in your community.

But entertaining preaching?  I'm not sure about that.  Neither am I sure that it's a bad thing.

Because good preaching is entertaining.  It's funny.  It's moving.  It's delightful.  It's challenging.

A good sermon does not feel long, even if it goes for 45 minutes.  A good sermon can run five minutes, and still convey one concept potently.  A good sermon involves rapport, as preacher and congregation connect.  It doesn't have to get all call-and-responsey, but a little bit of that is a good thing.

The challenge facing most overeducated Presbyterian pastors is that our task is not simply to give instruction.  Preaching is not the conveying of data.  It is not a board room presentation, or an academic lecture.  It bears no resemblance to the presentation of research results at a scholarly conference, or the oral presentation of a particularly hard-hitting article.   Even the most potent ethical or theological insight will transform no lives if it is smothered under mumbled bullet-point droning.

It needs to inspire, and to interest, and to stir the minds and hearts of the listeners, even...and particularly...if they don't totally agree with the pastor's interpretation.

If all you're doing is entertaining, that's a problem.  If it's all canned anecdotes and in-jokes smattered with a generic scripture here and there, all fluff and treacle signifying nothing, then you're not teaching.  You're just pretending to preach.

But if everyone's asleep, you're not teaching either.  If a congregation asks...please...try to make it interesting....that's well within their right to expect.

Drunken Preaching and the Skeletal Remains of Sermons

Two things happened over the last week that caused me to make a change in worship yesterday.

Thing Number One: The Sunday before last, I awoke with a fever. I was a mess. Chills and aching and a deep cloudiness let me know that I'd let an internal infection go too long. Through the miracles of ibuprofen, I was able to get the fever under control before going to lead worship, but my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders. This is not conducive to good preaching under any circumstances. Mostly 'cause folks asked me to, I've moved away from using a written text for my sermons, meaning I've got presentation software to give it form, but have to come up with the words as I go along. Normally, I can do this just fine. But illness worketh not well upon my cortex. I was able to mask it through most of my sermon, clinging to my Keynote like a crutch. It was a bit rambly, but that's just me, so people are used to it.

Then it came time to end the sermon. I like sticking the landing when I preach. That means bringin' it home. It means summing it up. It means using chiastic structure to conclude where you began. That's a good sermon, baby!

But...I couldn't. I couldn't seem to finish. I'd start what I was sure was the sentence that would lead to the paragraph that would end strong. But it would veer off. I'd start in again, swooping downwards towards that perfect summation, only to drift away clumsily. I felt, quite honestly, like I was engaged in the homiletical equivalent of trying to land a Huey after having downed four single malt whiskeys in rapid succession. I finally bounced in to a hard landing. It was ugly. Or so it seemed to me. I'm not sure anyone else noticed.

Thing Number Two: Last week, I sorted through the files of the church computer, after things had gotten too cluttered. As I neatly sorted all of the records into nice hierarchical files, I noticed that my collection of sermons over the last year was...well...limited. I had all of the presentations I'd prepared. They were all there.

But as I looked at them, I realized they were lacking something. The framework of the sermon was there, sure. Images and bullet points, all right there. But what was missing was the meat of it. There was none of the language I'd used. There was very little indication of the bible study and work that had formed my labor for a year's worth of Sundays. It was like coming across the skeletal remains of six dozen sermons. Yeah, with some forensic exegesis, you could reconstruct what they once were. But as a theological resource or a record of my work? They were dead things. Useless.

Those, I think, are two of the problems of moving to an outline and presentation-driven style of preaching. It's easier to stumble if you're not "on." More significantly, it means there's a loss of memory...a forgetting of the things you've thought and said and prepared.

So for a little while, at least, I'm going to go back to written texts. Maybe just for the summer. We'll see.