A new medium is never an addition to an
old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the
older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.
–Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man
I proceed deeply influenced by
Marshall McCluhan’s approach to media studies. For McCluhan, the term “media”
does not simply refer to a limited small group of media employed for
communication, like the newspaper, radio, television, or Internet. Media are,
instead, all the “extensions” of humanity, including clothing, housing, and in
the case under consideration, language itself[1].
For
most pastors, the sermon is an ancient communicative “technology” that we
inhabit more regularly than any other. It is one of the most important extensions
of ourselves into the communities we serve. The unique dimensions of this
medium, practiced week in and week out in a local congregation, illustrate the
formative aspects of media more generally construed.
Intimations: The Science of the Preaching
and Reading Brain
I
can still remember, vividly, the first sermon I preached on internship. Rather,
I should say I remember vividly what it felt like to prepare the sermon, and
the intense emotions and nerves that gathered around delivering it. I wrote out
(typed) a manuscript. I agonized over word choices, sought to align theology
and homiletical aspirations, hoped to be interesting. Because I had worried
over the individual words, the grammar of the sentences, the structure and
ordering of paragraphs, the delivery of the sermon was closely tied to a
written text. Sunday morning I read the text word for word out loud, like a
poem.
Reading
the manuscript aloud was agonizing, because my preferred approach to
communication, in individual or group conversations, is to look people in the
eye, speak freely, and not read texts to people (unless it is a recitation, in
which case different habits and rules would apply). Here I was, in a living worship environment,
and instead of speaking freely and vibrantly, I was reading verbatim a text I
had written earlier in the week. I can still remember how much of an
out-of-body experience it was, watching myself deliver the sermon. Although I
had attended many oral readings of written texts, such as poetry readings, and
so knew intellectually that reading from a text can actually be a legitimate
(and even beautiful) approach to oral communication, I knew in that first
sermon that it would not work for me as a preacher.
So
I set myself the task of revolutionizing my preaching, abandoning the pattern
of preaching I had received and observed throughout my lifetime. I had never (to my recollection) witnessed a preacher preach extemporaneously. The majority of my experience had
been with manuscript preachers. The remainder of the internship—because I had
time to do so and the inclination—I did two new things. First, I memorized the
gospel lesson each week and proclaimed (performed) it, like a dramatized
reading. Then, following the gospel performance, I preached a sermon working
out of an outline I had written and memorized. At first, I still wrote out an
entire manuscript, then organized it down into an outline, and memorized that.
Later, as the year went on, it became increasingly easy to preach without
writing the manuscript first. In fact, after a while the written manuscript got
in the way, because I wondered whether what I preached orally on Sundays
remained faithful to the manuscript written at an earlier date. My concern
would remain with what I had written or outlined rather than what I was
currently saying, as if the media in which the sermon had been “trapped” were
more important than the living voice of the gospel in the moment of oral
proclamation.
By
the end of internship I had even greatly modified the outlines themselves.
Instead of a five point outline with sub-points, I would have just a few words
written down, in order, brief pointers for remembering the way, sign-posts on
the road.[2]Even
the outline got in the way of sermon delivery, because my mind was tied to the
outline, and I would worry if I had forgotten a section, not to mention what to
do if a new direction came to mind in the process of preaching the sermon—what
do you do with that? Over the next couple of years, I stopped writing out the
outlines, but still developed and memorized some kind of outline sans notes for a few more years.[3]
More recently I simply stand up to preach without any kind of outline or order
in mind at all. The form simply “arrives” in my mind, fully formed, strands
woven together from the reading and contemplation I have engaged in over the
course of the week.
Which
is not to say that I do not prepare a sermon. I still study, read, sift,
reflect, pray, and meditate. Instead, all these activities coalesce around the
preaching moment as available resources to weave in. They are not required. In
a pinch, I can preach a sermon on any text, at any time. It is my hypothesis that
I can do this because the formative work of preparing those sermons, year in
and year out, and specifically in the manner I have been preparing them, has
changed the structure of my brain. I have neural pathways, open connections and
deep patterns established, that facilitate the form my preaching now typically
takes. In other words, I could not have prepared for that first sermon in the
way I prepare now, precisely because it has been past repeated preparations
that have shaped my brain in specific ways.[4]
The
anxiety and feelings I felt in those early experiences were the growing pains
of a brain that had not yet been formed to do what it now does. The “equipment”
we make use of takes part in the forming of our thoughts. I have had similar
feelings and experiences when learning to play an instrument, or drive a new
vehicle, or acquire any new communication skill using a new medium. Each
equipping requires the formation of new neural pathways. This phenomenon
scientists now indicate is an aspect of the neuroplasticity of the adult brain.
The consensus in much of the neuroscience community (and this is a relatively
new discovery) is that the adult brain is very plastic, even, we might say,
“massively plastic.”[5]
“The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it
functions.”[6]
Furthermore,
and this is central to what we will be exploring throughout this book, the
media I used to prepare sermons, the approaches I took to preaching, were
technologies that affected the outcome. Different media and approaches to
preaching would shape my brain in different ways. In fact, in some sense they
function as extensions of my brain. If, for example, over the past ten years I
had been in the habit of memorizing a manuscript word-for-word, my brain would
be adapted for the quick memorization of written texts, a different and
intriguingly powerful tool used by many in theater and the performing arts.
Additionally, and equally important, not only has the media impacted the
repeating media, the media has impacted the message itself. As Maryanne Wolf in
Proust and the Squid notes, “The
reading brain is part of a highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be
learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes
place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and
intellectually.”[7]
In my case, the living nature of the sermons I preach is intimately connected
to the mode of their preparation and delivery, and the extemporaneous habits I
have been cultivating over this long period of time I believe better serve the
nature of the homiletical task and its outcome in that they continue to change
my brain through repeated practice.
Finally,
according to Christian faith, all of what I have described above is a happy outcome
of the cooperation of the Holy Spirit and neurology. The Holy Spirit works
through means, and in this case the Holy Spirit works on the brain of the
pastor, preparing it like fertile soil to be a carrier of the Word. The Holy
Spirit works through means, including creation itself, and so it is no surprise
that the Holy Spirit also works in and through the neurological pathways forged
through repeated and rehearsed practices. The surprise in all of this is that such repeated practices, inspired by the
Holy Spirit, do not simply train the brain for more of the same—they are in
fact generative. As Wolf notes later in her book, “Proust’s understanding of
the generative nature of reading contains a paradox: the goal of reading is to
go beyond the author’s ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous,
transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text.”[9]
What Wolf says next is how I have felt as an adult learning to preach, although
she is describing a child learning to read: “From the child’s first, halting
attempts to decipher letters, the experience of reading is not so much an end
in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally, and
figuratively, to a changed brain.”[10]
[1] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 168.
[2] I’m reminded of
something I read years ago while studying Jonathan Edwards, that “nearly twenty
years after he first began to preach (i.e. approximately 1742), Edwards stopped
writing his sermons in full; so one of the most famous ‘manuscript preachers’
in American history shifted in the later half of his ministry to a different
pattern”; Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth
Trust, 1987), 190.
[3] In fact, I created most
of these memorized outlines while jogging, which probably also has important
neuroscientific implications.
[4] I was first alerted to
the relationship between the neuroplasticity of my brain and the development of
my preaching when I read this now-famous sentence from Nicholas Carr’s book on
neuroscience and Internet usage. “Over the last few ears I’ve had the
uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my
brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t
going—so far as I can tell—it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to
think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to
immerse myself in a book or lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the
twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours
strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now
my concentration drifts after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread,
begin looking for something else to do.” Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 2010), 5.
[5] Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to
Our Brains Norton 2010, 26.
[6] Ibid., 27.
[7] Maryanne Wolf. The Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain (HarperPerennial, 2007), 5.
[9] Wolf, The Proust and the Squid, 18.
[10] Ibid., 18.
