“You have a lot to say!”
“No, he just likes to write.”
“He just likes to pontificate, is all.”
I received each and all of these benedictions, today, in the last three minutes before the fourth of eight weeks’ worth of classes on Revelation. I was/am teaching at the local College of Life Long Learning.
We had discussed Revelation’s author, and I had been at pains to distinguish between the possibilities: the fisherman (who was among the first formal followers of Jesus), and a later disciple who had been entrusted with the spiritual oversight and care of seven churches in Asia Minor. I say the latter, unless it was the former.
Pay your money and take your chance, but whoever it was, was in Patmos for one reason or the other: I mean, yes, for the Word of God and the Testimony of Jesus; but was he exiled there as punishment for preaching; or was he there as a kind of missionary, seeking more followers (The Greater Patmos Crusade for Christ, as it were)?
Either way he was at distance from his people.
As for the vision, and its documentation, before John ever laid eyes on it, it belonged to Jesus. He had received it from the One Who Was and Is and Is to Come. Jesus then gave it to John, who if he ever were a fisherman in Galilee, is now a pastor, or a superintendent, or a bishop of the seven (listed) churches in Asia Minor (Revelation, chapters 2 and 3)
In any case, the talk turned to me for a moment. I was surprised and a little embarrassed. I must confess that in the same way some of Will Willimon’s classes at Duke are referred to as “Story Time with Uncle Will” (it’s not a compliment), I am afraid that over the years my people have lampooned me and my teaching in similar ways: “An Introduction to Tom.”
Which is to say I, too—like Will and the apostle Paul—am guilty of anacoluthon, meaning “unexpected discontinuities, course corrections and ramblings that change subject and point as the speaker/writer goes.” Yep, I do that, in both media, and we were talking about me, God help us, as we readied to enter the heavenly throne room.
I was telling them about the poems I have written most every morning for the last two years, first thing after my prayers, just to tell my children I am still alive and well. Or what passes for alive and, except for elevated BP and glucose, 3 artificial joints (one of them in the third iteration) and prostate cancer and the occasional fainting spell and sojourn in the hospital… I am well. Mostly.
Again this year I will print and bind three copies of the year’s poems at the UPS: one for the two of them and one for me, certain they will never be read again or much valued. This year we will also get prose: a copy of “The Long Way Home” (with apologies to Supertramp), which is what I have chosen to entitle my Storyworth. I have done 43 installments so far, each with a prompt chosen by my daughter. I get that prompt and do that work on Monday. I hope this year also to give them a copy of Next To Last Rites, the book I have written since retirement. I told them all that.
“He has a lot to say.”
“No, he just likes to write.”
“He just likes to pontificate, is all.”
In fact, it is all of the above. I blamed it on the medicine, but if I had had time I would have told them about my first report card, ever—and many ever after, one way or the other; by that I mean, with unflattering regularity—Mrs. Barnett said I needed to not talk so much.
Notably, my fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Rowell, once said, “Oh, you have an answer for everything!” That wasn’t a complement, either.
Barry Wood (?) told me in 8th grade woodshop he had been tempted to whip my skinny ass because I was a smart mouth. Barry was killed in a car accident a few weeks later. He was driving. I think he was on his third try at 8th grade. I mean no disrespect—he was kind not to beat me up, you know, because, I was a smart mouth. Still am.
Don’t have a skinny ass anymore, though.
Midge Barrett, God rest her soul, first used the word “pontificate” as regards my teaching—said that my teaching was, in fact, so much pontificating. She said that whenever I disagreed with her, or more accurately, when she disagreed with me. At which point, I would dismantle her stance with a ton of scriptures (I have an answer for everything, remember?). THEN she would huff and puff and accuse me of pontification. After the laughter, I would tell her I was taking medicine for it, and that it was giving me a fat ass.
Actually I didn’t say that last part.
In fact, my heinie may be widening because I like to write… and by that I mean, I really do, and not just more than exercise. I forget the artist of whom Annie Dillard (or was it Anne Lamott) wrote—how, when he was asked what it took to be an artist, and did the master think the inquirer could become such, said, “Do you like the smell of paint?” I get it.
I love writing—just sitting in front of the computer for, literally, hours every day—composing poetry (so called); a Storyworth; a Substack entitled, “I Saved You a Place at the Table” (I have few readers, many fewer comments, but I work hard at it); “It’s Not the End of the World” (my class on Revelation and a future book, I hope). And for three years I worked on “Next to Last Rites,” the 520 page book that will soon be in my hands—and in your hearts! Ya think?
Sermons on the parables that will become the foundation of the third book after that.
So, do I have a lot to say? Or do I just like the sound of a computer keyboard?
Do I think what is on the screen is good, or am I just vain about seeing my stuff in virtual or actual print?
Am I confident as to the actual value of my opinion? I have never charged for my Substack articles, which may say something about what I feel subconsciously. Or is what I really value, me, as I live every week by every word that comes from my arthritic fingertips?
I do like the smell of paint now and then, but I am no real artist. Even more, I like setting up equipment and, tired, playing to the crowd. But I am no juke box hero. I like the weariness of study, but I am no scholar (Ecclesiastes 12:12), and I love the wearied and wearying preaching of sermons. But Harry Fosdick, I ain’t.
And yes, I like to write. Not just having written, but the process—including the giddiness of a word well-chosen, a phrase well-turned, an explanation well-fashioned, a joke well-told. I like having a paper trail.
After all, I have a lot to say. Right?
No.
My vanity just proves that I am fallen and have nothing to say.
And so, every time I pontificate I subtract from the IQ of the nation or world. What was it Nikki Haley said to Vivek Ramaswamy: “Every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.” Many could probably say as much to me.
And that is the reason I really hate to write. Because I really have nothing to say. And my bombast is really just a masquerade for nothing much. Really. I am embarrassed about what I have written. What I thought was substantial, revisited, is a thin gruel. What was I thinking? What was I doing, framing the explanation or the essay in that fashion? The Process, you say? The process is as nourishing to my mind and soul as celery soup is to my body.
The word that is on the tip of my pen, as it were, that is just off the left frontal lobe of my brain—that elusive word, like the lost chord, would redeem my writing and comfort my spirit. But it slips away in vapor, and what I see after all the smoke clears is pale and weak.
Still, I keep at it. Because I have a lot (I want) to say, at least, good or bad.
I keep at it because writing is the only way I know to “say” what I have to say, as I am aspiring to live quietly (I Thessalonians 4:11).
Meaning, not pontifically, though I am convinced, some days, that at least some of what I say ex cathedra (or at least some of what I write ex carlisla) has to be worth preserving. Right?
Unless it’s not.