Dialogue: Giving better than receiving, when it comes to preaching

By JOE BENNETT

Boy, could I preach. I preached to children. For two years in Canada and three in New Zealand I ran boarding houses for schoolboys. And those boys got preached at.

Multiply, serially preached at. I could turn it on like a hose. Give me an occasion, a grief, a theft, a fight and I would summon the children, loosen the tap of language, and drench them with preaching. It was a joy.

Time and again I told them that all that mattered in the end was people. That tears spilt over toys or tractors, CDs or cricket bats were idle tears.

That trinkets and money and status and cappuccino makers were all just fine and dandy, but that if their faces were ever to crease into the lineaments of uninhibited joy or grief, what would do that was people.

Neither the Porsche, nor the fame, nor the bank balance, nor the delirious clapping of the distant crowd could do it.

People, I told them, would stretch the amplitude of their lives.

I who lived with dogs said that to them time and time over.

The children sat in silence until I had finished and then they went away.

I preached tolerance. The hobby horse was my image.

I said each man had a right to ride his hobby horse howsoever and wheresoever he wished, and so long as he knocked no one else from his own little private hobby horse, no one else had any right to knock him from his, no right to make him swerve, or steer a different course, or even to think of braking.

The boys sat in silence until I had finished telling them of hobby horses and then they went away.

And I preached on virtue. I told them that years of experience had taught me that the greatest of virtues is honesty and the second is courage and that I believed that the two were the same thing.

And I said that the prettiest and rarest of virtues, perhaps a kissing cousin to honesty and courage, was grace under pressure.

The boys sat graciously through my sermon and then they went away.

One of the schools I taught at had a chapel, which I was obliged to attend from time to time and always against my will. There it was my turn to be preached at.

I sat in silence in the cushioned teacher pews along the back and writhed with graceless impatience to be elsewhere.

The sermons were of interest only when they told stories or when they went wrong. When they went right or when they went moral, they went bad.

I resented their intrusion. I resented the implication that I needed preaching at. I resented the impotence of sitting and listening.

I waited till the service ended and then I went away.

I can remember none of the sermons that I heard, but most of the ones that I gave. I could give them now.

I thought my preaching differed by being meaty and unpretentious, and the fruit of experience rather than of doctrine.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong. It didn't differ at all, except perhaps in its degree of hypocrisy.

Where did I get them from, these ideas that I preached? I don't know. They were never preached to me, or if they were, I was not listening.

I may, like a magpie, have picked up some pretty bits from books I had read, or, far more likely, seized on brightly glittering nuggets from that mine of all shallowness The Oxford Book of Quotations.

All I know is that I liked to preach. I wanted to impress. I wanted to be seen, or at least to see myself, as a fresh and independent thinker, a bloke who had been around, a sage of sorts.

I was and am none of these things. I stumbled then as I stumble now, from day to day, following no moral precepts, choosing always the option that seemed best for me if I could get away with it.

When under pressure this preacher curled up in bed of nights and gibbered with distress, sleepless and frightened, hugging a dog for comfort and as far from grace as it is possible to be.

And all day long he practised secret intolerance, cursing anyone who rode a hobby horse in any way that didn't fit with what he felt was right. And he fretted about money. And lived alone. And scoffed. And knew nothing.

Now I know that the urge to preach is a curse. And that it is futile.

I doubt if any child I preached at ever changed the way he lived one jot because of what I had said.

For that I'm thankful. For the rest I'm sorry. Here ends the lesson.