The Ninth Gate

Right now I'm watching "The Ninth Gate." Call it a guilty pleasure--it's essentially a mystery/thriller/horror movie about devil worshippers. It's not profound, but sometimes it's nice to check your brain at the door and just watch a movie!

I suppose watching Johnny Depp traipse around Europe looking for rare books about devil worship is strange sermon prep for tomorrow. Sigh. The more I preach the more inscrutable it becomes. But I'm more deeply and painfully aware of my own shortcomings as a preacher as I go along. Along with that comes greater capacity for self-forgiveness in that capacity. This all reminds me of one of the insights of psychoanalytic literary criticism: that the act of creating anything is preceded by a moment (psychologically) of repression of the precedent. In other words, the only way a writer can write is if they forget everything that's already been written.

Writers themselves often speak of the paralysis that comes with an awareness of the precedent. The same is true with preaching--if you think about it too much, you become painfully aware of just how huge the responsibility is. I mean, you're tasked with interpreting the Word of God to your people. How crazy is that? And going to school for years etc. doesn't make it any easier. In the end, you simply have to let go of ever achieving a sense of doing it well. I mean, sometimes you feel good about sermons and other times you don't. Sometimes people like them and sometimes they don't. And the good feelings engendered by self-reflection or the acclaim of others is important because it gives you enough hope to keep preaching. But ultimately you have to cultivate a certain detachment from the results. At least, this is what I've found.

So watching creepy movies on Saturday night is definitely in the sphere of things a preacher might do!

-t