There were two speakers at Gettysburg, on the day of the famous Address. You can find with difficulty that the other, apart from Abraham Lincoln, was Edward Everett, who wrote to Lincoln to say that in two minutes Lincoln had said more than he did in two hours.
In St Maeve’s, sermons were nothing like as long as in Presbyterian churches, I gather, but long enough. Apparently 25-30 minutes was quite possible. The lengthy sermon nowadays, in my experience, comes from visiting priests from other parts of the Universal Church, an often tenuous grasp of English and its pronunciation providing some compensation.
Over the past year or two, it has been interesting to trace the path of the expression “It does what it says on the tin” from a TV commercial for Ronseal , a wood preservative, to its apotheosis as a universally accepted English idiom. It is one of many expressions which have become part of the very fibre of our being through a 30 second sound-bite. The advertising industry certainly knows what it is about when it comes to passing on a message. One wonders if an organisation with a Message to pass on of somewhat greater significance for the present and future of the human race than the efficacy of a wood preservative can learn from this.
Fortunately, the Archdiocese of Glasgow has had and still has preachers who are on the ball with sermons. I still remember, from twenty years ago, a two sentence sermon, and the first sentence was “Silence is golden”. I am prepared however to accept that there is a happy medium, and that a line could well be drawn. I was present some years ago when a famous member of the staff of St Aloysius Church, Glasgow once read the Gospel, said “I can’t possibly follow that”, and got on with the Mass. Who were we to argue?
But sermons were part of the Church’s after-sales service, which was rather good. It often took the shape of a Mission, a visit from two or three shock-troops, usually from the Redemptorists or Passionists . Spectacular figures though they were in their exotic flowing habits, they were even more spectacular when they started to preach. An Irish writer points out that these two orders were preferred to the Jesuits and the Franciscans in his native parish . The former preached common sense, and the latter charity, qualities which the Irish found rather boring.
It is easy to forget nowadays, when all churches are fitted with a sound-system which often works as well as most sound systems in Glasgow, a city still not privy to any of the technology which allowed Cape Canaveral to talk to the astronaut Collins, behind the moon, forty years ago, that sermons were delivered straight. This may be the historic explanation of why the back of a church still tends to be packed to suffocation while the front is empty. God knows how they trained, but they came to emphasise home truths, which they did with the kind of bellow which could have the Stations of the Cross rocking on the walls, and the holy water slopping over the sides of the stoup.
And these were lads who liked the smell of hell fire in the morning. There was a recent assurance by a Pope that Hell is not a place, but I don’t think this would have fazed them for long. They may well have mentioned the metaphorical nature of eternal flames and the worm which dieth not, but this would probably have disappointed the congregation. Because the surprising thing is that parishes loved missions, and the threat of hell-fire. There was a week for the women, and a week for the men, the church crowded to capacity every night, the missioners during the day and in the early evening visiting as many homes as they could. Naturally, being in the district only for a fortnight, they could afford to be a little more outspoken than the ordinary curates. The congregation might shudder- but they loved it.
What they loved most of all was the final evening, and the renewal of baptismal vows. The church was darkened. Each person held a lit candle, careless handling producing a painful spillage of hot wax , while black ribbons of smoke drifted up to the dark brown heights of the nave. The first response to “Do you renounce the Devil ?” was traditionally found to be unsatisfactory, and repudiated. “Do you renounce the Devil? Louder!”
A mission was a spiritual sauna, which never failed to leave the parish refreshed and invigorated. All we need now, of course, are the congregations and a modern dynamic method of advertising spirituality. These two circumstances may well be connected.