Transcript
Wow, have faith in each one of us, call us to this place, in a season of memory, and have recall us for this day, tell us Heavenly Father, not only to be the sculptor, to share our various memories, to live the prayer of hope for tomorrow's seminary and church. Grant that we may be instruments of that in the business of this day through Christ our Lord. Amen. Good morning, we don't have any minutes, but we do
have a committee report and our friars will be at that, and that is as far as I know, some of the actual witnesses are going to have to speak up, so, friars. This is the report on the report for the nominated committee of the Alumni Association, Executive Accompaniment. Members of the committee have described about the country, and I'm not going to be here, so I'm going to report on their behalf. The nominated committee appointed by Mark
R. Thompson, President of the Executive Council, met on January 8, 1980, and consisted of Don G. Jan (sp?), Class of '65, James E. Pierce, Class of '65, and Jean Ann Spoke, Class of '72. For alumni trustee, in the class of 1982, to serve the two-year term, the nominated committee nominated three persons from whom to choose one by the prevailing balance. For the alumni trustee, in the class of 1983, to serve the three-year term, the nominated
committee nominated three persons from whom to choose one by the prevailing balance. The three names were Dean E. Goose, Class of '64, Virginia Steve Hales, Class of '65, and Richard R. Simmons, Class of '55. Now the reason we had two groups of nominees was due to the fact that last year's alumni trustee, Dick Armstrong, was invited to serve. If I can remember the fact that we had both positions at once. So Richard Armstrong resigned, and the
two-year term was filled by the election process just that long. The ballot ticket was closed on Friday, May the 2nd, 1980. Laura R. Jervis was elected to the class of 1982 to serve the two-year term. Dean E. Goose was selected to the class of 1983 to serve the regular three-year term. These names were given to the board of trustees as nominees from the alumni. They were elected by the board of trustees, and these
names are now before the General Assembly in Detroit for confirmation. The nominating committee also named three persons to the class of 1983 on the Alumni Council Executive Commitment. These three are Eloise C. Howard, Class of '65, and Mark R. Thompson, Class of '44, and Frederick R. Wilson, Class of '50. In case of Mark Thompson, this is a re-nomination. This falls in our custody because the president serves a long-term, startling entity. The vice president has
moved up to president, and he still has two more years to serve as past president. The committee also nominated Paul Estoracas, Class of '69, CHM Secretary, and Dr. Howard G. Holmgren, Class of '24, who was re-nominated as treasurer of the executive council of the United States. Without a say in the nominating committee, Dr. Holmgren has been elected as much as there is no money in the treasury and no money in town. I make this report
to you on behalf of the nominating committee. I move the election of these three to the executive council, Eloise C. Howard, Mark R. Thompson, Frederick R. Wilson. That should have been seconded as opposed to the official. Seconded. Seconded. I'm just going to nominate these two before we allow that to persist. It goes to the nominating committee, yes. If they go to the nominating committee. You're just elected to us three. It's been moved that the nominations be
closed. There they are. There it is. It's been moved that the nominations be closed and we have an enhanced ballot. Next thing to that, second. All in favor say aye. Aye. We can't discuss it anyway. We can't do anything about it. I move the election of the Calls for the Proposal of the Secretary. Now, Walter Sotes has been our secretary. His particular term expired. Calls for the nominating of the secretary. And Howard G. Harding has been
stripped. He was bombed. Seconded. Seconded. Seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Mark Thompson would like to make an announcement. You can tell me you think in a very Democratic parliamentary way. We take extensive minutes at this meeting. But today I'm going to take the prerogative of asking rather than ordering the secretary to take a minute. I would ask that someone here ask a move that the secretary enter on the minutes of this meeting. Our gratitude
will link you on for the service of the man named Arthur Byers to the Alumni Association. What did you order then? Come on, write. Your action will be further expressed at the luncheon. I hope you're a resident at the luncheon so that we may further thank God and glorify his name for the ministry that sometimes gets easily overlooked. There's not a great deal of labor in the kind of job Arthur has been doing. Some of you
have this work on your bookshelf in the biographical catalog. Some of you got in contact with the development of indebtedness to him and every undergraduate graduating today speaking indebted to him for his ministry and his purpose. We're glad about these relationships and are really sorry that you will, on the next alumni meeting, see him in an unquick way. We're delighted to see you. Maybe in that spirit ask for a motion of adjournment. So moved. Second. All
those in favor say aye. Aye. Any stand for prayer. Stand as colleagues, O God, that we remember how each one of us has special gifts to offer to thee and thy kingdom. For art and his ministry on this campus and the lives of myriads of young men and women who go forth from here, for this ministry we offer them. For his service to the church and his sensitive way of arranging interviews and all the tasks it
takes to guide my Holy Spirit as it does its work in the lives of young people we offer them. Help us, heavenly Father, to remember we are the body of Christ, each with special gifts, each with different things to perform. But may this, O God, ever glorify thy name that thou hast given us a variety of gifts and ministries. Praise thy name, offer thanks, and his name. Amen. Thank you. Don't go too far. We're running out
of time. We're running out of time. We're running out of time. Thank you. From the feature of the morning, we have the presentation of one of the sons of the prince who took his doctorate here, Dr. Paul Shearer. Dr. John Killinger, professor of preaching at Vanderbilt, comes to us not only with the recommendation of those who knew him when he was here on campus, but many who have been ministered to him through the decades. We're delighted
to welcome him. I would have you know, on the program, this afternoon at 2:30, if this morning's session does not completely fill you and you want to seat the chair right there to discuss the talk, there's a second session with him this afternoon. We're delighted. I would ask you to welcome John Killinger to our alumni meeting this morning. Will you stand and welcome him? Thank you. It's been several years since we've been back in this
chapel. I confess that it looks smaller than I remembered, but that the task of speaking to this audience looks larger than I imagined at the last time I was here. There are many dimensions to preaching. The text, the congregation, the preacher's imagination, the chemistry of the moment. But one thing stands above all. The speaking. The preacher may be convert, visionary, mystic, one beggar sharing bread with another. But to most people, he or she is preacher, speaker,
talker. If there is a speech to be given, let the preacher do it. The preacher is a talker, a spieler, a spellbinder. Ministerial committees are pulpit committees, and they are invariably more interested in hearing a candidate preach than in listening to the story of his or her pilgrimage in the faith. I have on my desk at home a letter from the parents of a former student who has been unable to find employment as a minister since
leaving seminary a year ago. He is a shy, sensitive boy who lives tremblingly in the spirit. He was an excellent student and wrote brilliant papers. But no church has proved interested in his experience, only in the fact that he is not a Hale fellow well met. What can I say to his parents who are anxious for his welfare? Only that the church wants able talkers, not good listeners. Dozens of his classmates more loquacious than he have
had no difficulty finding positions. The preacher as talker. Did Samuel Beckett have this person in mind when he wrote the part of Lucky in Waiting for Godot? Lucky, you remember, is a menial, a factotum who carries suitcases and is led about with a rope. He sounds like a minister, doesn't he? And Lucky has one unique characteristic. Every time someone puts a hat on his head, he begins to spout philosophy. Not anything coherent, really, but bits and
pieces of philosophical jargon from the entire spectrum of Western thought. When someone puts his hat on, he starts. When someone takes the hat off, he stops. The other characters in the play have fun putting the hat on and snatching it off. They put it on and he talks, they steal it off and he stops. Whether Beckett meant it or not, Lucky does remind you of some preachers, doesn't he? Hopefully no one too close to yourself, but
someone you know. On, off, as smooth as clockwork or Sunday morning. It's a danger endemic in the professional ministry that we forget who we are and become talkers, speechifiers, non-stop voices inwardly despairing of their authenticity, even of their calling. Like Lucky, we become institutionalized, geared to automatic speech at a given signal. The lowering of a hat or the arrival of the eleven o 'clock hour. What we say often seems less important to us than the
fact that we have something to say. That we can say it well and that we are ready with it at the appointed time. In our preoccupation with ancient models of ministry who were sent to speak, we overlook the prior fact that those who were sent were persons who had seen and heard. After twenty or thirty years spent in proliferating speech in the pulpit, we awaken with a dryness in our throats, maybe even in our souls, and
realize we have been speaking without seeing and hearing. The Gospel of Mark is especially hard on this in disciples. Again and again the author pillories those who have vowed discipleship, yet fail to see or hear what the master is doing in their midst. Even when he has fed multitudes in the wilderness, not once but twice, they quibble over the scarcity of bread in their midst. Someone has forgotten to bring along an extra supply in the boat.
And Jesus must remind them that the supplier of needs and worker of miracles is among them. And at the end of the Gospel, when the two women come to the tomb and find it empty, with an angel who directs them to go back to the disciples and tell them that Jesus has risen and precedes them into Galilee, they run off and tell no one because they are afraid, says Mark, because their attachment to ministry has been
too shallow and they have not seen in Christ the fulfillment of the promise of victory over fear and death. You cannot preach, Mark was saying, until you have seen and heard and felt and known for yourself the mysteries we are given to declare. There is no preaching without presence, no speaking without listening, no talking without silence. Our calling before anything else is a calling to silence, not to speak but to be silent, to realize as Isaiah
did that our lips are not worthy to utter the counsels of God, the secrets of life. Woe is me, for I am a person of unclean lips. Before we say anything, on any Sunday or before any civic club, we must wait before God in silence. Only in this manner do we create sacred space at the center of the world. We do not do it by talking, we do it by listening. This was the secret, I think,
of the great power in Thomas Merton's life. His years of silence in the little monastery at Gethsemane in Kentucky fitted him with a wisdom and sensitivity rare in any age. Merton once described his anguish at having to leave the monastery to travel into Louisville. The noise outside the abbey was deafening to him. Everywhere sounds seemed to blare out and attack him as if it were demonic and wished to destroy him. I realized, he said, that that
little abbey was the linchpin holding the entire world together. And if that small space of quietude were to be destroyed, the whole cosmos would be endangered. It was this, not his gift for poetry or his constantly stumbling into publicity, that equipped Merton for modern sainthood. It was the power of silence and meditation he let loose on the world, an antidote to the rapacious powers of speech gone trivial. And if we wish to be more effective ministers
in the world, most of us will do well to study Merton's example. It is not better preaching we should strive for, but better presence, not more glibness of tongue. The world is quite mad enough on that score, but more quietude of soul. You see, silence discovers reality. Words do too, of course, but only words formed out of silence, not words wildly ricocheting through the world in search of a target. James Dickey learned this when he followed
a hunch and left his job on Madison Avenue for the chaste realms of poetry. I think it's absolutely absurd, said Dickey, to talk about integrity when you're in something like the advertising business. There's no such thing. It's already a sellout. The main thing is to be as profitably crooked as you can. Having put the cover on his typewriter and ceased to write advertising jingles, Dickey was able to go further and say that business offices cut off
a great many potentialities in human beings. He was talking about reality, about being open to the world around himself, open to the possibilities. The paid-for wordsmithing negated the possibilities, nixed the discoveries. The point is, reality is palpable. It breathes in the dark, the way the nada or nothingness does in Hemingway's little short story, "A Clean Well-Lighted Place". One can feel it, brush against it, even taste it when one is silent. But it is not
amenable to noise or chatter or idle gossip or professional analysis or cliché. Eventually, words are necessary so that we can see what we have been listening to. But first, there must be the quiet, else there is nothing to describe. Which is why Paul the preacher went into the wilderness for three years before speaking, went into eclipse before his nearly incessant verbalizing. He had to know what he was talking about, know it in the Hebrew sense of
having sexual intercourse with it, interpenetrating it and being penetrated. A lay person asked me recently if people who live in monastic settlements, isn't it a useless way of life? Only, I replied, if you think of life in terms of activity, not being. And only, I might add now, if we think of silence as a negative quality or passive instead of positive and dynamic. Zen Buddhism understands this well. And so did Robert Pirsig when he wrote that
lovely book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". You remember how Pirsig began the book. He was discussing the difference between riding a motorcycle and traveling in a car. In the car, he said, everything one sees is framed, as if one were watching it on television. The rider is protected from immediate involvement in the scene. On a motorcycle, everything is different, immediate. Nothing separates the rider from his or her environment. The world rushes in almost with
suffocating force. There is no safe distance then from impressions. Everything is instantaneous. Those unaccustomed to Zen might suppose it to be like the experience of riding in a car. Tranquil, distanced, safe. Not so. Zen is like riding the motorcycle. Meditation and awareness carry the traveler into life with immediacy. So that experiences are vivid, firsthand, even shocking. Now you do understand what I'm saying, don't you? Preaching that does not begin in silence is like Dickie's advertising jingles.
It is merely paid for and immoral speech. And it is like the car ride as opposed to the motorcycle ride. It is safe. It gives people a comfortable, well-distanced view of the countryside without any immediate involvement. It is in that sense what the Old Testament calls false prophecy. It is speech that costs nothing, demands nothing of the speaker, threatens nothing to the hearer. Silence discovers reality. It also shapes character. Only in silence, in the space
between noise, speech and activity, is there room for a person to become focused, to achieve gravity and centeredness. Only in silence, in waiting before the mystery of existence itself, can one attain what Mary C. Richards has called an incorruptible instinct for wholeness. Only in silence, brooding upon the fact that there is a world, that there is eternity, does one become endowed with true worldliness and true everlastingness. We understand this in certain persons who have dwelled in
silence and then entered the public sphere, bringing with them the aura of their quietude, trailing it like gossamer threads of being. Merton, when he emerged from the abbey at Gethsemane. Camus, who grew up in the presence of a deaf mother, and later wrote that the two abiding influences on his writing were the brilliance of the Algerian sunscape and the impenetrable silence of his mother. Flannery O 'Connor and her peacocks. The Yaqui soothsayer Don Juan, whose reticence
is described in the Carlos Castaneda writings. Lauren Isley, whose elegiac poetry and books leapt like a triggered spring from his years of lonely abandonment on a farm near Death Valley, where he was recuperating from tuberculosis. Max Picard, in his book, "The World of Silence", speaks of an actual substance that people carry with them when they have lived in silence. He says, a man in whom the substance of silence is still an active force, carries the silence
into every movement. His movements are therefore slow and measured. They do not jolt violently against each other. They are borne by the silence. They are simply the waves of silence. There is nothing vague and undefined about such a man. Nothing vague about his language. The fact that his movement and his words are made individually distinct from one another by the intervening silence makes his whole personality clearer than if the silence were not there at all and
the man and his words were all part of one continuous noise. This is why there is a luminousness about certain gurus. The substance of silence carries over from their hours of meditation into their public appearances. It explains the weight of Moses' personality when he came down from the mountain or of Jesus' after a period of prayer. It is the secret of a modern-day prophet like Will Campbell who lives on a coal comfort farm in Mount
Juliet, Tennessee rocking on his front porch and playing a guitar and comes out of retirement occasionally to deliver a bundle of pronouncements cooked up over the open fire of full concentration. Shy men, said Phillips Brooks, make the best preachers. That is because shy persons live much in the world of silence. They are like the man described by Rilke whose ear was closed by a god so that he could hear no sound but the god's own voice
and not be led astray by turbid and ephemeral noises. Chattering, voluble ministers often make a botch of the gospel by treating it too glibly, too freely, too casually. Having abandoned silence they have ceased to be formed by the eternal word and preach out of threadbare memories, out of mere wisps of experiences they once had but can no longer lay hold upon. Or perhaps that's the wrong way of putting it. They can still lay hold upon their
past experiences but the nature of experience is such that it serves reality only when we submit to it, relinquishing all self-control, not when we attempt to lay hold on it. The utilization of experience exhausts experience, sucks its being vampire-like and leaves it but an empty shell of itself. Only by living in silence, by continuing to live in silence, do we continue to be shaped by the spirit of god so that we have mediatorial power
in a world being constantly destroyed by noise. As silence gives shape to human character so also it bestows form and meaning upon language. Where there is no silence, words become weightless, slippery, elusive. As T. S. Eliot said, They slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. As a crisis of language in our world today, it has nothing to do with the pluralism of tongues. That in fact encourages silence by
refusing an easy reductionism. Few things are healthier for the soul than days spent in foreign countries where one understands nothing of the language and is thrown back upon more elemental means of communication or even upon no communication at all. Evoking new reverence for the immensity of life in the world. Instead, the crisis of language concerns the overuse, the overextension of language, the constant barrage of verbiage from newspapers, magazines, television, government, school, church. The world has fallen
into cliché. Cliché is the opposite of silence. It is the language from which all silence has been removed. Take the figure of the media evangelist who has renounced silence for network coverage, for the ministry of blitz and bits, spiel and spoil. You know how little silence there is in his program and how thin his character appears like the patina of ions forming a picture on the tube. There's something feverish about the program as if its makers
insisted on wall-to-wall words with no chinks of silence left. As if silence would somehow rise up and destroy the spell of the hype, the hard sell, the gimmicky gospel. The program is all speech and noise, and yet none of the speech is memorable because it has been deprived of all silence. The program, far from healing the sickness of language, exacerbates its illness. I mentioned Samuel Beckett earlier. As a modern poet, Beckett has been continuously
engaged with the problem of language. It's interesting to recall that he began his career in Paris as an unofficial secretary and confidant to that valuable Irishman James Joyce, from whose pen words flowed with diarrhea profligacy. Beckett has tried to restore silence to language. His plays are filled with pauses. Mime, gesture. He is said to have chosen Roger Blaine as the director of his play, Waiting for Godot, because he went to a theater where Blaine was directing
a Strindberg play to a nearly empty house, and Beckett decided that that kind of stringent condition was perfect for his plays. In one play, Beckett deals forthrightly with the language crisis. The play is called Krapp's Last Tape. The name Krapp is spelled K-R-A-P-P, but the cloacal reference cannot be missed. Krapp is an old man who has talked incessantly all his life, recording his thoughts for posterity on a tape recorder. As the curtains
part, he is sitting on a stage that is bare of everything except a table and a tape recorder and hundreds and hundreds of canisters of tapes. Krapp sits on the stage listening to parts of speeches from his lifetime. The words now have an empty, weightless quality about them. He cannot bear to hear them anymore. Impatiently, he strikes the fast-forward button and sends the tape reeling on ahead, dipping in here and there in an attempt to
discover something in which he is still interested. Only an occasional segment holds any interest now. It is usually the record of some sexual experience from Krapp's earlier years. At the end of the play, Krapp has drunk too much again and his head has fallen on the table as the end of a reel of tape spins idly about the machine. We have learned nothing at all of his life or character and indeed suspect that he has no
character for his life has been all rhetoric and no silence. What if every preacher, every media evangelist were condemned to spend eternity auditing his or her sermons on a tape recorder? It is a dreary, unbearable prospect, isn't it? Language is one of the great delights of the human species, yet language deprived of silence is tormenting. It may even be demonic. Here is what Picard says. When language is no longer related to silence, it loses its source
of refreshment and renewal and therefore something of its substance. Language today seems to talk automatically out of its own strength and emptying and scattering itself, it seems to be hastening to an end. There is something hard and obstinate in language today as though it were making a great effort to remain alive in spite of its emptiness. There is also something desperate in it as though it were expecting its emptiness to lead it to a relentless end.
And it is this alternation of obstinacy and despair which makes it so restless. By taking it away from silence, we have made language an orphan. The tongue we speak today is no longer a mother tongue, but rather an orphaned tongue. It sometimes seems as though man were ashamed of the language he has separated from its parent. Man hardly feels he can dare to communicate his words to another. He talks more to himself and into himself as
though he wanted to crush, crumple and destroy the words he speaks and throw them like ruins down into the emptiness of his own soul. It is only, says Picard, in the language of the poets that the real word, the word connected with silence still sometimes appears. I've felt that, haven't you? That only the poets are speaking the real word, the one connected with silence. It is what James Dickey discovered and why he left the world of
Madison Avenue. He tried for a while to live in both worlds writing advertising copy by day and poetry by night but learned that he could not do it, that he could not be chased at night after being a prostitute all day. William McFeeters, one of our Tennessee artists, once painted a self-portrait. It was of a blind man with no hands. This was his way of suggesting the impossibility of the artist's task to see and paint
reality. And it also defines the artist's reverence for the world that keeps him or her in touch with silence, with the power of the primordial and the uncreated that gives meaning to human utterance. It was Christina Rossetti, I think, who once could not sleep for several days because she had written the name of God on an envelope and it had been whisked away by the wind and carried madly into the crowds on the street whence she
could not recover it. We would do well if we are concerned about the weight of our words as preachers to develop a similar reticence. We talk much of the waning authority of the minister, but the real problem is not in society, it is in us. Like the speech of Simon Peter by the fire in Caiaphas Courtyard, our speech betrays us. It is naked of silence. The husks of quietness have long been shorn from its sides, which
are now as slippery smooth as stones washed by the restless sea. We need, if we are to be restored to efficacy, to be struck dumb the way Zechariah was before the word of the coming of the herald of Christ. Then, when we do speak, people will be amazed at our words as they were at his. I cannot forget a portrait of a preacher I read years ago in the Christian century. It was in an article by
Richard L. Stanger, the chaplain of MacMurray College in Illinois, about the visit to MacMurray of San Francisco poet William Emerson, known as Brother Antoninus. The visit that week was such a success that Brother Antoninus was prevailed upon to speak in chapel on a Friday night. People poured into the chapel sanctuary despite the usual competition of Friday night events in a college town. Every seat was taken and guests sat in the aisles and around the chancel. When
the moment arrived for the sermon, what people beheld was a tall middle-aged Dominican standing quietly in the chancel area, listening for a voice. The words came slowly, awkwardly. Antoninus began to pace the chapel like a great bear, his white robe flowing behind him wherever he went. He read some of his poems. He reflected on the untidy impressions and occurrences of his life. Again and again he bolted across the chancel as if somehow trying to seize
a phrase or sentence taking wing and eluding his grasp. The audience was electrified. When it was over, they didn't want to leave. One girl even came forward to the altar, though there had been no altar call. Stanger said the event made all his upbeat liturgies and sermons seem pallid and empty by comparison. Why? What was there about Brother Antoninus' appearance that should have produced this effect? I think, said Stanger, it was the becoming quality of the
man and the event. Brother Antoninus had little idea where the evening would go. Certainly he had some intention emerging from his vocational commitment to risk a radical openness with his audience that might somehow be led to an awareness of the living God who moves amid the horrors of the human heart. But the outcome was not laid out in advance, nor was his life. One had the sense that here was an unfinished product, a life still rising,
still struggling, still becoming. The man's words still bore the husks of silence upon them. They still trailed gossamer threads of being. They were the words of a poet, rung courageously from the heart of reality and shared like fresh-picked fruit with a spirit-hungry audience. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting even for a moment that we cease to prepare the prayers and sermon for Sunday morning. This is no white paper for slovenly performance. What I am
suggesting is that both we and our speech need more of the character evident in Brother Antoninus' performance, a character born only of daily struggling with the holy mysteries surrounding our existence. There need not be glaring hiatuses in our speech on Sunday morning, pausings and hiccupping of the spirit. But the words should easily betray the silence in which they were wrought. What Antoninus told in his work on drama called updrafts and downdrafts and temptations of the soul.
There should still be husks of silence clinging to them, making us occasionally clear our throats and recall along with the congregations that this Sunday morning speech, for all its simplicity and commonness of vocabulary, is no ordinary speech. It is words derived from and expressing the word itself and becoming the word again in the lives of those who hear. To that end, there are some very practical things we can do. We can become, if we are not
already, persons of prayer and meditation, setting aside precious minutes every day when we become all ears and listen to the silence of God. I do not mean talking to God. We can do that at other times when we are busy about our daily routines. I mean listening, waiting in the void, lying open to the Spirit like a fresh plowed field to the gentle rains of winter, not spring but winter, for it is not always easy on
us. We can read and listen to the poets, word crafters, hewers of speech, who know from their practice of silence the heft and breadth and width of words. They work in language as other persons work in bricks and boards, building things tangible, the husks still cling to their words. The blank spaces on their pages are as viable as the print, sometimes more so. The poets can teach us to speak slowly, carefully, quietly, that we not disturb
the mystery we are describing. Then too, we can take vacations from speaking for a day at a time or for a week if the malady of speech is too much upon us. There are wonderfully nourishing things to do. A silent trip, visiting art galleries, churches, parks and public buildings in one's area without uttering a word on the entire pilgrimage, a speechless journey to a state park or retreat center for a couple of days, a few days
meditation in some nearby convent or monastery, where architecture and nature and monastic rule conspire to hush the restless tongue, or even in the normally resounding space of one's home or office, a resolve not to utter speech for an entire day, aided and abetted by a sympathetic spouse or secretary who fends off intruding phone calls or demands for personal attention. Corita Kent, the former sister Corita, understands, once when I wrote her to invite her to lead a
series of worship services at our university, she replied with a single sentence on a postcard. There she wrote, I'm trying to be quiet. Trying to be quiet. It is the only antidote to being like Lucky, who spoke whenever a hat was thrust on his head, or Krapp, who despaired of all his life's speeches, or John or Jane Q. Minister, who would hate to be condemned to listening to his or her past sermons. Trying to be quiet,
so that the word we speak is the real word, the creative word, the living word, the word with husks of silence on it. That's the thing. Now, Lord, forgive me for having spoken, for I am a man of unclean lips. Amen.