In her Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton writes of a moment while tending her garden border, and she was overcome by tiredness, and particularly a sense that too much had happened without enough time to process it. She later wrote of the fatigue caused "by unassimilated experience." My parents used to have a wee devotional book, given them at their wedding by the minister, but long disappeared – it was called Come Ye Apart. The title came from an old translation of Jesus' invitation to the disciples at the end of a draining day, "Come ye apart and rest awhile". A good title for a book about restoring the soul – also a good phrase to describe what happens in an overstressed life "come ye apart"! - or as Yeats said, "things come apart, the centre cannot hold".
The poet Denise Leveretov – for me one of a personal canon of poets who assimlate experience and cherish human existence in a troubled world – Levertov writing about her friend Robert Duncan quoted his criticism of a fellow poet – "he has enthusiasms but not passions, he collects experiences but he does not undergo the world". I sometimes think that about preaching today – "enthusiasms but not passions", the preacher collects experiences but does not undergo the world."
When we've done the training, read the books about new hermeneutics, had fun with the homiletical plots and narrative theology, made the necessary concessions and expressed the expected cautions about postmodern suspicions of authority and engaged in discourse analysis and the dangers of social construction through linguistic power games, and then preach; or when we've done the biblical thing and subjected the text to atomised exposition, contextual application, faithfully (so far as our own limited grasp of it goes) proclaimed the gospel to our own satisfaction and even the satisfaction of those privileged to hear us. Well when all that kind of stuff is done and said, the poet poses a fundamental question to the heart of the preacher –
Do you have enthusiasms but not passions?
Do you collect experience but refuse to undergo the world?
To undergo the world is to live deeply, to feel the joy and anguish of other human beings, to come to terms with ambiguity and doubt and struggle and hurt as people try to make ends meet in the economy of the heart. What I sense in much preaching now is a lack of depth, by which I mean a willed unfamiliarity with the deep places of human experience, a superficial stone-skimming-the-surface impatience with profundity or difficult thought, a salesman-like confidence that is entirely uncritical of applied practical answers to life's most troubling complexities, and these delivered in sound-bytes and bullet points as if the conversation was about the latest three for two offers from our preferred supermarket. OK that's exaggeration – but the poet is right. It's too easy in the image saturated environment we inhabit to become collectors of experience and refuse to undergo the world. A preacher is the last person who should shirk depth – maybe those who shirk depth are afraid of sharks.
To undergo the world is a deeply Christ-like journey.
The Word became flesh and made his home amongst us" – the Word did not refuse to undergo the world.
"He emptied himelf….and being born in human likeness…he humbled himself…" the one in the very nature of God, did not refuse to undergo the world.
To undergo the world is to love it, to live in it, to be in the world as a reconciling presence, to hold the world in the heart, to explore the depths and darkness as well as the surface and light of human experience, to struggle with thought in the face of tragedy and to find words to express the joyful mystery of existence, and to do so in order to know when we are short-changing those to whom we dare preach. To undergo the world is to live with openness of mind, ears, eyes and heart – not a collector of experiences, but an experienced human being who in undergoing the world, transfigures experience into wisdom. It is that wisdom that best informs our preaching, and that wisdom which emerges from the encounter between our personal lived experience, the biblical text, and the real lives of those to whom we are privileged to preach.