In her excellent book on the “Writing Life”, Annie Dillard advises writers to:
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Her ‘mortality’ principle is not new. I first encountered it in some book on preaching that I had read when I was much younger. Unfortunately I can’t remember the title or the author of that book. But I found myself nodding vigorously when I read Dillard’s version. I nodded because we are drowning in trivia.
We drown in triviality in our entertainment. I mean how many “world’s most astounding videos” do we really need? And who gives a damn as to who can throw an oil drum the highest? How many reincarnations of “candid camera” will we be subject to? Movies like “The Fellowship of the Ring” stand out precisely because they both entertain and confront us with the real questions of life, questions of morality and relationships and meaning.
We drown in triviality in the news. And I speak as one who considers many journalists his friends, fully sympathetic to the difficulty of the news business. Unfortunately it is true that much of news is now entertainment, junk food for the mind. Often we end up with more pages that deal with sports than the horrific possibility of another war in the Gulf.
Dare I say that even war itself has been trivialized. My father was buried alive during a bombing raid during the Second World War. He escaped because he was the first to be pulled out of the debris. His scars remain till today. I rarely hear folks from his generation talk lightly about war. In fact they seem reluctant to talk about it at all. But when I hear war being discussed by today’s political leaders, they might as well be discussing strategies for the next Super Bowl. I allow that in a fallen world, wars may be a necessary evil, like WWII. But at the very least we must realize what kind of monster we are talking about.
This curse of trivialization has also infected our churches and our church education programmes. The Word gets domesticated by bad exegesis and proof-texting. Sermons are pressed into the service of the denomination’s/church’s agenda for the year. No wonder our parishioners and Sunday School pupils often feel cheated. They come Sunday after Sunday dying to hear some word that will give them some hope that life is more than their daily grind – only to encounter the church campaign du jour. They come hoping for a glimpse of the divine only to get another sales job.
The trouble is we accept all this triviality without so much as a protest. Dillard doesn’t have to worry that triviality will enrage us. It doesn’t. We are so used to triviality that we accept it as norm. Which may be as effective a satanic strategy as any.
If the devil can’t stop people talking about ultimate issues, he is quite happy to let those issues be lost in a sea of trivialities. Let the pitching of the gospel be lost in the avalanche of pitches for anti-aging skin cream.
Communicators have their work cut out for them. Journalists, preachers, writers, teachers—we just have to work that much harder to highlight the things that really matter. On this, God is on our side because we are on His.
We need to work harder at finding how we can communicate better. But I think that is only part of the solution. And maybe not the main part. We need to hear Dillard again when she reminds us that we are dying people writing for dying people. In our very brief sojourn this side of heaven, we need to rediscover the “fire in our bones” that Jeremiah talks about.(Jeremiah 20:9)
Before we can communicate to those dying in a sea of triviality, we need to be awaken from our own lethargy. For we swim in the same numbing sea. We too get hypnotized by the overwhelming triviality of the age.
So step one in communicating as ‘dying men to dying men’ is to cry afresh for fresh encounters with burning bushes. Or for God to splash our faces with living water.
“For you are all children of the light and of the day; we don’t belong to darkness and night. So be on your guard, not asleep like the others. Stay alert and be sober. Night is the time for sleep and the time when people get drunk. But let us who live in the light think clearly?” 1Thessalonians 5: 5-8a NLT
Your brother, Soo-Inn