One of the best ways is through memorization of Scripture and of the prayers of the Church. Before I say any more, just think about your favorite music. Choose any you like, as long as it has lyrics. When you hear the opening parts of a familiar work, the mind almost immediately recalls the lyrics. If listening to an album, the end of one song immediately prompts the memory of the next. Recall is the basis of old game shows like “Name that Tune” and new games like SongPop. Memorization has long been an important component of literature classes. How many can recite some portion of Shakespeare or Chaucer from a high school English class from long ago?

We can then ask ourselves the question, “If I can memorize the latest songs from Rihanna, Metallica, or Brad Paisley, why can’t I memorize the Psalms or chunks of a gospel?” Which one has greater benefit?

Memorization gives additional purpose to our listening to Scripture and to prayers. It is one thing to listen to, say, an audio bible as though it were any other audio book. It’s another thing to listen to the same chapter, or same Psalm, multiple times with an aim to remembering it word for word. Listening now has a purpose. It’s not enough to get the gist of what is heard. Rather, when listening for memorization, one aims to get it all, exactly. Listening (and reading) for memorization disciplines the mind, insisting on mental focus rather than allowing the aimless wandering of one’s thoughts.

There are numerous benefits. Memorization gives us an abbreviated bible and prayer book that stays with us even when the physical objects are not at hand. It provides a means by which the Holy Spirit brings important points to mind in times of crisis and conflict. A life of disciplined memorization provides invaluable comfort when the effects of age take away our mental acuity. (It is a beautiful thing to visit elderly parishioners suffering from dementia and memory loss an to hear them recite the Creed, Our Father, and psalms along with me. Many of these were acquired solely from attending church services, but the durability is amazing.)

From the standpoint of listening to preaching, memorization skills bolster the ability to pay attention. The faithful can be encouraged to remember what is preached. In turn, the preacher is encouraged to spend more time composing sermons with content worth remembering, instead of fluff written in the knowledge that it will be forgotten before coffee hour. More importantly for the pastor, memorization keeps important Scriptures and prayers at the ready, for use in confession and when crises small and large arise. Some of the best counsel I have received from father-confessors has been Scripture. Without it’s memorization, it wouldn’t have been on offer.

Readers: what are your thoughts on memorization? What things – specific Scriptures and Psalms, prayers, etc. – do you find most valuable to memorize? What role does this play in cultivating the spiritual life of your children? Is it used in your church school?

 In our time, the hearer presents a mix of issues, broadly speaking:

1. A short attention span
2. A desire for entertainment and exciting topics.
3. An expectation that preaching be a boost for self-esteem, or motivational according to the popular definition.

These are not entirely new phenomena (see the citation from St John Chrysostom in the preceding post). There has long been a bias in the direction of flattery, which is why it is so effective for politicians. There are, nonetheless, some differences in this early 21st century.

Consider the matter of attention spans. In our time, the short attention span appears to be the result of minds conditioned to flit from one thing to the other. Several recent books link this to our “always connected” lives, where the mind easily indulges every mental impulse, never staying on any one task for more than a couple of minutes. However, I think our contemporary workplaces, for those in white-collar and service industries, fuel this as well. Workers in these jobs are expected to multi-task, responding promptly to communications from numerous channels (email, phone, instant message, etc.), often when not at work. They tackle little issues as they continually arise even as they labor at larger efforts. Interrupted work becomes the norm. It eventually gets done, but it doesn’t happen in extended, sustained application of effort.

Mass media has already adapted to these hearers who, like sprinters forced to run a marathon, lack endurance. Television programming is dominated by short programs (20-22 minutes, once advertisements are removed) characterized by brief sketches that have rather little connection to each other. Even if the commercials are skipped (a common practice with cable/satellite boxes), they mark an interruption in the program. Televised sports have frequent breaks for advertising, instant replay, and repetitive commentary. (Those paying for the privilege of watching the game played live instead receive the endless distraction of the Jumbotron and snippets of AC/DC riffs.) Politics is reduced to sound bites. Why listen to an entire speech, when the slanted-news-of-your-choice can extract the five ten-second sound bites you need to hear? Talk radio combines the worst features of all of the preceding examples.

What can the preacher do? Is he compelled to shorten sermons to seven minutes or less, about the duration between commercials on television? Must he really repeat himself over and over to make the simplest of points? Is the visual aid – perhaps displayed on a projection screen – a real requirement to be effective in our time?

The long-term solutions involve effort. The pastor must encourage his listeners to read the Scriptures in larger chunks, starting with the daily appointed pericopes and then moving to larger units like entire chapters. This helps build endurance, but listening, too, needs help. Audio books and bibles are a great way to do this, and are readily available (search for “free mp3 bible”). They transform errands and commutes into time that is both spiritually profitable and good “exercise” for the ear.  Prayers are also available; Holy Cross Hermitage offers morning and evening prayers plus the prayers in preparation for Holy Communion in both CD and downloadable formats.

The preacher must also challenge the faithful (and himself!) to “disconnect” for a time every day. This starts with regular prayer, but it doesn’t need to be confined to specifically spiritual pursuits. Just spending more time reading without jumping over to see what’s happening on Facebook, listening to lectures, playing board games with the family, and going on walks and hikes without audio accompaniment are all therapeutic for the short attention span. Parents in particular must be encouraged to cultivate these same skills in their children. We don’t (or shouldn’t) let our kids subsist on a diet of cheese curls and ice cream, so we must avoid the same thing as regards their intellect.

Improvement is not instantaneous. The preacher in our time will almost undoubtedly find it necessary to place a cap on the length of his sermons and to make deliberate use of repetition. He will have to tailor his vocabulary and sermon structure so that sustained listening isn’t so demanding that it encourages the faithful to tune him out. In some ways, this simplifies life for the preacher. If there are multiple points that merit expounding in a given reading for the day, the preacher can pick just one, and leave the others for when the reading next occurs.

What are your thoughts?  What else can the contemporary Orthodox preacher do to cope with the short attention span phenomenon? I’d like to hear from the “hearers,” too.

I’ll tackle more of those other preaching challenges next time.

One of the greatest challenges the priest faces is that of preaching, and it’s not a new problem. Even Christ’s words, which were life from Life himself, were not always received (cf. the rich young ruler, Matt 19:16ff). Thus John Chrysostom gives his own perspective on the delicate balance that must be achieved by the faithful preacher.

Chrysostom’s first caution to the preacher is the description of the state of his “audience”:

For most people usually listen to a preacher for pleasure, not profit, like [critics] of a play or concert. The power of eloquence, which we rejected just now, is more requisite in a church than when professors of rhetoric are made to contend against each other. (On the Priesthood, V.1)

I would add that the contemporary listener is heavily conditioned to be this way. The majority of pastimes – whether sports, or television, or books and magazines, or games – are aimed at pleasing us. That is to say they are not in the least intended for us to elevate our souls or minds, or to have them grasp at something better. Thus, many listeners have an unspoken, and perhaps even unknown, desire to be entertained by the preacher. There is no greater evidence of this than the difficulty with which even pious believers have in listening to a homily that exceeds 15 (or 10!) minutes, even as they can watch hours of television without moving from a recliner.

The explosion in performance television (American Idol, The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, <Your Country>’s Got Talent, X Factor, etc.) has combined entertainment with criticism, encouraging viewers not only to vote with their viewing choices, but with text messages and phone calls as well. It produces exactly what Chrysostom describes, and it’s no longer confined to the professional critics.

From there, he goes on to describe the preacher’s response (italics mine):

Here, too, a [preacher] needs a loftiness of mind far beyond my own littleness of spirit, if he is to correct this disorderly and unprofitable delight of ordinary people, and to divert their attention to something more useful, so that church people will follow and defer to him and not that he will be governed by their desires. It is impossible to acquire this power except by these two qualities: contempt of praise and the force of eloquence. If either is lacking, the one left is made useless through divorce from the other. If a preacher despises praise, yet does not produce the kind of teaching which is “with grace, seasoned with salt” [1 Col 4:6], he is despised by the people and gets no advantage from his sublimity. And if he manages this side of things perfectly well, but is a slave to the sound of applause, again an equal damage threatens both him and the people, because through his passion for praise he aims to speak more for the pleasure than the profit of his hearers. The man who is unaffected by acclamation, yet unskilled in preaching, does not truckle to the people’s pleasure; but no more can he confer any real benefit upon them, because he has nothing to say. And equally, the man who is carried away with the desire for eulogies [praise; i.e., good words] pay have the ability to improve the people, but chooses instead to provide nothing but entertainment. That is the price he pays for thunders of applause. (V.1-2)

But, of course, the good preacher requires particular care from his people, to allow for an “off day” in the pulpit:

For the congregation does not sit in judgement on the sermon as much as on the reputation of the preacher, so that when someone excels everyone else at speaking, then he above all needs painstaking care. He is not allowed sometimes not to succeed – the common experience of all the rest of humanity. On the contrary, unless his sermons always match the great expectations formed of him, he will leave the pulpit the victim of countless jeers and complaints. No one ever takes it into consideration that a fit of [dejection], pain, anxiety, or in many cases anger, may cloud the clarity of his mind and prevent his productions from coming forth unalloyed; and that in short, being a man, he cannot invariably reach the same standard or always be successful, but will naturally make many mistakes and obviously fall below the standard of his real ability. People are unwilling to allow for any of these factors, as I said, but criticize him as if they were sitting in judgement on an angel. (V.5)

And, above all, the preacher must be independent of his flock, seeking approval only from God:

Let the best craftsman be the judge of his own handiwork too, and let us rate his productions as beautiful or poor when that is the verdict of the mind which contrived them. … So too the man who has accepted the task of [preaching] should pay no attention to the commendation of outsiders, any more than he should let them cause him dejection. When he has composed his sermons to please God (and let this alone be his rule and standard of good oratory in sermons, not applause or commendation), then if he should be approved by men, too, let him not spurn their praise. But if his hearers do not accord it, let him neither seek it or sorrw for it. It will be sufficient encouragement for his efforts, and one much better than anything else, if his conscience tells him that he is organizing and regulating his teaching to please God. For in fact, if he has already been overtaken by the desire for unmerited praise, neither his great efforts nor his powers of speech will be any use. His soul, being unable to bear the senseless criticisms of the multitude, grows slack and loses all earnestness about preaching. So a preacher must train himself above all else to despise praise. (V.7-8)

I commend these points for your own reflection. I’ll offer more reflection on these tomorrow.

[Most of the excerpts here come from the SVS Press edition, although CCEL has the Stephens translation from the NPNF here. (Today's excerpts all come from Book 5.) While I don't have the Greek text at hand, the NPNF version appears to be more accurate, which is expected based on my experience, while the readability nod goes to the SVS Press edition. I note that my copy of the SVS Press edition is a 2002 printing; some of the Popular Patristics titles have been re-translated and re-issued (e.g., St Basil the Great's On the Holy Spirit). I don't know whether this one has or not.]