Herewith a sermon by VCFA graduate Hilary Mullins, not a former student of mine, though she was in a novel workshop with me once, just a friend, but an old and good friend who comes up to the campus every residency to visit and sits in for a lecture or two or a reading. I has fond memories of long evenings spent in Francois Camoins’ room in Noble with Hilary and Ralph Angel and any number of students and faculty rotating in and out. Good friends, good conversation.
I offer this sermon in the Numéro Cinq spirit of subversiveness and outlawry. Once upon a time, the sermon was a hot nonfiction form. Books of sermons were routinely published and became best sellers. Nowadays, creative nonfiction is pretty narrowly defined and almost all literary prose has turned secular. I offer this sermon to remind you of a form, now too often ignored, a vibrant form that by definition looks to the deepest places of the human heart. Also to remind you to look to the side, to avoid defining yourselves, your reading and your writing too narrowly.
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Hilary Mullins, Author’s Note:
Sermons are a great form, and–as a writer addressing other writers–I am here to tell you it’s a form you do not have to be ordained to practice. You should be informed of course, but that is not the same as being ordained. In my case, I’ve taken a couple of seminary classes plus a three-year lay training program in Vermont where I live. I have also studied a fair amount on my own. But that is all. And yet it’s enough.
Naturally, since I also run the services I preach at, my sense of the sermon’s potential exceeds the parameters of the
sermon itself. For me the form is the whole service: from the prelude and call of worship, to the first hymn and prayer, to the sustained silence that comes next, and on and on, each element flowing along in the larger structure of the liturgy, creating an ongoing rhythm that, if you do it right, wakes people up—to themselves, to each other, to the deeper river running through all things.
But as for the sermon itself, it has its own dynamics as well. Even more obviously than a short story or an essay, the sermon is a wonderfully flexible form that you can shape shift in just about any direction that will serve, mixing facts and figures with quotations or poetry, alternating straight-up exegesis with story. And in the liberal denominations I work in, which are Unitarian Universalist and Congregationalist, I have the freedom to work with texts beyond the Bible. For instance, when it comes to picking scripture for a Sunday, I have often paired a Biblical passage with a poem, using works by Rumi, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some denominations won’t allow this, it’s true. But the limitations are not in the form itself.
Then there are effects that, though they don’t play in a reprinted sermon, work well in person with a congregation before you. Smile when you stand up, and they’ll smile back. Then as you get going, talk quiet or talk loud, slow up, slow down, use your body. Speak as if you were a channel for something good and something good can happen. And maybe best of all, the thing that other writers so rarely get to do: look in their eyes. Worlds are there. And they will come forth as they look back at you.
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