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Disappearing Cats

“I wish,” said Alice , “you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!”

“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of its tail, and ending with the grin, which remained for some time after the rest of it had gone.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice ; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”

By “disappearing cats” I am referring to a mode of communication that moves from a world of common experience (like a cat without a grin) to deeper insight. The Annotated Alice refers to a grin without a cat as a perfect description of pure mathematics (1960, p. 71). The classic example of such discourse is Plato’s Symposium, in which a discussion of love moves from the merely carnal to the spiritual. Along the way, earlier stages of understanding fall away like the booster stages of a rocket launched into space.In his book Self-Consuming Artifacts Stanley Fish says such discourse "succeeds at its own expense. . . it becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment". I think of two friends talking late into the night, their conversation spiralling out in directions neither one could have anticipated. The key to the process is the interaction.

Preaching ought to move from the world of common experience to deeper insight, but it is handicapped by lack of interaction. At one point Stanley Fish makes a perhaps inadvertent negative judgment of preaching. Dialectical discourse, he says, “does not preach the truth, but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves.”

What a bad name preaching has! It hurts me professionally as well as personally when my wife caricatures my side of the argument as preaching—one-sided, belligerent discourse. I try not to preach in such a manner, and indeed was trained not to preach in such a manner. But let’s face it, an awful lot of Christian tradition stands against me. Those high pulpits so many churches have are described as being “ten feet above contradiction”.

A sermon is one-sided, particularly in white European congregations, though at City Church we have enjoyed “participation” in my preaching from a mildly schizophrenic worshipper that gives a jolly spice to the worship service. I sorely miss him when he’s not present. Pulpitted sermons constitute such an anachronistic form of communication I have often been tempted to jettison the whole business.

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