Stories: October 2005 Archives

The statisticians tell me that more people fear speaking in public than fear just about anything else. And then their are all the people who speak in public a lot, and who who have gotten used to the experience. Most of these people would testify that they actually enjoy being up in front of people sharing some idea, expressing some opinion, and communicating with a group.

I remember having stage fright, the jitters and the sweating that would overwhelm me as I prepared to speak. I think I was afraid of being judged, judged because of the mediocrity of what I would say, judged because of the inadequacy of my delivery.

It was sometime after I began regular public speaking as a teacher, and later as a student for the ministry that I discovered my mantra, which I present below. I used to say this to myself quite often, less now. It helped. In time I stopped thinking about what judgments the audience was making about me, and more about how I could sing my song with force and spirit.
I give you Maya Angelou who wrote:

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

T.S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Last night I officiated in a service of remembrance for a ninety year old woman. She had grown up in Iowa and gone to college at Iowa State and become a teacher. Her teaching career took her to a series of schools and colleges during the 1930s and when World War Two came to the United States she joined the Red Cross and was assigned to service at Fort Hood, in Texas. She married an army physician and settled in New York where they raised two children. and she returned to teaching art in a high school.
When her husband died and her retirement came she moved to Florida. It was in Florida that she met an old college classmate, who had introduced her the Unitarianism way back in college and she found her way to the church that I serve.

She thought of herself as a Unitarian all those years, but going to Unitarian church had been associated with the relationship with her friend. After graduation, pursuing a career and a marriage, raising a family took her away from that relationship and from church going for fifty years. Ten years ago she resumed her friendship with her Unitarian friend, and returned to where she had started, as if it were the first time.

Churches also serve, when they just stand and wait.