MGG - 7.04 - Dead - sermons
Gloria died and I died as well. I just didn't stop breathing.
Guilt and regret and remorse are common factors in grief. An awful lot of the time people have all kinds of regrets about either what they did do, or what they didn't do, with their loved one before their loved one died. How they treated, or mistreated, their loved one.
That's not a big problem for me. I knew what I had. I knew that Gloria was wonderful. I possibly didn't appreciate quite *how* wonderful Gloria was, but I knew I had a good thing. I wasn't going to blow it in any of the usual ways. I didn't tell jokes denigrating Gloria. (I always found kind of behavior annoying, and, now that she's gone, I really resent it when other people do it.) I told Gloria that I loved her. Every day. So often in fact, that sometimes she found it annoying. I held hands with Gloria. Gloria used to say that I held hands with her so much, when we first got married, that it was as if I wanted to make sure that she couldn't get away. That may not be too far from the truth. I opened doors for Gloria. When I said that I loved her, and she asked me why I loved her, I would seriously try and come up with lists of her wonderful attributes.
So, no, I didn't have an awful lot to regret. And I frequently say that my biggest regret is that, for thirty years, I cooked broad beans the wrong way.
However, I do have a probably more significant regret. I do, seriously, regret the fact that I didn't start writing sermons until after Gloria died.
Actually, that is not quite true. I did write *one* sermon while Gloria was still alive. I wrote it, over a period of thirty years, while we would have been sitting through boring sermons by other people. I wrote it, and I memorized it, and I wrote it bit by bit, and then I refined it, over time, over a roughly thirty year period. The first sermon that I ever wrote. Except that I never wrote it down.
I missed an opportunity. A golden opportunity. I missed the opportunity to discuss my sermons with Gloria. As I wrote them. I'm sure that Gloria would have enjoyed discussing the sermons. I certainly would have enjoyed discussing the sermons with Gloria. I am absolutely certain that her insights would have contributed to, and improved, my sermons. Gloria very frequently said that, coming from a somewhat anti-intellectual, and fairly provincial, denomination, that being at Regent, and listening to, and sometimes discussing with, some of the greatest theological minds of our age, was like coming up out of the valleys to a mountaintop with, quite suddenly, a huge broad vista spread before her. Gloria improved my books no end, and I probably should have started writing down the sermons earlier, so that we could have discussed them.
But that didn't happen.
As I have said, the ability to dictate was part of the impetus of starting to write sermons. First of all, I wrote down my first sermon, even though it had been written over a period of 30 years, and I basically had it memorized. But I dictated it out, and put it into a fixed form. And then I started taking some of the theological, well, perhaps insights is too strong a word, but at least ideas that I was having, and dictating them out. The first few were probably more devotionals than sermons.
And then, while I was discussing the ideas from "The Grieving Brain" with one of the ministers in Delta, he mentioned that the idea reminded him of the idea that we, as Christians, frequently talked about: that of dying to self. And that sounded like a really good sermon idea topic. And so, pacing up and down in a BC Ferries parking lot (at five in the morning), I wrote basically the entire sermon based on that idea. (And later gave him the first draft of it.)
And I kept on going.
The next one I was actually rather complicated. Part of it began before I left Delta for Port Alberni. I had been talking with some friends, and noting that, if I was going to try and pursue some kind of activities now that Gloria was dead, and I had lost my job as her caregiver, which ones should I concentrate on? One of them quoted Philippians 4:8, the passage about whatever is good, whatever is perfect, whatever is pure, think on these things. That is probably good advice in general. But for me, specifically, it seemed to indicate that I shouldn't pursue what had been my professional career: security. After all, in all the fields of security, generally speaking you are dealing with bad people. You are dealing with cons, and frauds, and tricksters, and, well, basically, bad people. And the thoughts of what bad people do, and their motivations, and understanding how they view the world is probably not good, or pure, or spiritually profitable. So, I took it as a sign that I should downplay the security aspect of my life. I should pursue other options.
And so I came to Port Alberni. And I started church shopping. And I went around to a number of churches in Port Alberni. Eventually doing the full circuit and going to every single one of the twenty-one churches that there are here. But even to begin with, as I went to different churches, and told people that yes, I was new in town, and I was church shopping, I started being warned away from certain churches. Don't go to that church: they don't believe in the truth. Don't go to that church they hold heretical views. And so I started working on a sermon on that issue. And I got to the point where the sermon was basically finished, but I really wasn't happy with it. I wrote it down dictated it out, and, since nobody was asking me to preach anyway, put it away.
And then, as frequently happens, I was sitting listening to somebody else's boring sermon. And the minister made one little throwaway comment towards the end of the sermon. And that one little throwaway comment tied together two ideas that we're lurking in the back of my head. And those two ideas both came from aspects of security research. And they both had to do with particularly nasty attacks that bad people made against, well, anybody else. And all of a sudden, with one dismissive comment, and two not very pure ideas, a whole bunch more of the sermon wrote itself in my mind. And I went and dictated it out and added it to the existing sermon, and that sermon was, suddenly, finished.
I have continued. At one point, actually fairly long after I started writing the sermons down, I started posting them as entries on my blog. And then I created a kind of an index page, as I have started to do with certain topics like grief, artificial intelligence, and online frauds, and so I have a catalog of the sermons that I have written, as well as the individual blog postings. And, over time, various topics and subjects have appeared and recurred in various sermons, and so I now have a few sermons series. By this time, I have actually a year's worth of sermons, packaged and ready to go: one for every week of the year. And I'm sure that shortly I'll have a few left over ...
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/03/mgg-702-dead-blog.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: TBA
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