Very, very slow

I was chatting to Drayton Parslow this morning, who was rather energised and excited. This is never a good thing, and usually means that we have to send Young Keith round to confuse him a bit until he calms down. But, fool that I am, I asked Drayton what he was excited about. And he thanked the Archdruid for giving him an idea.

Now, Drayton actually appreciating anything that the Archdruid has said is something of a rarity, so I enquired further, and he said that he'd been inspired by a comment she'd made that "although Jesus's teaching seems to have lasted all day on many occasions, his actual recorded sermons are in fact very short". And what, I asked, was so inspiring about that?

And then he explained that he often worries that his sermons are too short.

It took me a couple of minutes to recover, pick myself up from the floor and check what he'd actually said. I even got Mrs Hnaef round to check that I'd understood him correctly, and got him to repeat his comment. And when I'd picked _her_ up off the floor (I really should have thought to stand behind her), I thought I'd better try to understand what he was on about. He, Drayton Parslow, is concerned that he doesn't speak for long enough when he's preaching. And, I asked hopefully, he's now realised that he can preach for a shorter time, because the Archdruid noted that even Jesus didn't always speak for very long?

"Ah, no, "he responded: "get thee behind me, Satan."

What? I continued, and then realised that I'd just cast doubt on the literalness of Scripture, at least in Drayton's head. Easily enough for a "getting behind him", as we sometimes call them in the Community.

"What I realised was that even if the words recorded by Our Lord are few, if he took all day to speak them, then he must have been speaking _very_ slowly. And I mean _extremely_, very, very slowly. So I'm going to see if I can't at least quadruple the length of my sermons from now on by taking a very long time over each word. It's the Biblical thing to do."

I told Young Keith. And he's started a sweepstake - not on the length of the sermon, but on how long it is before Drayton is preaching to himself. I've taken "never", because if Young Keith is there to record the time, he'll have to stay and listen, right? See - I'm not so dim after all.