There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday about this being commencement speech season and there was an accompanying photo of Oprah Winfrey. Oprah spoke at Harvard (of course) and talked about how most of the 35,000 people she interviewed through the years wanted to be validated, no matter their fame. There are lots of young grads from Harvard who have received a fair amount of validation in order to get there in the first place, but hey, Oprah has a point.
The Post article used the term "speech amnesia" to describe the reality of forgetting what a commencement speaker says almost immediately. I have heard a fair number of commencement speeches through the years, including several for my kids. The best ever was by Oscar Peterson who played at my wife Ruth's commencement. His fingers did the talking. I heard a few as the interim chaplain at Dalhousie and while some were quite good, it is cruel and unusual punishment to say a blessing, then have to sit interminably while hundreds of strangers traipse across the stage.
I can't be too glib about this because preachers do their approximation of a commencement speech every week. We would like to brilliant on a regular basis, but would settle for insightful and God-focused with at least some humour and a nugget or two for the road. Do people remember what we say? Sometimes. Sometimes a lot, and other times very little. Sermon amnesia. There are times when folk quote back things I never said!
Rather than grow discouraged I like to think that it is along the lines of being regularly nourished by wholesome meals, even if we don't remember every one. If we stay spiritually healthy that's the sign we were well fed.
Are you inclined toward speech/sermon amnesia? Do orators still inspire? Is there much point to speeches and sermons in a time of sound bites?
2 comments:
I find orators to be especially inspiring! With so much technology in our faces, and everyone seemingly plugged in at every opportunity, I find myself backing off from these gadgets and making a concerted effort to speak with people face to face. And you can't replace listening to an inspiring speech with any technology.
I tend to agree with Roger on this one. That being said, it really does depend on the effort put into the written speech. I have heard some pretty horrible ones that were clearly recycled and/or thrown together without a lot of thought.
Highly recommend that everyone reads The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch if you haven't already. I know that it was a lecture vs a "speech", but he has inspired so many and that could never have happened if he kept those thoughts to himself.
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