I keep re-reading a single phrase in this quote. Tolkien is pulling apart what makes a “good” talk versus what makes a “real” sermon. Good takes human craft—skill, study, and standard virtuous effort. Those are things you can practice. But a “real” one, he says, relies on a gift from the outside, a moment where the Holy Spirit drops insights into a human mouth that the speaker doesn’t even personally own.
Then he cuts the legs out from the whole thing: “but the occasions are rare.”
On the first pass, it sounded grouchy, like a harsh “fruit inspector” sitting in the back pews judging the local clergy. But the more I let the text sit, the more it feels like it might just be a dose of humility.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He was old-school before there was old-school. Part of the fun of reading his letters is figuring out what he means; he expressed himself in what our modern ears consider archaic. (I’ve been experiencing a bit of that generational friction myself lately, though my age gap is only twenty-some-odd years. But I digress…)
If a real sermon means a flawed human voice perfectly echoing a divine chord, you might be talking about a literal miracle. And the last time I checked, miracles, by their very nature, aren’t a weekly commodity.
We live in an age of incredibly smooth, manufactured spiritual content, where every talk seems optimized to feel like a life-altering revelation. Tolkien’s bluntness breaks the machinery (fitting, for a man who abhorred technology’s dehumanizing effect). He isn’t necessarily saying human effort is bad or useless; he seems to be drawing a sharp line between our management and a true movement of grace.
We can stack the logs, but we don’t own the lightning.