The altar in my attic

Every Monday morning of my 16 years of preaching, I’d slide open my filing cabinet to add another sermon manuscript to the archive. When I couldn’t stuff one more into the drawer, I’d take the stack of pages up the stairs into the attic, where I have bankers boxes of old sermons, and I’d cram my armful of manuscripts into another box—one more building block added to a monument for no one, just there in the darkness of my attic. I don’t know why I’ve saved them.

After my first sermon, I remember feeling awkward about throwing the papers away. So I left the manuscript—with all my scribbled thoughts and marginal notes that came after I printed a draft from my computer—in a folder on the desk. After my next one, I slid the pages into that same folder as if that were now the rule, an accidental office protocol with enduring storage implications. I haven’t once gone looking through those boxes in search of my final revisions—the marginalia scrawled with pen, the reworked paragraphs, the exact words I took with me into the pulpit. When I want to remember an exegetical insight years later, I just look at the drafts saved on my computer.

Nor have I put any thought into the preservation of all those purposeless pages. It’s more that, at this point, the act of tossing them into the recycling bin would feel like quite the statement, fraught with intention—as if I disliked my work, as if I felt like I had to repent of what I’ve preached, as if I didn’t want reminders of my profession.