Facing up to my own narcissism

A sermon I gave in Oxford

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“Would I”, said the letter from the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, “like to give a University sermon?” Wow! I was not expecting that. For most of my life I have been an undiagnosed dyslexic and the sort of dyslexia I have stems from something called auditory processing disorder. This means I can hear all the sounds distinctly but there is a slight delay before I can make sense of them. Before all these fancy diagnoses came into vogue, I was merely categorised as ‘not very bright’. I had to accept the ‘not very bright’ label because the evidence was all there. I was slow to read, was a Mrs. Malaprop, and could not spell. I was certainly not of the calibre of pupil to go to university and certainly not Oxford. My parents thought that a good idea would be to get me married off to someone who did, so I was sent to a Secretarial College in Oxford, known locally as the Ox and Cow. Sending a dyslexic on a shorthand and typing course before the invention of spell check would, in my estimation, fall into the category of ‘not very bright.’ Nevertheless, I did a bright thing. To help me escape from this torture, I put my arm in a sling so I did not even graduate from that illustrious college. Despite the shortcomings of my education, I’ve held down jobs, got a degree, become a psychotherapist, written academic papers and books, been given an honorary doctorate, made documentaries, podcasts and radio shows and had a weekly column in a national newspaper. And now I’ve got a growing Substack!

Dr Phil 👆

I make a living from the words that used to be my torture. But despite this apparent success my pride is still wounded from that early “not very bright” label. So, when I was asked to give this sermon, I accepted, not because I had wisdom burning me from the inside that I had to impart, not because I wanted to help out, no, I just did it for retribution. I wanted to show my now dead elementary school teachers that maybe I was just a tiny bit bright if I was given the honour of being asked to give a sermon AT OXFORD. I said YES!

Then I learnt that I was to make my sermon on the sin of pride and I thought how ironic is that?