Public speaking freaks a lot of people out.
Jerry Seinfeld famously noted, “According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
The Irish, of course, have a traditional remedy for such stage fright.
All you need to do is kiss the Blarney stone.
High atop the parapets of the Blarney castle, just a few miles from Cork, tourists line up before a small block of limestone that was set into one of the castle towers sometime around 1446. According to legend, planting a kiss on that craggy surface (worn smooth by the lips of millions of previous visitors) bestows the gift of persuasive verbal eloquence.
It’s called “blarney.” In the words of Irish politician John O’Connor Power, “Blarney is something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humor and flavored by wit.”
How did a bit of humble geology come to have such powers?
On that subject there has never been consensus. Irish folklore insists that the goddess Cliodhna told Cormac MacCarthy, who built the castle, to kiss the first stone he found on the morning of an important court case, whereupon he pleaded his case with unusual eloquence and won. Other storytellers suggest that the rock is a chip off the famous Stone of Scone, long associated with the coronation of Scottish monarchs.
What everyone agrees is that kissing the Blarney stone requires a physical maneuver that is not for the faint of heart.
The stone is lodged in the middle of an exterior castle wall, approximately 100 feet above the ground. Would-be kissers must first climb dozens of steps to reach the top of the castle, then lean over backwards on the edge of the parapet.
In centuries past, it was crucial to recruit an assistant – someone whom you trusted very much, and with whom you had hopefully not had a recent quarrel. While you leaned back as far as you could go, the assistant would hold you tight by clutching your ankles, leaving your lips close enough to kiss the stone even while you dangled over the abyss.
All of this was considered sufficiently heart-stopping to induce the owners of the castle to install wrought-iron guide rails and protective crossbars in 1897 – although the experience still tends to take one’s breath away.
I learned that firsthand 12 years ago when I visited Blarney castle with my two brothers and concluded that the chance to ratchet up my eloquence was simply way too good to pass up.
Leaning backwards 100 feet above the ground doesn’t seem like a big deal – until you try it. While a castle-approved assistant secured my legs, I was left to wonder if all of that day’s previous kissers were up-to-date with their flu shots, and to ponder who in their right mind had ever thought this whole thing was a good idea.
The 2020 pandemic briefly shut down the world’s most contagious ritual. Today the Blarney staff declare that the stone is regularly treated with a cleanser “approved by the World Health Organization, which kills 99.9% of germs and viruses.”
So who, among the Bible’s human authors, would have apparently benefited the most from kissing the Blarney stone, thus receiving the gift of eloquence?
The answer – if you can believe him – is none other than the apostle Paul.
He writes to the church at Corinth: “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God” (I Corinthians 2:1).
The Corinthians were Paul’s most high-maintenance flock. They splintered into cliques, ran roughshod over the poor during congregational meals, and chafed under the call to sexual purity. Maddeningly, they played the comparison game with regard to Christian leaders.
They lauded traveling teachers who dared to call themselves “super-apostles” (see 2 Corinthians 12:11). Paul, by comparison, was regarded by some as a plainspoken country preacher who couldn’t keep up with the big boys, who were the Real Deal spiritually.
It drove Paul crazy. “For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing’” (2 Corinthians 10:10).
The irony is that Paul’s letters are masterpieces of ancient world rhetoric. When pushed into a corner, he can preach and teach and lecture and argue with the best of them.
But that’s not how he chose to share the Good News when he walked into Corinth.
“I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom.” Why? Because he didn’t want to introduce Jesus by resorting to “flattery sweetened by humor and flavored by wit,” as John O’Connor Power might put it.
Eloquence and fancy words may briefly hold someone’s attention.
But the Gospel is all about holding onto Jesus, and being held by him, in this world and the next.
That’s a gift we need to understand and accept by means of the simplest terms possible. No special insight, education, or pedigree is required to become a child of God.
And the best thing of all?
We don’t even have to be held by our ankles at the top of an Irish castle.
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