I Talk to the Room When I Pass It

The photograph is on the second shelf by the door and it is not even a good one.

Her mother is at a table outdoors somewhere, squinting, mid-sentence, holding a cup. It is slightly out of focus. There are better pictures in the box upstairs and she has looked at all of them and none of them is this one.

Her mother died in the spring, three years ago.

And at some point in the second year she started saying things.

Not to the photograph. That is what she would want understood if she were ever asked, which she will not be, because she has told nobody. She does not stand there and address it. She goes past it on the way to the kitchen and something comes out of her, out loud, at ordinary volume: well, that was a day. Or: you would have laughed at that. Or, once, badly, after a phone call from the hospital about her aunt: I do not know what to do with any of this.

She says it to the room. She says it to the air about eighteen inches to the left of the shelf, if she is honest about where her eyes go.

And she has begun to be uneasy about it.

Not because anybody would mind. Because she cannot work out what it is. She does not think her mother can hear her and she is fairly clear about that. And it is not prayer, because prayer is a different thing that she does at other times and this is not that.

So there is a woman who talks out loud in her own hallway most days to a slightly out of focus photograph she is not looking at, and she has been carrying a small private question about it for a year.

The invisible has always been perceived through the made

Let me take the unease seriously first, because it is not silly and dismissing it would be no help.

You are not worried about being sentimental. You are worried about being confused. You want to know what you are doing when you do that, because you are a person who likes to know, and a habit that arrived without being decided on is uncomfortable to a mind like yours.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: what happens at that shelf is not confusion, and looking through something is not the same as stopping at it. That is not my kind reading of a year of unease, it is what stands written in the first chapter of Romans, where the invisible things of God are said to be perceived through the things that have been made, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that sentence has been in your hallway most days for two years.

Read what Paul claims is possible, because it is a large claim and he makes it without qualification.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.Romans 1:20

Clearly seen, and from what has been made. Two things held together in one sentence that people usually keep apart.

The invisible is genuinely invisible. And it is genuinely seen, and the seeing runs through made things, and Scripture does not treat that as second-rate seeing or as a concession to weak eyes.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a clearer account of yourself: you have not been doing something muddled at that shelf, because the written word puts real seeing of the invisible God through visible made things and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept your mother's out-of-focus face doing that work for three years.

Now let me say what is actually happening, as plainly as I can.

That photograph is not the thing you are looking at. It is the direction you are facing while you look at something else, and what is written puts the invisible God on the far side of visible things, with the Holy Spirit doing the carrying. When you say you would have laughed at that, you are not addressing a print on a shelf and you are not addressing the dead. You are standing in a particular direction and saying a true thing out loud, and the direction is the one your whole life with her is stacked in.

And underneath it there is a Listener, and He has been in that hallway the whole time. You said I do not know what to do with any of this out loud in an empty house after a hospital phone call, and that was heard, and it was heard by the One who has been waiting eighteen inches to the left of that shelf for two years.

Here is the guard, and it is where the whole category lives: through, not at. What is written puts God on the far side of made things and never in them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a person's attention along that line rather than stopping it at the glass.