Still In Her Rhythm

Her mother said the same thing over her at the front door every school morning for eleven years.

Not long. About twenty words. Both hands on the sides of her head, right at the door, and she can tell you where the emphasis fell and where her mother took a breath and the way the last word came down like something being set on a table.

She used to be embarrassed by it. Around thirteen she started opening the door first so the neighbors could not hear.

Her mother died four years ago and she can still say it at full speed with the exact rhythm, and she has done, alone, in the car, twice, and both times she had to pull over.

She has two of her own now. Nine and six.

And she has never said it over either of them. Not once, not part of it, not in four years.

She has thought about it about eleven hundred times, usually at the door with the bags and the shoes and somebody's homework and the whole morning coming apart. And every time the thing that stops her is the same thing, and it is small and stupid and it works every time: it would be weird.

She does not have her mother's voice. She would not do it right. Her nine year old would look at her.

So she says: have you got your water bottle, and: shoes, and: love you, go on.

And she stands at the door after they have gone and knows exactly what she is not doing.

A faith moves through named women and Paul says so out loud

Let me say the plain thing first and not dress it up.

You are not withholding anything out of neglect. Those children are loved, fed, listened to and sent out the door by a woman doing eight things at once. The thing you have not done is not a failure of love. It is one small door of nerve you have not walked through yet.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: what your mother put in you at that door is not a memory, it is an inheritance, and inheritances are for passing on. That is not my warm framing of a hard four years, it is what stands written in Paul's last letter, where he names two women and traces a young man's faith straight back through them, and the same Holy Spirit who moved him to write it is the one who kept twenty words at full speed in your body for four years after your mother died.

Read who he names, because he does not do this often.

I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.2 Timothy 1:5

First lived in your grandmother. By name. And then in his mother, by name. And then, and only then, in Timothy.

Paul is writing to the man he is handing his own work to, and when he wants to remind him what he is made of he does not point at a conversion or a conference. He points at two women in a house.

So this is yours right now rather than pending better nerve: you are the middle link in something the written word treats as one of the most serious lines of transmission there is, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been keeping that rhythm intact in you through embarrassment at thirteen and grief at thirty-eight.

Now let me deal with it would be weird, because it is the whole of what is standing in the way and it deserves a proper answer.

It would be weird. That part is true. The first morning you put both hands on your nine year old's head at the front door and say twenty words in your mother's rhythm, that child is going to look at you.

And then there will be a second morning, and by about the ninth it will simply be what happens in that house, and by next spring the six year old will complain if you skip it.

Everything a family does was weird once. Your grandmother started that prayer somewhere, in a kitchen, feeling exactly this, with somebody looking at her.

And you do not have your mother's voice. You have your own, and your children are not comparing. What is written is that these words are to be spoken to your children when you sit and when you walk and when you rise up, and the Holy Spirit does the work through the saying of them rather than through the quality of the delivery.

And the guard, because it belongs here as much as anywhere: nothing about this makes a house without a fixed morning prayer a lesser house. Plenty of children are prayed over in words invented that day and that is real. This is not the required form. It is simply the one that is already in your hands, and the one you have been putting down every morning for four years.