The Same Six Words, Again

Nine years, and last month Thea caught herself saying the words while working out whether she still had potatoes at home.

Her mouth was going. The whole line, in order, in the right place, in the right tone, and somewhere behind her eyes she was standing in her own kitchen looking at a vegetable rack.

She has not told anybody. She went home and did not eat and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time and had a thought that frightened her more than the potatoes did: I think I have started to resent this.

Not God. She was careful about that, in her head, several times. Not God. The words. The same words, in the same order, in the same place in the morning, week after week after week, and lately the sound of them starting up has produced something in her chest that is very close to irritation.

And underneath the irritation is the accusation, and it has been sitting there for about a month now with its arms folded: if these words meant anything to you, you would not be bored of them. People who love something do not get bored of it. You have gone cold, and the proof is that a form of words you once wept over now sounds like a bus timetable.

That is the thing that actually needs answering this morning. Not the boredom. The verdict she has passed on herself because of it.

And you may not be Thea. Your version might not be a liturgy at all. It might be the grace you say at every meal, or the psalm your father read, or the four lines you have prayed over your children since the eldest was small. Somewhere there is a set of words you have said so many times that they have gone smooth, and you have started to suspect that the smoothness is a report on your heart.

I want to take that verdict off you, and then I want to tell you what the smoothness is actually for.

Twenty-six times, on purpose

Open the psalms at the hundred and thirty-sixth and read it out loud, and you will run into something that no honest person can explain away.

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His faithful love endures forever.Psalm 136:1

Then the next line ends the same way. And the next. And the next.

Twenty-six times in one psalm. The same six words at the end of every single verse, and this is not a scribe being lazy and it is not a poet running out of material. It was built like that on purpose, to be said in a room by people who would say it again next month, and the year after that, and after they had buried somebody, and after a good harvest, and after a bad one.

Nobody in that room was expected to feel it freshly twenty-six times in four minutes. That is not what it is for. It is a floor being laid, plank after plank, so that a person standing on it does not have to generate their own footing.

Here is what I want you to see about your nine years.

The words did not go smooth because you went cold. They went smooth because you have said them through nine years of an actual life. They were in your mouth the week your mother was ill. They were in your mouth on the Sunday you could not look at anybody. They were there when you were happy and could not have told you why, and there on the mornings you came in late and cross and sat at the back. What is written was given to a congregation to say back together, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding you up on it for nine years.

They did not change through any of it. You did. That is the entire arrangement, and it is not a fault in the design. It is the design.

A thing that holds still is not boring. It is a handrail. Nobody stands at the bottom of a staircase admiring the freshness of the handrail, and nobody wants a handrail that reinvents itself weekly, and the moment you actually need it you do not care in the slightest whether you find it interesting.

And I want to say something plainly here, because it would be easy to hear this as an argument against something, and it is not. There are people who meet God best in words that arrive new every morning, out loud, unrehearsed, straight off the heart. That is genuine and it is not a lesser thing and I would not spend a syllable arguing with it. A tradition that prays freely is not shallow. There is no competition running here.

This is simply for you, in your nine years, with your smooth words, holding a verdict you did not deserve. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit works through a form that does not move in exactly the weeks a person cannot move either.

Because here is the mercy in it that nobody mentions. If the words depended on your feeling, then on the mornings when you have no feeling you would have nothing. The whole point of a form that does not move is that it can be said by a person who is not up to saying anything.

You did not stop meaning it. You handed it over to your mouth so that your heart could go through a hard nine years without having to carry the words as well. Nothing written makes feeling the price of the words, and the Holy Spirit does not charge it.

That is not coldness. That is what being carried looks like from the inside, and it feels almost exactly like boredom, which is why so many faithful people quietly conclude they have lost something they have not lost.