The Thing I Have Never Been Able to Say

It was a Thursday night, which she mentions because Thursdays were not usually anything.

Fourteen years ago. A midweek meeting with maybe forty people in it, in a building that has since been knocked down and replaced by flats. There was no visiting speaker. Nothing was going on. She had come because she had come every Thursday for two years.

And something happened to her at the front of that room that she has never told one single person.

Not because it was shameful. There is nothing in it anybody would need to be protected from. She has simply opened her mouth to tell it four or five times over fourteen years, twice to people she would trust with her life, and every time the first sentence has been so far short of it that she has stopped and turned it into something else.

She can tell you the room. She can tell you the carpet and the fact that somebody's phone went off. Those bits go into words fine.

What happened in the middle of it does not.

And here is what has been growing on her, quietly, in her forties. If she cannot say it, did it happen? Because everything else real in her life has survived being described. Her marriage goes into words. Her mother's death goes into words, badly, but it goes. Fourteen years and this one thing has never once made it out, and she has started to wonder whether that is because there is nothing there to come out.

She has never said that out loud either.

Paul had one of these and could not tell it either

Let me deal with the fear straight on, because it has had fourteen years of quiet and it needs answering out loud.

The fear is that unsayable means unreal. That anything genuine would have found a way out by now, and the silence is a leak in the story rather than a property of the thing.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: what happened on that Thursday is not less real for never having been said. That is not my kind reading of your forties, it is what stands written in Paul's second letter to Corinth, where the apostle describes something that happened to him and states plainly that it could not be put into words, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that passage was in a building that is flats now.

Read how awkwardly he handles it, because the awkwardness is the point.

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.2 Corinthians 12:2-4

Fourteen years ago. He counts, the way you count.

I do not know, God knows. The apostle cannot give an account of the basic circumstances.

Inexpressible things. Not things he chose to keep private. Things that do not go into language, and he says so in writing, to a church that was actively questioning whether he was the real article.

So this is yours right now rather than pending your ability to produce a narrative: the untold thing is intact. The written word puts an unsayable encounter in the life of the apostle who wrote most of the New Testament, and the Spirit of God is the one who gave it and the one who has kept it in you for fourteen years without a sentence to hold it in.

Now let me name what you have actually been doing every time you started, because it is worth seeing.

You open your mouth and the first sentence is so far short of it that you stop. That is not failure. That is a person refusing to hand over a smaller version, and it comes from reverence rather than from doubt, even though it has felt like doubt in your forties.

And here is the guard, because this is where a piece like this could go badly wrong.

Nothing here makes an unsayable experience into a credential, and nothing here makes it a foundation. Paul goes straight from that passage to talking about a thorn and about weakness, and he never once builds an argument on the third heaven, and he tells the whole story in the third person as though it happened to somebody else.

What you know about God, you know from what He has said, and that is public and testable and written down and belongs to everybody. A Thursday is not doctrine and it never was. What is written is the ground you stand on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who occasionally gives a person something extra that they will be carrying alone.