Too Large For The Sentence

Her son asked her at eleven at night, in the kitchen, with the fridge door open and his back to her, and he was not being clever.

That is what made it worse. He was seventeen and genuinely curious and he had clearly been thinking about how to ask for a while, because he did not look at her while he did it. He said, "What do you actually believe? Like, if you had to say it."

And she heard herself do it.

She heard her own voice produce a small, tidy, entirely correct paragraph. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It was not wrong. She could have written it on a card. And she watched it cross the kitchen and land in front of him as exactly what it was, which was a small tidy paragraph, and she saw him nod politely, and take the milk, and go upstairs.

She stood there afterwards with the fridge still humming and thought: I have just described the sea to him as a large amount of water.

She lay awake about it. Not because he was unimpressed. Because she had said the thing she would die for, out loud, to the person she loves most, and it had come out the size of a leaflet. And underneath that, quietly, the fear that has been coming and going for about three years: if that is all that comes out when I open my mouth, is that all there is in there.

You have had that kitchen. Maybe it was a colleague, or a form, or somebody at a funeral asking you what you thought happens next, and you heard the enormous thing you carry go through your mouth and arrive on the table looking like a pamphlet.

I want to say something about that gap, because you have been reading it as a report on your faith, and it is not. It is a report on sentences.

The gap is in the design

Paul, in the middle of the greatest chapter he ever wrote, admits the same problem and puts it at the very top of the system.

In the same way the Spirit also comes alongside our weakness. For we do not know what to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Look at where he locates the wordlessness. Not in the beginner. Not in the poorly taught. At the level of the Spirit's own praying inside a believer, the deepest and truest intercession happening anywhere in a human life, and it comes out as something that will not go into language.

Too deep for words. Not too vague. Not too woolly. Too deep. There is a difference and everything hangs on it, and it is what is written rather than anybody's consolation.

Because if the Spirit Himself does not run everything through sentences, then the gap you noticed at eleven at night is not a symptom. It is the shape of the thing. You were trying to pour an ocean through a funnel and then judging the ocean by what came out the bottom.

Now the other half, and I want to be firm about it, because there is a lazy version of this message that would leave you worse off.

A mystery is not a fog. The tradition that has held this most carefully for the longest time is not the vague one. It is the one that says the same words on the same days for century after century, that hands children a creed to learn by heart, that will spend an hour on a single clause and mean it. It holds the mystery precisely because it has built a very exact fence around it. The fence is not the fire. But you do not get to keep a fire in an open field.

So none of this is permission to stop learning, and none of it excuses knowing nothing. Go on learning the words. Say them carefully. Get them right. The creed is not a rival to what you cannot say. It is the wall that keeps what you cannot say from evaporating into whatever you happened to feel this year.

And then there is the other way it travels, which is the older instinct of this house.

There is an account the tradition has kept, of envoys sent out to look at the faiths of the world and report back. What they said about one service they attended was not an argument at all. They said they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. That is a story the tradition tells about itself, and I offer it as that rather than as a chronicle you could check. But notice what it claims, because the claim is the point: what carried them was not a case that had been made. It was something they stood inside and could not describe afterwards, and it changed what they did next.

That is what your son actually got, by the way. Not the paragraph. He got twenty years of a woman who prays in a kitchen and keeps going. The paragraph was the smallest and least interesting thing in that room, and he was not learning from it. What is written puts the wordlessness at the highest level of praying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prays there.

You have not lost it. You have run into the edge of what a sentence can carry, which is a fact about sentences, and which the highest praying in the universe runs into as well.