Where To Put My Eyes

There are eleven pieces and one of the sheep has been broken and glued since before he was born.

His abuela set them out on the low shelf on the first of December every year of her life, and she did it in the same order, and one of the kings went at the back where you could barely see him because there was not room.

She has been gone two years. His mother has the set now and does the same thing on the same date.

And he is forty-one and he stood in front of that shelf in his mother's front room last December, at about eleven at night, when everybody else had gone up.

And he did not know what to do.

That is the plainest way he can put it. He was not praying. He was not remembering, exactly, though there was some of that. He was standing in front of eleven carved pieces feeling something enormous and slightly unbearable and having no idea what the correct response to it was.

He thought about kneeling and felt ridiculous.

He thought about just going to bed and could not make himself leave.

So he stood there for about four minutes with his hands at his sides, feeling the way a man feels in a room where he does not know the customs, in his own mother's house, in front of a thing he has seen every December of his life.

The shepherds went to see, and what they saw was a person

Let me say the plain thing first, and it is the same thing this article will say at the end.

Nothing here is going to tell you what to do in front of that shelf. Not to kneel, not to stay standing, not to cross yourself or not to. That question belongs to you and your family and your own conscience, and a stranger who arrives with an instruction about it has overstepped badly. This is not that.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a way around the question: you were not lost in front of that shelf, you were at the start of a line and did not know you were allowed to follow it. That is not my kind reading of four awkward minutes, it is what stands written in Luke's second chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that page was in your mother's front room at eleven at night.

Read what the shepherds do, because they are the model here and their response is remarkably physical.

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about. So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.Luke 2:15-16

Let us go and see. And then: they hurried, and they found.

Their whole obedience is a direction of travel. They do not stand at a distance working out the correct posture. They go, and the going ends at a person, and the last words of the sentence are a baby in a feed trough.

So this is yours right now rather than pending the right custom: the line runs from those eleven carved pieces to a real person, because the written word ends the shepherds' journey at a child rather than at a scene, and the Spirit of God is the one who put something enormous in you at eleven at night in front of a shelf.

Now let me name what the four minutes actually were, because you have been reading them as a failure.

You were not confused about theology. You were moved and you had no action available, and a person with a large feeling and nothing to do with it will always feel like a fool. Nothing written condemns a man for that, and the Holy Spirit was the one who put the feeling there in the first place.

That is not a spiritual problem. It is a lack of a next step, and the next step is not a posture. It is a sentence.

Look at the pieces and then say something out loud to the One they are about. That is all. You came. You were that small. Thank You that she set these out for sixty years.

Four words in an empty room converts standing about into prayer, and it does not require you to kneel or not to kneel, and nobody but you will ever know whether you said it. What is written invites anybody to call on Him, and the Holy Spirit meets a sentence rather than a posture.

And here is the guard, and it is the whole of this category and the end of what anybody should say to you: through, not at. What is written puts a person at the end of the line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man's attention moving along it rather than stalling on the shelf.