Worn Smooth at the Corner

The bottom right corner of the front board is worn down to the card.

Not the spine, which is fine, and not the edges of the pages, which are foxed but sound. One corner, about the size of a thumbnail, rubbed through the cloth and down to what is underneath, because that is where her mother's right thumb sat for fifty-one years of Sundays.

There are things in it too. A pressed flower at 214 that has gone to almost nothing. A funeral card. A shopping list on the back of an envelope in her mother's hand that includes the word lard, which she cannot look at without something happening.

She got it in a bag with three other things after the house was cleared.

And it lives on the shelf in the kitchen, and about once a fortnight she takes it down and sits at the table with it and does not really open it.

She holds it. Mostly by the corner, which she is aware is not an accident.

And what she has been turning over lately, at seventy-one, is a question she would not know how to phrase to another person: what is it she is actually holding?

Because it is not her mother. She is quite clear about that. It is not God either, and she would be firm with anybody who suggested it was.

But it is not nothing, and a woman who sits at a kitchen table holding a book by one corner for ten minutes at a time is doing something, and she would like to know what.

The word dwells in people and comes out of them singing

Let me answer the question rather than admiring it, because you asked it plainly and it deserves a plain answer.

You are holding the evidence of something that happened over fifty-one years in a woman you knew better than anybody.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a nice thought: that corner is the physical record of the word of God living in your mother, because that is what the word does in a person and Scripture says so directly, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line was in a pew with a woman's thumb on a board for half a century.

Read what Paul says the word does, because he does not describe it as information.

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.Colossians 3:16

Dwell. It is a house word. Something that moves in and stays and takes up residence.

And notice the route it takes on the way out: singing. Psalms and hymns and songs, sung to God, in a group of people who are teaching each other by doing it.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better way of putting the question: what you are holding is the wear left by fifty-one years of that happening, because the written word describes itself as dwelling in people and coming out in song and the Spirit of God is the one who did the dwelling.

Now let me be exact, because you have been exact and you would spot anything less.

The corner is not holy. There is nothing in the card and nothing in the cloth, and if that book were lost in a fire the thing it is evidence of would be entirely unharmed, because what is written endures forever and the Holy Spirit does not keep anything important inside a binding. You have been right to be firm with anybody who muddled that, and this article is not going to muddle it now.

What the corner is, is a mark left by a Presence at work in an ordinary woman.

Fifty-one years of Sundays. Her thumb there while she sang, in a body, in a building, week after week, mostly not feeling anything in particular, in the ordinary way of a person who goes. And what is written says the word dwells and produces singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that in a person over decades whether or not anybody in the pew notices.

So when you sit at the table holding it by the corner, you are looking at a thumbprint left in the surface of your mother's life by God, and there is no reason on earth you should not.

And the whole rule, which is where this article stops: through, not at. The book is a book. What is written puts God at the far end of the line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman's attention moving along it rather than resting on the board.