Sixty Years Of The Same Verse

She learned it standing on a chair so she could see over the pew in front, and she was five, and she is eighty five now.

It is one verse of one hymn and it is about a fountain and about being washed, and it is old, and she has sung it in three church buildings, at two of her children's weddings, at her husband's funeral, and once, badly, on a bus.

She would tell you it is the truest thing she knows.

And this morning, in the same front room she has sat in for thirty one years, with the radio on and that hymn playing, she sang it and felt precisely nothing.

Not the first time. It has been happening for about a year and a half, more and more.

She is not distressed exactly. She is puzzled, and underneath the puzzlement there is a small cold worry that she has not said to her daughter, and it goes like this.

If the words used to move her and now they do not, then something has gone. And at eighty five, when a thing goes, you do not assume it is coming back.

She has begun to wonder whether what has left is the feeling, or whether it is the faith, and whether she would even be able to tell the difference from in here.

That is a serious question asked by a serious woman and it deserves an answer that does not pat her on the hand.

The words are a teacher

Paul writes an instruction about singing that says exactly what singing is for, and almost nobody notices the two verbs in the middle of it.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.Colossians 3:16

Take that in the front room. You are furnished already, thoroughly, over eight decades. The word says let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the dwelling on a morning with nothing in it.

Teaching and admonishing.

Those are the jobs. A hymn teaches. A hymn admonishes, which is an old word meaning it warns you and puts you right. That is what it is for, and both of those things happen whether or not the person singing is moved.

Notice what is not in that sentence. There is no line about how it should feel. There is no instruction to generate an emotion, and no suggestion anywhere that the value of the singing depends on the state of the singer.

The word dwells in you. Dwelling is a residency, not a visit, and a resident is there on the days you do not notice them.

So take this in your front room, and know it is not me being gentle with an old woman, it is what is written: the word of Christ is dwelling in you richly, right now, in a morning where you feel nothing. His word says teaching and admonishing, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the dwelling, and He does not leave the house on the days the weather is flat.

You have been using a teacher as a thermometer. That is the whole of the problem, and it is an easy mistake, and I would guess nobody ever explained the difference.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns, and their theory of it would have been familiar to your grandmother.

They wrote for people who could not read: miners, servants, farm laborers. And they were completely explicit that the hymn was a teaching instrument. It was how doctrine got into people who had no other route to it, and it went in through the mouth and stayed in the body and came out again years later.

They did not think singing was a way of measuring yourself. They thought it was a way of being furnished.

Which is why an eighty five year old woman who has sung one verse about a fountain for eighty years is not a woman with a failing thermometer. She is a woman who has been furnished, thoroughly, over eight decades, and the furniture is still in the house on a morning when she cannot feel the floor.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing more. He held both, and the hymn was how ordinary people carried the first one into old age.