The Second Verse Since June

He can do the first verse. He has tested it, alone, in the car, twice.

It is the second one.

The hymn is one they sang at his father's funeral in June and it was his father's, in the sense that everybody in the family associated it with him, and somebody chose it and it was the right choice and the whole room sang it.

The second verse has a line in it about the years and about being carried through them.

He got about four words in, in that room, with his father in front of him, and his throat shut. Not tears. Something more mechanical than tears: the words physically did not come out, and he stood there with his mouth open and the sound not arriving, and his cousin put a hand on his back.

It is August.

He has sung in that building six times since and every time the same thing happens if that hymn comes up, which it has twice, and it also happens on a slightly wider set of songs now: anything with years in it, anything about being carried.

He is a man who sings. That is the thing. He has always been one of the ones you can hear.

And what has started to worry him, quietly, is not the crying. It is that he has begun to work out in advance which songs are safe, and to scan the sheet before the service, and he has noticed himself standing further back.

They asked the question out loud

There is a psalm written by people who had been taken a very long way from home and were being asked, by the men who had taken them, to perform.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?Psalm 137:4

Take that where you are standing. You are not at fault for a throat that shuts. The word keeps the question, How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and never answers it, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved it for somebody like you.

That is a question and it is not answered anywhere in the psalm.

Now think about what it means that this is in the book. Somebody wrote down: we could not sing. We hung our instruments in the trees. And that piece of writing was kept, copied, sung, and canonized, which means God did not consider a person's inability to sing to be a failure that needed editing out of the record.

The psalm is not a rebuke of the people who could not sing. It is their voice, preserved.

So take this where you are standing, and know it is not my permission I am giving you, it is what is written: a shut throat is not a fault and there is a psalm in the book about it. His word records people who could not sing in a strange land, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that question in Scripture without answering it, because some things do not get answered, they get sat with.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote something like six thousand hymns between them, and they had a very particular theory about what singing does.

They believed the words lead and the feeling follows. That is why they wrote so many, and why they gave them to laborers and miners and people who could not read: because a person who sings a true thing often enough has that true thing in them, underneath, available on a night when nothing is available.

But here is what people forget about the man who wrote those hymns. He also wrote a great many about grief, and about dryness, and about not being able to feel anything, and he wrote them because he went through long stretches of exactly that.

The theory was never that the singer feels it. The theory was that the words are true whether or not the singer feels it, and that the singer is carried by them rather than the other way round.

Which means, and this is the part for you, that on a morning when you cannot get the words out, they are still true and you are still inside them. The room is singing them over you.

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

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the singing held people who could not sing.