The Words Are Ahead Of You

The book is open in her hands at the right page and she has not made a sound in four minutes.

Everybody around her is singing. The woman in front has a lovely voice and knows it. Somewhere behind, a man is a semitone under the whole room and has been for thirty years and nobody has ever had the heart to mention it. It is a good room. It is not one of those cold ones. The heating works and the flowers are real and the boy on the keyboard is trying very hard.

And she is standing in the middle of it with the words in front of her eyes, and they are true, and she knows they are true, and there is nothing on the other end of them at all.

That is what frightens her. Not sadness. She could manage sadness. Sadness has a shape and you can put your arms round it. This is flatness, which is worse, because there is nothing to hold and nothing to weep about and no story to tell anyone afterwards. Somebody asks how she is and she says "fine, tired," and both of those are true and neither is the thing.

So she does what she has been doing since about March. She mouths it. Lips moving, no air behind them, eyes on the page. If you were three rows back you would think she was singing.

And afterwards, in the car, in the queue to get out of the car park, at a red light on the ring road with the indicator going, she hears her own voice say four words of the last verse out loud. Not decided. Not worked up to. Just her voice, in an empty car, saying a true thing to the windscreen.

And she stopped at the lights and thought: what was that.

You have been in that car. Maybe your version is a prayer you can no longer feel the bottom of, or a grace before a meal you have said eleven thousand times, or the third Sunday in a row where you stood up and sat down at the right times and went home hollow. And somewhere underneath it there is a fear you have not said out loud: that the numbness means it has gone.

It has not gone. And I want to show you which way round this actually works, because you have been holding it upside down and it has been very heavy that way.

The psalm talks to itself

Here is a man in Scripture doing the exact thing you are afraid to do, and he is doing it out loud, in a song, in the book of songs.

Why are you cast down, my soul? Why do you stir up a roar within me? Wait with hope in God, for I will again give thanks to Him.Psalm 42:5

Take that with the book open. You are held on a morning with nothing in it. The word has the psalmist asking his own soul why it is cast down, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the question in the book without an answer under it.

Look at who is being spoken to.

He is not talking to God there. Not in that line. He turns and speaks to himself, in the second person, the way you would speak to somebody sitting next to you on a wall. Why are you cast down. He interrogates his own interior and then he tells it what to do.

And he does not wait until he feels like it. The whole psalm is written by a man who does not feel it. He says his tears have been his food day and night. He says people keep asking him where his God is. He remembers going up with the crowd to the house of God with the sound of celebration and he says that remembering it is what breaks him.

And into that, in that condition, he says the true thing out loud to his own soul.

That is the direction. The words go first. The feeling comes along behind at whatever pace it can manage, and sometimes it does not come along for a long time, and the man in Psalm 42 is not rebuked anywhere in the psalm for that.

Because here is the thing nobody says plainly enough: a sung truth is not a report on your interior. You have been treating every hymn as though it were a statement about your current emotional weather, and so when the weather is flat, singing feels like lying. It is not a report. It is a confession, in the old sense, which means saying the same thing as God says, out loud, whether or not your chest has caught up.

This is the house you are standing in, by the way. A man once wrote down that his heart was strangely warmed at a meeting he had not wanted to attend, and everybody remembers that sentence. What almost nobody remembers is what came next, which was not a feeling at all. It was rules, timetables, small groups, and an enormous amount of walking. And his brother wrote hymns by the thousand, and the point of them was never to describe how anyone was doing. It was to put true words into the mouths of ordinary people, miners and weavers and prisoners in cells, so that they would have something correct to say before they had anything correct to feel.

That is what you were handed. Not an emotion machine. A set of true sentences to carry in your mouth on the days your heart is not available.

So let me be exact about what I am not promising.

I am not promising that if you sing it you will feel it. That is not the deal. It has never been the deal, and the moment it becomes the deal, singing turns into one more thing you are failing at, and you have enough of those. You might feel nothing at the sink tonight. You might feel nothing for a month.

The truth of the line does not depend on your reception of it. That is the whole mercy. The words are ahead of you, out in front, going first, and they are not waiting for you to catch them up before they are allowed to be true.

So take this before the story, and know it is not my comfort: you are held on a morning with nothing in it, and the words are true while you cannot feel them. His word has the psalmist asking his own soul why it is cast down and getting no answer, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that so you would not read your own flatness as a verdict.