Thinking About The Oven

Twenty five minutes of singing and she can tell you, with some accuracy, what the oven was doing for all of it.

On at half past eight. In at nine forty, which was tight. The potatoes went round the outside, which they always do, and she was not sure about the fat and she thought about that fat through the whole of the second song.

Somewhere in the third one there was a thing about whether she had turned the timer on or only meant to.

The last song, which she loves and which she has cried through before, went past entirely. She sang it. Her mouth did the words. And she was, throughout, standing in her own kitchen doing arithmetic about a roast.

In the car she felt awful.

Not dramatically. The specific low grade guilt of a woman who has been at church and has not been at church, and who is now driving home to serve dinner to eleven people and cannot afford to feel anything anyway.

And here is the conclusion she has come to, quietly, over about two years of Sundays like this: she is not really a worshipper. Some people are. She is a person who thinks about ovens.

She has never said it to anybody. She would be embarrassed. But she has stopped expecting anything from the singing, and a person who has stopped expecting has already half left the room.

He had to tell his own soul

There is a psalm everybody knows the first line of, and almost nobody notices what kind of sentence it is.

Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.Psalm 103:1

Take that in the car. You are not a lesser kind of believer for having a mind that solves problems. The word has David commanding his own soul to bless the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a thing worship, and never your concentration.

That is a command, and look at who it is addressed to.

Not God. Not the congregation. His own soul. David is standing there instructing his own interior, out loud, which is a thing you only ever do when the interior is not currently cooperating.

Nobody tells their soul to bless the Lord while their soul is already blessing the Lord. You do not command something that is already happening. The verse is evidence, right there at the front of one of the great psalms of praise, that the man writing it had to talk his own insides into it.

So take this in your car, and know it is not my excuse for you, it is what is written: your soul lagging behind your mouth is the normal condition and it is written into the psalms. His word has David commanding his own soul to bless the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your concentration who makes worship real in a room.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds whose brother wrote something in the region of six thousand hymns.

And the reason he wrote them, and the reason those two put such enormous weight on singing, was not that they thought people arrived at church full of feeling. It was almost the opposite.

They were working among people who came off a shift, who could not read, who were exhausted and largely uneducated and who had nothing much in the tank. And the theory of the whole hymn project was this: the words carry the doctrine into a person, and the person catches up.

You sing what is true. The truth goes in through the mouth. Somewhere later, sometimes years later, on a bad night, it comes back up from underneath and you find out it was in there.

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 singing was one of the places the two of them met, whether or not anybody in the room felt like it.