I Can Talk About It as Long as It Is Not True

She is very good on the subject. That is the trouble.

She can talk about cathedrals and light and the architecture of a psalm. She can be interesting about hymn tunes and about why the King James cadence does something to a room. She has said the sentence there's obviously something in it, culturally more times than she can count, and every time it has gone down beautifully, and nobody has ever laughed at her.

What she cannot do is say I believe this, out loud, in the present tense, about herself.

She got close once, in a studio, late, three of them left and the good kind of tired. Somebody asked her a real question, gently, no edge to it at all. And she heard herself take the exit: oh, I find the whole tradition fascinating. And the conversation carried on happily, and she went home and sat on the end of her bed with her coat still on.

Because she does believe it. That is the thing. She has never once not believed it. She simply cannot get it out of her mouth in the first person, and she has started to wonder whether a faith you can only discuss in the third person is a faith at all.

That is your studio. That is your bed. And I want to answer that, because there is a man in the Gospels who was not eloquent about it either, and what he said has been kept for two thousand years.

The one honest line

A crowd has just walked away from Jesus over a hard saying, and He turns to the twelve and asks whether they want to go too. Peter answers, and it is not a confident answer.

Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.John 6:68

To whom shall we go?

That is not a declaration of certainty. It is a question, and underneath it is something closer to helplessness than to conviction: I have nowhere else. Everything else I have tried does not have this in it.

And notice what happens to that sentence. It is not corrected. It is not upgraded into something more impressive. It is preserved, in the record, as the answer of the man who would lead the whole thing, and it stands as faith.

You have faith that is already the right shape. Not a thinner version awaiting the real one. The written word keeps a bare, unrhetorical answer as the model rather than editing it upward, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman sitting on a bed with her coat on.

Now let me say something about the person who asked you the real question, because the evening has begun to be recast as a trap.

There was no edge in it. They asked because they were interested in you, at eleven at night, when people ask better questions. They are not testing anybody, and if you had answered honestly they would have listened, and if you never do they will still like you.

You have nobody to guard yourself against in that studio. The written word does not make honesty a defensive operation. The Holy Spirit is in that room with all three of you, and He is not standing behind you against anybody.

And now the fear itself, which is not really about words.

It is that the words are the evidence, and that if you cannot produce them, then whatever is in you is not the real thing.

Peter's sentence had no evidentiary quality whatsoever. He could not explain it, he did not sound sure, and he had no argument. He had the fact that there was nowhere else, and Jesus took it.

You are not disqualified by your own inarticulacy. Thou hast the words of eternal life, and it is His having them rather than your producing them that the verse rests on. The Holy Spirit has been holding this in you through every evening where you took the exit.