A Hymn That Would Not Mean Anything

At twenty to seven she is wiping a counter that was already clean when she came downstairs.

The cloth goes around the ring the coffee pot leaves, then along the edge, then back around the ring. The kettle is on and she is not making anything with it. Outside, the streetlight at the end of the drive is still burning and the sky behind it has gone the color of weak tea.

And she is humming.

She has been humming the same hymn for eleven days. It started in the corridor outside that office, somewhere between the door closing and the car, and it has not stopped since. Four lines and a turn at the end of the third. Her grandmother used to sing it at the sink with her hands in the water, and she knows every word, and every word has gone completely flat.

That is the part she has not said out loud to anybody. The hymn is still there. The meaning has left it.

She sings the line about the rock and it is a sound her mouth makes. She sings the line about being led and it lands on the counter like a plate. Somewhere behind her ribs there used to be a woman who felt something when that turn came around, and this morning that woman is not answering.

Six forty-one. Upstairs an alarm goes off and gets slapped quiet. In forty minutes she will make two lunches, find a permission slip, and say something ordinary at the door. She is functioning. Three people this week have told her how well she is doing.

The cloth goes around the ring again.

And under her breath, without deciding to, she starts the four lines from the top.

That is you. Not the counter, maybe. Maybe the car at a red light, on the third verse of something you have known since you were nine. Maybe a corridor where a vending machine hums and the chorus keeps arriving like a bird that will not leave the window.

You know every word of it and not one of them will open.

Let me say the first thing before anything else, because I think you have been standing there for eleven days waiting for somebody to say it. This is not a failure of faith. The words did not stop working because you stopped believing them, and the flatness is not a verdict on you.

And I am not going to tell you why this happened. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I have not brought you one.

The hymn is not the thing that is failing

Notice something about the psalm your grandmother's hymn came out of. The man writing it is not singing well either.

He says he is calling from the end of the earth, which is not a location. It is a description of how far away everything looks from where he is standing. He says his heart is overwhelmed, which is a word for water coming over the top of something. And out of that he asks for one thing, and it is not a better mood and it is not a firmer grip.

From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.Psalm 61:2

Lead me. Somebody else does the leading. He is the one being taken.

You are held this morning by something that was never the hymn. That is not my opinion offered kindly: Psalm 61:2 puts the rock outside the man and above him, which is the entire reason it can be a rock at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the warmth of your singing, who keeps a person fastened to it on a morning when the singing does nothing.

Notice what he does not ask for. Not to feel the rock, not to describe it afterward. He asks to be brought, which is what happens to somebody out of navigation.

You have a footing under you that eleven days did not touch. The written word says higher than I, and higher is a word about elevation and not about effort, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a written line bear weight in a kitchen before the sun is properly up.

Shock does this. The music goes on and the response to it does not, which is an ordinary thing a shaking does to a body and not a spiritual diagnosis. If the flatness frightens you, tell your doctor, the way you would tell them anything else your body started doing.

You were carried through every one of those eleven days, including the four you cannot account for. Scripture keeps putting it that way round, a shelter that covers and a wing that spreads (Psalm 61:4), never a person who held on impressively, and the same Spirit who was in that corridor is in this kitchen at twenty to seven.

Lead me is the whole prayer

There is what you can feel and there is what is true, and in the last week and a half those two became one measurement. That is what a shaking does. When the floor moves, everything sitting on the floor moves with it.

The feeling was on the floor. The confidence was on the floor. The sense that a familiar hymn would do what it has always done, that was very much on the floor.

The rock was not on the floor.

You are not required to feel the rock in order to be standing on it. The psalm is written by a man who says outright that his heart is going under and in the same breath calls God a shelter and a strong tower (Psalm 61:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both of those true at once in one person, without either canceling the other.

And see what happened at that counter without anybody noticing. She hummed it anyway. Eleven days of nothing coming back, and her mouth went on making the shape of it.

You have already prayed the whole prayer today, and you prayed it with a cloth in your hand. Lead me is the entire content of Psalm 61:2, and the Spirit is the one described as carrying a groan that never became a sentence, which is exactly what four flat lines over a countertop are.