She Cannot Say Amen

Eight chairs in a ring in the side room, close enough that everybody's knees nearly touch, because eight chairs is what fits once the table is folded against the wall. The radiator ticks. There is a plate of cookies on the windowsill that nobody has touched in four years of Tuesdays and that somebody still brings.

She is in the same chair she always sits in, second from the door.

They go around. The older man on her left prays for his sister's operation, in the same steady voice he has used since before she joined, and when he finishes there is that half second of settling and then the room says it together. Amen.

Her mouth does not move.

She notices it happen the way you notice a stair that is not there. Everybody else's lips make the shape. Hers do not. She turns it into a small cough, and then she is furious with herself for the cough, and the woman across the circle smiles at her the way people smile at a cough.

When it comes to her, she prays. And she prays well. She prays for that operation by name and for the sister by name, for the girl doing exams, for the family in the apartment with the damp, for the man who is not here tonight and has not been for a month. She holds the list in her head the way she has held it for eleven years. Her voice does exactly what it should do. Somebody says yes, Lord, in the middle of it, the way they do.

And she comes to the end and she says, in the name of Jesus, and she stops.

The room fills in the last word for her. Seven voices. Amen.

She looks at the carpet, at the join where the two pieces meet under the leg of the chair, and she thinks the thing she has been thinking since the brown envelope came on a Thursday. She thinks: I asked You for that in this room. I asked You in front of these people. In April, in this chair, second from the door.

That is you, in the ring of chairs, praying for everybody with a whole heart and a closed throat. Or that is you in the car afterwards, or in bed at four, saying the thing to God that you would not want repeated.

I am going to tell you two things and then I am not going to move off them for the rest of this. Your faith did not break. And I am not going to explain to you why the answer came the way it came, because I do not know, and I am not willing to invent something and put God's name on it.

God kept the accusation in His own book

There is a psalm that opens like this, and I want you to notice not only what it says but where it is:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.Psalm 22:1-2

Read the second half of that again. Thou hearest not. A man says to God, out loud, in the songbook of God's own people, that God is not listening to him. Nobody edited it. Nobody added a footnote underneath explaining that he did not really mean it. It went into the book and it stayed in the book and the people of God sang it for a thousand years before the Son of God said the first line of it from a cross.

You are holding a sentence that God Himself decided to preserve. Psalm 22:1 is in Scripture because the Holy Spirit put it there and left it uncorrected, which means the thought you cannot say in a ring of chairs on a Tuesday has already been printed, published and sung in the house of God.

You have not been shut out of the room for what you are thinking in it. The written word does not treat a question as treason; it hands the questioner a microphone and keeps his words for the ages, and the Spirit who inspired that psalm is the same Spirit sitting with you in chair number two.

You were not abandoned in the hour that felt exactly like abandonment. I know it did. Psalm 22:1 is the honest report of how it felt from the inside, and the Spirit of God does not require a woman to revise her own report before she is allowed to come near.

You are praying at this moment, and it counts as praying. Roaring is the word the psalm uses in Psalm 22:1, and the Holy Spirit calls that prayer, so the silence where your amen used to be is not an absence of prayer, it is prayer that has stopped pretending.

Amen is not a grade

Amen means so be it. It is agreement. And a woman who has just been handed something she cannot agree to, and who will not say a word she does not mean, is not backsliding. She is being truthful in a room where truth costs something.

You are not being marked on the last word of a prayer. There is no verse anywhere that makes a syllable the price of access, and Scripture is full of prayers that end in a question mark, sustained the whole way by the Spirit who helps our infirmities and makes intercession when the words run out.

You have a God who does not flinch at the volume of your roaring. His word kept the roaring, printed it, canonized it, and the Spirit carried it down to a side room with a ticking radiator so that one woman would know she is not the first.