I Kept It Rare on Purpose

He made the rule at thirty-two and he has kept it, which is the trouble.

Yonatan had watched something get worn out. A particular practice, in a particular community, done so often and so casually that by the end nobody in that room noticed it was happening, and he was young enough to be genuinely shocked and old enough to draw a conclusion.

The conclusion was: keep the good things rare and they will stay holy.

He applied it carefully, the way he applies everything. Certain readings he saves. There is a psalm he will not read except in specific circumstances, and there has been for nineteen years. There are two hymns he does not sing along to because he wants them to be able to do what they do. There is a practice he keeps for perhaps three occasions a year and guards fiercely.

He is fifty-one now.

And what he found in November, doing an inventory of the rule for reasons he could not have told you, is that he has taken the psalm out four times in nineteen years.

Four.

The two hymns he has not properly sung in a decade. The practice he guards has fallen to about one occasion a year because the circumstances he requires for it almost never assemble.

He has protected the holiness of things by making them so rare that he has effectively stopped having them, and he has been calling that reverence.

He is honest enough to say the next part out loud, which he did, in an empty house, in November: I have not been keeping them special. I have been going without.

And the worst of it, and the reason he is reading anything today, is that the rule worked. Those things did stay holy. They are exactly as potent as they were at thirty-two. He simply has not been in the room with them, and a starving man in a locked pantry is not a man with a full pantry.

And you may have your own rule. Yours may be about a place or a practice or a song, and it may have been made for a good reason, and you may have kept it far better than you meant to.

The invitation is issued out loud to whoever is simple enough to come

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since you were thirty-two and it was never yours.

Holiness is not something you protect by scarcity. It never was. Scripture has wisdom shouting an open invitation to come and eat, in the street, to whoever will, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your rationing, who keeps a thing holy. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy, and nineteen years is a long time to carry a rule you made in one bad year.

Now hear it, and hear who is being called.

Wisdom builds a house, prepares a meal, sets the table, and then sends her servants out to call from the highest point of the city. Not to an inner circle. Not to the ones who have arranged the right circumstances.

Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.Proverbs 9:5

And read the line just before it, because it names the guest list: let all who are simple come.

Simple. Which is not an insult in that book, and here it means the ones who do not know enough to be careful, the ones who have not built a rule, the ones who would just come in and eat because they were called.

That table is set and the call is going out. Right now, at fifty-one, in a house where the psalm has been read four times in nineteen years. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who prepared it, and He has never once made scarcity the condition of holiness.

Now let me be careful here, because this page could do harm and I am not going to do any.

Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything, or how often, or on what any tradition keeps for particular occasions. That belongs to them and it stays exactly where it is, and there is real wisdom in some of it, and I am not putting a view about it in your head.

And nothing here says the thing you saw at thirty-two was imaginary. It was not. You watched something become invisible through familiarity, and that is real and it happens and you were right to be shocked.

The point is only that you drew one conclusion from it, and there was a second one available, and Scripture takes the second: the answer to a thing going unnoticed is attention, not distance. His Spirit is the one who supplies the attention, and He has been calling in the street for nineteen years.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it as you would want it. The rule was reverence.

It was genuinely reverence at the start and it was not fear. What has happened since is only arithmetic: a rule that requires rare conditions gets applied less each year without anybody deciding, and after two decades the guarding has eaten the thing it guarded. His Spirit is not offended by nineteen years of careful protection and He was in that empty house in November.