The Same Hymns, Two Publishers

The box came out of her mother's house eight years ago and has been in the loft since, and Ruth knows exactly what is in it because she looked once, on the day, standing up, with the loft ladder still down.

Two hymn books.

One from the congregation her mother's people were in and one from the congregation her father's people were in, and the two buildings are on the same road, and the two congregations were one congregation until a particular year that everybody in that family could name and nobody ever said out loud.

The books have different covers and different publishers.

And they contain, as far as Ruth could tell standing on the ladder, more or less the same hymns.

Different order. A handful in one that are not in the other. But she opened them both at random four times and got the same hymn twice, and the second time she laughed, and the laugh came out wrong, and she put them back in the box.

She is sixty-two.

Nobody in the family has ever discussed it in her hearing. Not once, and this is a family that discusses everything, and that has strong opinions about a great many small matters and airs them freely at length.

There was simply a category of thing that did not get said, and she has never known who decided that or when.

What she has said, when asked over the years, by people who are only curious, is a smooth paragraph she is now embarrassed by. It goes: there were two congregations and it was a long time ago and there were reasons on both sides and it is all quite friendly now.

Every clause of that is true. She has checked.

And it functions, and she has known this for a while and has kept using it, as a way of getting to the end of the subject without anybody having to look at it.

And you may have a box like that. Or a paragraph like that, which you can say without thinking.

Lamentations says examine, not explain

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it a long time and it was never yours to smooth over alone.

You are not the keeper of the family's composure. You never were. Scripture in its most grief-stricken book gives an instruction about how a people handle their own history, and the verb is examine, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a paragraph that gets to the end of the subject, who makes that survivable. Set it down here on this porch. It is heavy and it has been over your head in a box for eight years.

Now hear it, and hear that the instruction is plural.

Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the LORD.Lamentations 3:40

Let us examine our ways.

Not defend. Not account for. Examine, which is a word about looking at a thing steadily and for long enough, and it is said by somebody sitting in the wreckage of everything he loved.

And notice both halves are us. It is a whole people looking at what a whole people did, and there is no arrangement in that sentence by which some of them get to hold the lamp while the others are looked at.

You are allowed to look at your own family's history. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes the looking bearable, and He has never once asked anybody to keep a smooth paragraph going.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the people who split were small people. They were not. They wanted the church to be one, they believed that was possible, and they gave money and years they did not have to it, and that fire is the reason your family has a faith to be awkward about.

And nothing here says the other congregation on that road was the one that went wrong. It does not. They have a box too, and Scripture in that verse does not sort a people into two groups and neither will I.

The point is only about the smoothing, and Scripture says examine and test, and His Spirit is the one who is present while a woman does it on a porch with two books open.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The laugh came out wrong on the ladder because it was not a joke.

Two books, the same hymns, two publishers. That is not funny and you knew it before you were down the ladder, and the wrong laugh is what happens when something true arrives and there is nowhere in the family to put it. His Spirit was in that loft and He has never once needed you to make it lighter.