I Did Not Mean to Start Singing

Cheryl was in the family room on the fourth floor and she was not ready to be comforted.

That is the part that matters. She had gone in there to be on her own, deliberately, because in the corridor there were seven people from her family being wonderful and she could not take one more hand on her arm.

She sat down in a low chair the color of nothing and looked at a poster about handwashing and thought about the conversation they had just had with a doctor who was doing her best.

And after about four minutes she noticed that she was humming.

Not deciding to. Not comforting herself, because she would have refused to be comforted, and if you had offered her comfort at that precise moment she would have said something she would have had to apologize for later.

It had started in her chest, underneath, the way a thing does when it has been waiting.

It was one her grandmother had. One of the long ones, with a tune that goes up in the third line and does that thing at the end of the verse. She has not sung it since she was about twelve and could not have told you the words if you had asked her in the car park an hour earlier.

And she was furious.

That is the honest report and she has told two people since. She sat in that chair and thought: do not. I am not doing this. I am not being sung at by my own chest at half past four in the afternoon while that woman is down the corridor telling my brother the same thing she just told me.

And it kept going.

Someone came in for the water machine. An older woman, not family, another floor's worth of trouble on her.

She filled her cup and stood there a second and said, "That is a good one."

And Cheryl said, sharper than she meant to, "I did not mean to."

And the woman said, "No, baby. They do not wait for you to mean to."

And she went out.

Now let me ask you what started up in you.

Because something has. In a car park, or standing at a sink, or in a corridor with a water machine in it. Four bars of something. A line you have not thought about in twenty years. And you may well have been angry about it, and if you were, you are the reason I am writing this.

The singing goes on underneath the deciding

Paul gives an instruction about singing and it is worth noticing where he locates it.

Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.Ephesians 5:19

With your heart. Not with your agreement. Not with your understanding, and not with your permission.

The word he uses is the deep interior of a person, the part underneath the decisions, and he says the melody is made there. Which means singing, in Scripture, is not primarily an act of the will. It is something that happens in a place that is lower down than the will and that the will does not fully govern.

So hear this said over you, in the low chair the color of nothing. You are carried by words that do not require your consent to arrive, and the fact that you did not choose it does not make it fake. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in the sentence before it as the one who fills a person, and He does not appear to wait for a signature.

Now let me deal with the anger, because nobody ever does and it deserves it.

You were not being disloyal.

That is what it felt like, and I want to name it precisely. When a comforting thing arrives in the middle of something terrible and you have not finished being in the terrible part, receiving it feels like agreeing that the situation is all right. And it is not all right. And so something in you refuses, and then you are furious at the hymn, which is an absurd position to be in and is exactly where you were.

Here is what was actually happening.

The hymn was not telling you the situation was fine. It never once said that. Those old words are almost entirely written by people who were in trouble, and half of them are about a valley, and none of them claim that the valley is not a valley.

It arrived because it was in you. Not as an argument. As company.

And company does not require you to be ready. That is what the woman at the water machine understood and could say in five words: they do not wait for you to mean to.

Let me guard the thing this category always has to guard.

You do not have to be able to sing.

Cheryl was humming under her breath in a plastic chair and she got the third line wrong, and there is a bit in the middle she has never known and has always slid past. That is not a lesser version of it. That is what it looks like every time it matters.

And you do not have to know the words. Four bars is a whole hymn on an afternoon like that. Half a line is enough. The words that were put in you when you were nine went in with the tune attached, and the tune will carry the words up when your mind is entirely occupied elsewhere, which is the mercy of the arrangement.

The written word says God is the one who works in a person both to will and to work, and the Spirit of God brings things to remembrance, which means what came up in your chest did not come up at random and it did not come up from you.

You are not being managed. You are being kept company, by somebody who knew you would be in that room today and put the song in you in 1994.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote hymns specifically for people in trouble and said plainly that the devil flees from music, and that he had known times when he could not pray a word and could still sing one, and that the singing carried him until the praying came back.