Somebody Left the I Empty

Ari is the one people ask when they need something said properly.

He has a card index. An actual one, in a wooden drawer, started when he was twenty-six because he kept losing scraps of paper. Quotations, mostly, and lines out of poems, and about four hundred cards that are just a sentence he heard somebody say.

He has written eleven wedding readings for people who could not choose one. He has been asked twice, by families outside his own, to find something for a funeral, and both times he found the right thing in under an hour and both times the family said afterward that it was the thing that got them through.

He is very good at it. He would tell you it is not a gift, it is a filing system, and he would be being modest and also about forty percent right.

And in the February something happened to him, and he could not find one word.

Not for a card. For himself, in his own house, at his own kitchen table, in the middle of a night when he could not sleep and needed to say something to God and had absolutely nothing.

He knows twenty thousand sentences. He could not produce one.

He sat there for a while and then he did what he does, which is get up and go and look, and he went to the psalms, and he went the way he always goes, professionally, looking for something he could give to somebody.

And he stopped on one at about the fourth line, because it was saying his own thing.

Not the general shape of it. His. The specific complaint he could not have worded twenty minutes earlier, in an order he recognized, ending on a turn he would not have thought of.

And it was in the first person.

That is what got him, and it took him a while to be able to explain it to anybody. He was not reading about a man in trouble. He was reading a sentence with an I in it, and the I was empty, and there was nothing stopping him standing in it.

He read it out loud at his own kitchen table at ten past two, in the first person, without changing a single word.

And he said afterward, to me, in a way that took some getting to: "It was like somebody left the I empty on purpose."

Now let me ask you.

Who finds the words when it is you?

Because you might be the one everybody asks. Or you might not be, and you might simply be somebody who has never once had anything adequate to say about your own situation, and has assumed that this is a defect.

He borrowed one at the last moment of His life

Here is the verse, and then here is what was done with it.

Into Your hand I commit my spirit; You have ransomed me, O Lord, God of truth.Psalm 31:5

That is David, a thousand years before Christ, in trouble of his own, in the first person.

And on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, at the very end, the Son of God said the first half of that line out loud.

Sit with what that means for a moment, because it is not decoration.

He could have said anything. He is the Word. Every sentence in the language was available to Him, and He was in the most significant hour in the history of the world, and what He said was somebody else's line, from a songbook, in the first person, learned as a boy.

The last words of Christ were borrowed words.

So hear this said over you, at the kitchen table at ten past two with nothing of your own. You are permitted to say a line that somebody else wrote as though it were your own sentence, and that is not a lesser way of praying, it is what He did on the last afternoon of His life. That is written down in a Gospel, and it is the Holy Spirit who inspired the psalm in the first place and who brings it to a person at ten past two, which means the arrangement was designed and is not a fallback.

Now let me tell you why the psalms are in the first person, because most people have never had it explained and it changes how you read them.

They were written for public use. They are the hymnbook of a whole nation, sung by people who were not David, in situations that were not his, for a thousand years before Christ and two thousand since.

Which means the I was always going to be somebody else's.

It is not a diary that we are permitted to read over a man's shoulder. It is a set of sentences deliberately left in the first person so that whoever needs one can step into it. The vacancy is the design.

That is why the specific complaint fits your specific February. Not because David was writing about you, but because he was writing in a form that could be occupied, and three thousand years of people have occupied it, and the sentence has taken every one of them.

Let me guard something for you, because you are the kind of reader who will want it guarded.

Borrowing does not mean pretending.

You are not required to feel every word, and you are not lying if a line does not fit your Tuesday. The psalms are honest enough to include lines you will never need, and there is no obligation to manufacture a feeling to match a sentence.

Say the ones that fit. Let the others go past. That is how a hymnbook has always worked, and nobody has ever sung every verse of everything and meant all of it.

And the last thing, which is the one this whole category rests on.

You do not have to say it well.

Ari read it at ten past two in a flat voice with no expression at all, and it did what it did anyway. The Word says the word of God is living and active, and the activity is in it and not in the delivery, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old sentence land in a person at a particular hour.

There was a man five hundred years ago who called the psalms a little Bible, and said that in them you find every emotion a person can have set down in words, and that when he could not pray he would take one and pray it, and that this was not a lower form of prayer but the one the church has always actually used.