The Line I Dismissed at Twenty

Freya paid two pounds for it and put it in her bag quickly.

That is the detail she is embarrassed about and the reason she told me. Not buying it. The speed of the bag.

It is a prayer book. Not an old one, an ordinary one, off a shelf of them in a charity shop on a Wednesday, and she got it home and left it on the side for four days before she opened it.

She left that tradition at twenty and she left it honestly. There was nothing dramatic in it. She simply found, at twenty, that the set prayers felt like reading somebody else's letters, and that saying the same thing every week when she did not mean the same thing every week had begun to feel like pretending. She wanted to say her own words to God, in her own voice, out of her own life.

And she went and did that, and it was real, and it was good, and for eighteen years it was how she prayed.

Then last year happened.

It does not matter what. It is the kind of year that does not have one event in it, and by about the September she found that she could not produce anything.

Not doubt. Words. She would sit down to pray, in her own voice, out of her own life, and her own life had nothing left in it to say. And a person who has spent eighteen years praying spontaneously has no other gear, and by the November she had stopped trying.

So: a charity shop, two pounds, and into the bag quickly.

She opened it on the Sunday evening and went looking for a thing she half remembered from being about fifteen, and found it in four minutes, and read it.

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.

She had thought that line was dead at twenty. She could have told you exactly why, and her reasons were not stupid.

At thirty-nine she sat on the end of her bed with a two pound book and read it out loud once, and then again, and cried in a way she had not managed since about March.

Now here is the thing she said to me afterward, and it is the reason this article exists.

She said, "I feel like a fraud for both of them. For leaving, and for going back."

Songs for the road

Psalm 119 is a very long poem about the word of God, and in the middle of it there is one line that sounds like a throwaway and is not.

Your statutes are my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.Psalm 119:54

Your statutes. The set stuff. The written, given, fixed material, which nobody composed on the night and which arrived from outside the person praying.

Are my songs. Not my rules, not my curriculum. Songs, which is what you carry with you and sing at the wrong moment and get through a long stretch on.

In the house of my pilgrimage. Which is a way of saying: while I am on the road, in temporary accommodation, not yet home. In transit, in the hard bit.

So hear this said over you, on the end of the bed with a charity shop book. You are allowed to be carried by words you did not write, and reaching for them is not a downgrade from the years when you could produce your own. That is written in the psalm that praises the word of God more than any other, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a line alive in a person for nineteen years until the night they need it.

Now let me deal with the fraud feeling, because it has two halves and both of them are wrong.

You are not a fraud for leaving at twenty.

That was honest. You did not want to say the same thing every week while meaning something different, and that instinct is the opposite of hypocrisy. Nothing in this message says you should not have gone, and nothing here is about which way of praying is better, because there is no verdict here to hand down and I would not hand it down if there were.

And you are not a fraud for going back for one line at thirty-nine.

Because you did not go back to a position. You went back for a sentence, at an hour when you had none, and that is not a reversal, it is a person picking up a tool.

Here is what actually happened over nineteen years, and it is worth seeing clearly.

At twenty you had a great deal to say. Your own life was full of material and your own voice was working, and the set words felt like a coat that did not fit because you did not need a coat.

At thirty-nine you had nothing to say, and it was cold.

The words did not change. Your need did. And the reason those old lines survive across centuries is precisely that they were written for the cold end of that range, by people who were in it, and they sit unused and unloved through everybody's warm decades and are exactly where they were when somebody comes back.

Scripture says to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, and to teach and admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and it does not rank the composed against the given, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old sentence land in a specific person on a specific Sunday evening.

Let me say the last thing and it is the smallest one.

You do not have to become anything.

You are not obliged to go back to that tradition, or to defend it, or to make an announcement, or to work out what you now think about the eighteen years. You bought a book for two pounds and you needed one line and it held.

That is allowed to be all it is.

There was a man five hundred years ago who took prayers and songs that had been kept in one language by trained people and put them into the language of a household, precisely so that a person with nothing left could pick one up and use it. He was not trying to make anybody into anything. He wanted the words available on a bad night.