The Sentence He Has Never Finished

The tide is a long way out and the sand it left behind is ribbed and wet and holding the whole sky in strips.

He walks here most weeks. Not for the exercise, though that is what he says if anybody asks. The path runs along the top of the shingle for about a mile and a half and then there is a gate, and he turns around at the gate and comes back. He knows every plank of the boardwalk section and which one is loose.

There is a sentence he starts out here.

He has started it hundreds of times. He gets two or three words into it, sometimes four, and then it stops, the way a car stops when the road ends and there is grass. The thing is, I have been and then nothing. What nobody knows is and then nothing. He is not being coy with himself; he genuinely does not have the rest of it, and there is no hidden fact. There is something in him with a shape and a weight and no name at all, and it has been there so long it has become part of the architecture, and every attempt to get it into words has failed at word four.

He is fifty-two. He is good company. People like him and they are right to. At his daughter's wedding in the spring he made a speech people still quote, and he meant every word, and he was also carrying the nameless thing across that room like a man carrying a full glass through a crowd.

He has never said it to his wife. Not because she would not listen; she would. He has never said it to the friend he has had since school, or to a doctor. He has not said it to himself in the shower, where a person says everything.

Out here he gets furthest. Somewhere around the second groyne, with the gulls and the wet light and nobody within two hundred yards, he will open his mouth and get to I have been so and stop.

Today he stops at the same place. He stands there for a second with his mouth actually open, and then he closes it, and puts his hands back in his pockets, and keeps walking, and the sound that comes out instead of the sentence is not a word. It is one breath out, low, through the chest.

The gulls do not care. The tide is a long way out. He has forty minutes to the gate.

The groan arrives already read

Let me name it before I say one word about strength, because you will not name it and the sentence itself is not going to name it for you.

You are not evasive. You have tried, out here, more times than anyone would guess, and you have run into the same wall at word four every time, and then you have gone home and been good company. The trying is real. The wall is real. And the loneliness of it is a specific loneliness, because it is not the loneliness of having nobody. You have people. It is the loneliness of a thing that has never once been on the outside of you, in any form, in front of anybody, including you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You have been carrying something with no name, and a thing with no name cannot be handed over in words, because words are made of names.

Now here is the line I want under you, and hear which half does the work.

Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.Psalm 38:9

David wrote that in the middle of the worst psalm he ever wrote. The verse just before it says he is feeble and broken and that he has roared, and the word there is not eloquence. It is the sound a person makes.

And then look at what he says about it. My groaning is not hid from thee. Not my explanation. Not my account of myself. Not the finished sentence, which he does not appear to have either. The groan. The thing with no words in it. And what he says about that wordless thing is that it is not hidden, which means it is already fully read, entire, in front of God, right now, without one syllable of it ever having been successfully spoken.

You are known in the part you have never managed to say, and you were read whole a long time before you started trying. That is not my sentiment. It is Psalm 38:9 exactly, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a groan and lays it over a man on a shore path who just stopped at word four.

Paul says it from the other side, about the Spirit Himself.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Groanings which cannot be uttered. Not which have not been uttered yet, as if you were behind on it. Which cannot be. There is a whole category of what is in a person that does not go into language, and God did not put language at the door and leave that category outside. He sent the Spirit in to carry it.

You have an Intercessor working in the exact register you have never been able to reach, and it is already happening while you walk. The written word says the Spirit makes intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, and the Holy Spirit is the One doing the carrying rather than waiting on you to find a way to say it.

The face is a structure, not a lie

Now let me be careful with something, because there is a version of this message that would do you harm and it is the version you are braced for.

I am not going to accuse you of pretending. You are not a fraud, and the man at the wedding making that speech was not a performance laid over an emptiness. He meant it. Both things were in that room and both were you.

The face you wear at the door is not a lie. It is a structure. Somewhere a long way back, something needed holding up, and you built a wall, and it worked, and it has been working ever since. Walls that work do not get taken down; they get built into the house, and thirty years later you cannot tell anymore which part is the wall and which part is the room. That is not deceit. That is how buildings happen.

And nobody is asking you to knock it down this afternoon. I am not going to tell you who to talk to, because I do not know your life, and the last thing a man in your condition needs is one more task he can fail at by six o'clock.

You are already fully known without a single demolition, and you were never asked to explain yourself as the price of it. Psalm 38:9 puts the groaning in front of God with no translation attached, and His Spirit is the One who keeps it there whether or not it ever reaches another human being's ear.

And I am not handing you the rest of your life. I have nothing to say about the next thirty years or the conversation you may or may not ever have with anybody. What I have for you is the rest of this walk. The forty minutes to the gate, the wet sand, the loose plank, the gulls.

You have strength for the walk back, and it is His and already given, and it is not conditional on your finding the words. That is Psalm 38:9 in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it off the page into a body that has been trying to say one sentence for twenty years.