The Song I Stopped Hearing

She sang the whole thing and could not have told you one line of it in the car park.

Not a wandering mind, or not only that. She was there. She was standing, she was singing, her mouth was making the correct words at the correct time, and she was even, in some low sense, meaning them.

And afterwards, going to the car, somebody said something about that second one and she had to run it back in her head to work out which one they meant.

She has sung that song, she reckons, four hundred times. It was the song at the retreat when she was nineteen. It was the song after her grandmother. It was the song they played at the thing in March, and she sang it that day the way you sing when you cannot see.

It goes past her now.

That is the honest description and she has been avoiding it for months. It goes past the way a road goes past when you have driven it every day for six years: you arrive, and you are not aware of having driven, and you could not describe a single junction.

She has begun to draw a conclusion from this and the conclusion is about her.

That she has become dull. That something has calcified. That the girl of nineteen with her hands up at the retreat had something that a woman of thirty four singing correctly in the fourth row does not, and that whatever it is has been quietly leaking out for years and she did not notice until it was gone.

Last Sunday she deliberately did not sing, for a whole song, to see whether the not singing would feel like anything.

It did not. And that frightened her more than any of it.

Songs in the house of my pilgrimage

Sit down here a minute, because there is a line in the long psalm that describes exactly what a worn song is for, and it is not what anybody told you.

Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.Psalm 119:54

A pilgrimage. A long road, walked over years, with the same few things carried on it.

And what he says he made songs out of is not experiences or moments or high points. It is the statutes, the settled things, the words that do not change, and he sings them in the house of a journey that is not over.

Songs on a long walk work in a particular way. They are not for the first mile, when everything is interesting and nobody needs one. They are for mile eleven, and mile nine hundred, and the ones you know without thinking are the only ones that are any use by then, because at mile nine hundred nobody has the capacity to learn anything.

Hear this in the car park. You are not going dull, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the familiar words in the mouth of somebody a long way into a journey and calls that ordinary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put those four hundred repetitions into you where you can reach them without looking.

Now let me name what is actually happening, because the description you gave is right and the conclusion is wrong.

You have gone from hearing a song to holding one, and the written word calls that the songs of a pilgrimage rather than a decline, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the putting in. It is what happens to everything a person genuinely learns. A thing you have to attend to has not gone in yet. A thing you can do without attending has.

That is why you were frightened when the not singing felt like nothing. You thought the flatness was the reading. The flatness is what the Holy Spirit leaves behind when a written word has gone all the way in, and it is exactly what allowed you to sing at your grandmother's funeral without being able to see the page.

You did not lose anything in March. You spent it.

Hear this too, and let it come off you. You are not further from God at thirty four than you were at nineteen, and Scripture is what says so. What is written locates the songs in the house of the pilgrimage, and the Spirit of God has been in every one of the four hundred, and a woman singing correctly in a fourth row is not a woman at the end of anything.

And now the small mercy, which is not a technique for feeling it again.

I am not going to tell you to find new songs, and neither does the written word, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for novelty. That is the reflex everybody reaches for, and it works for about six weeks, and then you have a shallower version of the same problem and one less thing that goes all the way down.

What is available is slower and better, and it is what the written word does with a settled sentence. Take the line you have sung four hundred times and say it, once, out loud, with a full stop after every phrase. Not sung. Said, at walking pace, in a room, so that each part of it has to land on its own before the next one is allowed, with the Holy Spirit doing the landing.

You will not feel nineteen. You will hear the words, most likely for the first time in about four years, and hearing is not the same as feeling and it is more durable.