The Words You Have Words I Stopped Hearing

Ewan has said the same twenty-two words at the end of his daughter's bed every night for eleven years, and one night in March she stopped him halfway through.

She is fourteen now. It is faintly ridiculous that they still do it and neither of them will be the one to stop, so it happens at the door mostly, quickly, on the way past, and it takes about nine seconds.

That night she said the words with him, the way she sometimes does, and then in the middle of them she said, hang on. What does that bit actually mean?

And Ewan stood there in the doorway with his hand on the light switch and could not tell her.

Not because he did not know. He knew perfectly well, if he thought about it, and after about four seconds he did think about it and gave her a decent answer and she said right, night Dad and that was that.

But he went downstairs and sat on the bottom step for a while.

Because what had actually happened in that doorway was this: he had been saying those words for eleven years, and he had not heard one of them in about four.

He does not say them badly. He says them warmly. He means them, in the way you mean the thing you say to somebody you love. It is just that the words have gone under. They come out in one piece now, the way a phone number does, and there is no longer any inside to them.

And it is not only that prayer. He has noticed it in the building too. He says the responses. He does not have to look. He gets to the end of a service and could not tell you a single sentence he has spoken out loud in the last hour, and he said several hundred of them.

He knows what he is supposed to conclude from this and he has read the articles. He is meant to be bored. He is meant to conclude that the familiar has gone stale and that what he needs is something fresh, something spontaneous, something in his own words, from the heart.

But here is the thing, and he has never been able to say it to anybody without sounding defensive.

He does not want new words.

On the nights that are actually hard, and there have been some, he does not want to find his own language. He wants the old sentence to be there and be exactly the same, and to be able to say it with his mouth while the rest of him is somewhere else entirely.

He just wishes he could hear it.

And you know this, because you have your own worn sentence. Something said at a graveside, or every Sunday, or at the end of a hard day for twenty years. You could say it in your sleep. Some part of you has begun to suspect that saying it in your sleep is a failure.

Wear is a record, not a fault

I am not going to tell you to swap them.

That is the standard advice and I think it is wrong, and worse than wrong, I think it takes something from people who cannot afford to lose it. If somebody has told you that the familiar words have died on you and you need to find fresh ones, and you came away feeling that your faith had gone flat, I would like to take that off you now.

The wear on those words is not damage.

There was a man who put the prayers into English so that a ploughman could say them, and set them at morning and evening so that they did not depend on anybody feeling like it, and drew the boundary of a parish around everybody who lived inside it rather than everybody who agreed. All three of those are the same idea, and the idea is this: a person needs words that are there when they have none of their own, and they need them to be the same words.

Look at what the most repeated poem in the world actually says, and notice who is doing the work in it.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not lack. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.Psalm 23:1

Every verb in it belongs to Him. He makes, He leads, He restores. There is no instruction in it. There is nothing in that psalm for the sheep to do, which is precisely why it can be said by a person who has nothing left, and it is why it has been said over more deathbeds than any other set of words in the language.

And here is what your repetition has actually been doing, all these years, while you thought nothing was happening.

You have not been wearing the words out. You have been wearing them in, and the written word is what says so, and the Holy Spirit has been doing the wearing.

There is a difference and it matters. A thing wears out when it thins and fails. A thing wears in when it stops being an object you are handling and becomes something your body simply knows. That is what has happened to your twenty-two words. They are no longer in front of you where you can inspect them. The Holy Spirit has taken a written line all the way in, which is why you can say them on the worst night of your life without assembling anything.

The reason you cannot hear them is that they are no longer coming at you from outside.