Eleven Years Of Making It Hold

He came with two bags and a phone number written on the inside of a book, and that was eleven years ago, and the arrangement he made with himself in the first week has never been reviewed.

The arrangement was: I hold this.

Nobody else was going to. That was not self pity, it was arithmetic. There was no one here. The number in the book turned out to belong to a man who had moved. He got work in a kitchen and then in a warehouse and then in the kitchen again, and he learned the language off the radio and off a woman at the bus stop who was kind and never knew what she did.

He held it. Every part of it. Papers, rent, the letters he could not read at first and read anyway with a phone in his hand at two in the morning, the money going home every month without fail, his mother's health from four thousand miles away, and then a wife, and then two children, and then a lease, and then a car that was a mistake, and then his brother's situation which is not his to explain but which he has been holding as well since the spring before last.

He is thirty nine.

And here is what happened in June, and it took about four seconds and he has not been able to put it down.

He was standing at his own table on a Friday. The house was full. There were fourteen people in it, most of them his, and there was food on the table that he had paid for and cooked half of, and somebody was laughing at somebody, and the whole thing was warm and loud and good.

And he could not enjoy it. He was watching it. He was standing slightly apart from his own family with his hand on the back of a chair, checking it, the way a man checks a load on a trailer.

He thought: I have not put this down in eleven years.

Not the work. He does not mind work; he comes from people who work. The grip. He has never once let go of the shape of his own life, not for an evening, and he does not know how, and there is a real fear underneath it which he has never said in any language, which is that if he let go the whole thing would go soft and slide.

You know the grip. Yours may have started somewhere else and it may be shorter. But you know what it is to be the only thing holding a shape, and to have stopped being able to be in a room you are holding up.

Something was over the water first

Let me name the pit before the verse, because if it lands on the wrong thing it will become one more instruction to a man who is already carrying everything.

The pit is not the work and it is not the responsibility. Both of those are honorable and neither of them is being taken off you tonight. The pit is that in the first week of eleven years you concluded, correctly at the time, that if this life was going to hold a shape you would have to be the one holding it, and that conclusion was never revisited, and it has become the floor of everything. And a man cannot be present in a room he believes he is personally suspending.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Read the order of it. Formless. Void. Dark. And then, over it, before anything at all has been given an edge, the Spirit of God.

The word for that movement is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading itself over its nest and over its young. A bird over a nest, over something that has no shape yet and is not being asked to produce one.

And here I teach you the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb that sits beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a city. That is grammar and grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture reaches for a father's traits and a mother's both when it tells you who He is, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it. It does not make the Spirit a woman. It does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.

Take that with your hand on the back of the chair, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written. Something has been over your life since before you had a grip on it. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over the deep first, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over yours for eleven years, including the two in the morning with the letters and the phone.

And then one verse on, the whole answer to your arrangement.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

The shape came down. It did not come up out of the water. The deep was not asked for a plan, was not asked to organize itself, was not congratulated for holding on. It was brooded over, and then spoken to, and the order arrived from above.

You were never the thing holding this life in shape. I am not softening your eleven years; every hour of that work was real and it fed people. But the order came down, the whole time, and the grip was doing something else.