The Language He Prays In

He wrote it at the kitchen table after the house had gone quiet, and he wrote it in the language he prays in, which is not the language he works in and never has been.

That was not a decision either. He started it in the working language and it came out like a form. So he began again in the other one, the one from his mother's kitchen, the one his numbers still come in when he counts something fast, and it went down the page in about twenty minutes and it was true.

Eleven lines. The first of them says: I know I have no right to ask.

He folded it twice and put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He has taken it out at the lights, in the stockroom, once on a bench outside the bank. It goes back in every time.

Today is his brother's house, which means twenty people and a table made out of two tables and a door laid across trestles. Rice, chicken, the good bread from the corner, three arguments running at once, a nephew asleep sitting straight up in his chair.

He goes out to the yard for air. The lemon tree in its pot, the folded chairs against the wall, the cat that belongs to nobody.

He takes the paper out and unfolds it and reads the first line, in that language, in his head. And he cannot get it into his mouth. Not in that one. In the working language he could say it the way a man reads out a delivery note. In the language he prays in it would be a real thing said by a real person in the room where his mother used to say things, and he cannot do it, so he folds it along the soft crease and puts it back and stands with his hand flat on the outside of the coat.

Behind him the kitchen door is wide open. All the noise is coming out of it, and all the light, straight across the yard and onto his back, and not one person inside has asked him where he has been.

You are the one in the yard with the paper folded in your pocket, and the speech is finished, and you have never once been able to say the first line of it out loud.

There was nothing wrong with writing it

Let me say the kind thing first, in case you arrived braced to be told the letter itself was the error.

It was not. Sitting down and getting eleven honest lines out of yourself is a real piece of work, and I would not make light of the night that produced them. The lines are true. They are well made. They are yours, and writing them in the language you pray in is the most honest thing in the entire story, because that is the tongue a person cannot be careful in.

The only trouble is the job you have handed the paper. You are carrying it as the entry document. Somewhere below the level of deciding, it has been decided that the welcome begins once the thing has been read out properly, and that until then a man stands in a yard.

You are already inside the welcome, and that folded paper has no bearing on it at all. Romans 8 says the Spirit carries what will not come out of our mouths, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you turning that page over instead of throwing it away, which is not how a man behaves when he is being kept outside.

He has been carrying it, unfolded, the whole time

Here is the verse, and it was written for the man by the lemon tree.

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

Which cannot be uttered. Not which have not been uttered yet. Not which will be uttered when the man finally gets brave enough. Cannot. Paul is describing prayer with no available words in it, and he does not describe it as a failure of prayer. He describes it as the point at which the Spirit Himself takes the thing up and carries it into the presence of God on our behalf.

So consider what has actually been happening while that paper sat folded in a coat.

Every line has been in front of God already. Not because it got delivered. Because the Holy Spirit, who knows the language you pray in and the wordless place underneath that language too, has been carrying the whole of it, unfolded and uncreased, from the night it was written.

You have already been heard, entirely, including the part that will not come out, and the hearing never waited on your delivery. Romans 8 says the Spirit intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered, and He has been doing that for you at a set of traffic lights, in a stockroom, and on a bench outside a bank.

The letter was never undelivered. It was only unread by you.

The word He puts in a returning mouth

Now look at what the same chapter says comes out of a person instead of a speech, because this is the part that undoes the whole problem.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Abba. One word, kept in the original, left untranslated in a Greek letter, because the whole point of it is that it belongs to the family and not to the office. It is the word a small child uses. It is the word in the home language.

That is what the Spirit of adoption produces in a returning mouth. Not a well ordered account. Not eleven lines with a defensible opening. One family word, in the tongue a person cannot be careful in, which is exactly the tongue you wrote your letter in and exactly the tongue you cannot read it out in.

You have had this backward, and gently. You thought the home language made the words too real to say. The home language is the evidence. It is the Spirit of adoption in you, speaking in the register of a son and not a delivery note.

You are a son in the house tonight, and the word in your mouth is a family word, not a submission. Romans 8 says the Spirit of adoption is the one who cries Abba, Father, and the Holy Spirit has been putting that word into people in their mother tongues for two thousand years without once asking for the rest of the paragraph.

And in the story Jesus tells, the son with the prepared speech never gets to finish it. The robe and the ring and the shoes arrive over the top of him, mid-sentence, because the father had stopped listening for terms somewhere back down the road.