Two Splits In One Room

His family came apart in the space of about four years and there is no single thing anybody can point to, which is the kind he says is hardest.

Three brothers. A funeral, a farm, a decision about the ground, some words said in a kitchen in a bad month. And it was not one thing, it was about eleven things over four years, and every one of them was small enough to have been survivable on its own.

They have not all been in a room together in nineteen years. Two of them talk. One does not. Nobody has a plan.

He is sixty and he has made his peace with it as well as anybody makes peace with that, which is to say he does not think about it for months at a time and then thinks about nothing else for four days.

And in April somebody at a men's breakfast said something about how the church and the older faith it grew out of had gradually gone their separate ways over the first centuries, and he went home and looked it up, and it went into him somewhere unexpected.

Because it is the same shape.

Not one thing. Not a decision anybody made in a room. A long accumulation over generations, small enough at each step, and then you look up and it has been nineteen hundred years and nobody living remembers when it was one thing.

And he cannot tell them apart in himself now. That is the whole trouble.

Some nights he is sad about his brothers and something else comes with it. Some nights he reads about the parting and finds himself thinking about a kitchen in nineteen ninety something. The two of them have got into the same room in him and they will not stay on their own sides.

You know that room.

Maybe you have an old family thing that this landed on. Maybe it is a church you left, or a friendship that thinned, or a country your people came out of. Maybe you found out about the ancient one and were surprised by how hard it hit, and then worked out that it had hit an old bruise.

Nobody engineered this. Griefs of the same shape recognize each other. That is not a fault in you and it does not mean you are being self indulgent about history.

The waves are plural

Here is a line from a psalm written by a man who was drowning in something, and the grammar of it is exactly your April.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

Deep calls to deep.

One depth in a man calls to another depth. That is what the line says. Not one sorrow neatly in its own container. One reaching down to another and the two of them answering each other, which is precisely what happened at that men's breakfast.

And then: all thy waves and thy billows. Plural. He does not itemize them. He does not say, and this wave is about the following, and that one is about something older. He says all of them, over me, and moves on.

You are not required to sort your sorrow into piles before you are allowed to name it. That is what the plural in Psalm 42:7 does by refusing to separate the waves, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved a man's unsorted grief in a songbook, which He would not have done if the sorting were a condition of being heard.

Nothing here is going to explain either one

I want to be plain with you, because you are a practical man and you will be waiting for the part where somebody accounts for it.

There is no accounting here. Nothing on this page explains why your family came apart and nothing on it explains the other one either, and no century, no council, no party and no people is going to be named as the reason.

That is deliberate. An explanation is what you reach for when a loss is unbearable, and it works for about four days, and then you are a man with an explanation and the same loss.

You are not being handed a reason, and nobody here is going to be blamed for anything. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children (Deuteronomy 29:29), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a resting place rather than a closed door, which is what allows a man to stop working on something at sixty.

What the two of them being in one room actually does

Now here is the thing worth taking out to the porch.

You have been treating the mixing as a problem. It feels like a mess and you are a tidy man and you would like your sorrows filed.

But look at what it has actually done. For nineteen years, your family thing has been unspeakable. You do not raise it, nobody raises it, and there is no version of a conversation about it that anybody in that family could survive.

And in April, a thing you can read about, that belongs to nobody living, arrived carrying the same shape. And you have been able to think about it, and read about it, and be sad about it, and say something about it out loud at a breakfast table.

That is not a contamination. That is a door.

You have been given something you are allowed to grieve out loud, and it is standing next to the one you are not. Scripture says he healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds (Psalm 147:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that binding, in stages, and He is entirely capable of reaching one wound through another.