I Can Read It And I Cannot Say It

Give him a page and he will read it to a room without a tremor.

He has done it. He does it about once a month and has for eleven years, and he is one of the two people that group asks when something needs reading properly, because he does not gabble and he does not perform and he lands the ends of sentences.

He has read out things that would make most people's voices go. He read a thing at his own uncle's memorial and did not falter, off a page, in front of ninety people.

Ask him for one sentence of his own and there is nothing there.

Not nerves. He would want that separated out, because nerves he could work with and has, and he knows what nerves feel like and this is not that.

It is more like reaching for a tool that is not on the wall. He goes to produce a sentence in his own words about this and finds a specific absence, and the absence has a shape, and it has been the same shape since he was about twenty-four.

He is forty-eight.

He has tried to solve it the way he solves things. He has thought about whether it is a vocabulary problem and concluded it is not, because he has the vocabulary and could produce a technically correct sentence in about two seconds if what was wanted were a technically correct sentence.

What he cannot produce is one that is his.

And here is what he has never told anybody, and what he thinks about about once two weeks: he has begun to wonder whether a faith that only ever leaves a man in other people's words is his faith at all, or whether it is something he has been faithfully reading aloud for twenty-four years.

The word is nearer than you have been reaching

I want to go straight at the fortnightly thought, because it is the actual weight and everything else is scenery.

A faith that only ever leaves a man in other people's words may not be his.

That is a serious question, asked seriously, and it deserves better than reassurance. So let me answer it with the mechanism rather than with comfort.

Reading aloud well is not a substitute for speaking. It is a different skill and it uses a different part of a person, and you have spent eleven years becoming excellent at one of them.

A reader receives a sentence and delivers it. The construction has been done by somebody else, and the reader's whole job is transmission, and you are very good at transmission: you do not gabble, you do not perform, you land the ends.

A speaker constructs and delivers at once, and the construction happens live, and for a man who has spent eleven years operating exclusively in transmission that is not a small adjustment. It is a different instrument.

So the absence you feel is real and it is not a diagnosis of your faith. It is what happens when a man reaches for a skill he has not used.

Now here is what Scripture says about where the word actually is.

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

Moses is at the end of a long speech and he is dealing with exactly the objection you would raise. Two verses earlier he has ruled out the two places people go looking: it is not in heaven, so that somebody has to go and get it, and it is not across the sea, so that somebody has to fetch it.

And then he says where it is. In thy mouth, and in thy heart.

The mouth is named first, which surprises people. It is not: in your heart and therefore, eventually, in your mouth. Both are stated as present locations, and the phrase joining them is very nigh, which in that Hebrew is about as close as the language goes.

You have the word in your mouth already, and it was put there rather than achieved, and that is not consolation for a man who reads well, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the absence rather than on a passage you could locate in about four seconds.

Now let me say the thing that I think will actually help, because you are practical.

You have been reaching for the wrong thing.

You have been trying to construct an original sentence, live, that is adequate to the subject, and you are a man of standards, and no sentence you can build in real time is going to clear the bar you would hold it to. That is why the tool is not on the wall: you are reaching for a level of construction that does not exist in speech.

You do not need an original sentence. You need a true one, badly built, said out loud.

You are permitted a poor sentence. Scripture says the word is very near, in the mouth, that thou mayest do it, and doing it is the point of the sentence rather than the quality of the phrasing, and the Spirit of God has been in you since twenty-four while you read other men's words in front of ninety people without faltering.

You have the word in your mouth already, and it was put there rather than achieved. Scripture rules out heaven and rules out the sea and then names the mouth first, and the Holy Spirit has been in you since twenty-four through eleven years of reading other men's sentences.