What I Said at My Father's Wake

It was the parish hall and there were more people than chairs, which in that town is the only measurement that matters.

His father had been a difficult man in some ways and a considerable one in others, and there was a lot to say and a lot that could not be said, and at some point in the evening somebody put a glass in the eldest son's hand and the room turned to him.

He talked for about four minutes. He was good. He is always good in a room, which is his gift and his problem.

And at the end of it, with his sister standing at the side of the hall with her arms folded, he said what he was going to do. That the door of that house would stay open the way his father's had. That the Sunday would be kept. That nobody in this family would go a week without hearing from him, as long as he lived.

Four years.

The house was sold within eight months because it made financial sense and it did make financial sense. The Sunday went the way Sundays go. And his sister, who has not once mentioned any of it, does not need to mention any of it, because he can see her arms folded at the side of that hall every time he thinks about going home.

He has missed two Christmases, a christening, and the sixtieth birthday of a woman who used to feed him after school. He sends flowers with the correct card. He is known now, in that town, as the one who does very well and does not come back.

You may have a town. Or a hall, or a room, or a side of a room where somebody stood with their arms folded, and you may have arranged an entire life around the angle of one person's shoulders.

What happens to a face

Let me put a small line in front of you from a psalm you probably know for other reasons, and let me make you look at what it says about faces.

David is writing about deliverance, and he writes a sentence that is oddly physical.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.Psalm 34:5

You are lightened by looking somewhere, and the direction of the looking is what decides the condition of your face. Psalm 34:5 says they looked unto him and were lightened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been turning your face for four years.

Two directions a face can point

There is a whole doctrine of shame in that one line, and it works entirely by direction.

They looked unto him. That is the movement. And the result is in the faces of the ones who looked, and the result is described twice, once as light and once as the absence of shame, which are the same thing said from two sides.

Now here is the mechanism, and it is worth having, because it explains four years of your life.

A face that is turned toward a room takes its condition from the room. That is not weakness, it is how faces work; every person alive reads a face and adjusts. And you have had your face turned toward a parish hall for four years. It has been reading a folded pair of arms and adjusting, and adjusting, and adjusting.

The psalm does not tell you to feel better about the room. It tells you where to point your face.

You are lightened by looking somewhere, and where you look is the thing that decides the condition of your face. Psalm 34:5 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a psalm about deliverance and stands it at the front of a parish hall.

Now let me be honest about the town, because you are from a place where these things are real and I am not going to tell you that nobody remembers.

They remember. Small towns do. Some of them think what you think they think. Two of them will say something at the next funeral you attend, and it will be worse than you imagine and less than you fear, both at once, which is how these things always go.

That is genuinely true and it is genuinely not the point, because none of those people are the party. You gave your word to God. The town was in the room. Being in the room does not make you a party to a covenant, any more than being at a wedding makes you married.

You are answerable to the one you spoke to and not to the room that heard you. Scripture puts the lightening in the looking and not in the room's response, and the Spirit of God has been settling your standing through four years of flowers with the correct card.

Your sister's arms

And now the arms, because that is the actual object here.

You have been reading them for four years and you have never once asked what they meant. Folded arms at the side of a hall at a wake could be anger. They could also be a woman holding herself together in front of a hundred people on the day she buried her father, which is what most folded arms at most wakes actually are.

You do not know. And I want to be careful here, because this article is not going to instruct you to go and find out, and it is certainly not going to make her answer a condition of anything.

What I will say is that you have given a verdict to a gesture you never verified, and then served the sentence with great discipline, and missed a christening.

You are settled with God tonight, and no arms folded anywhere have been given a vote. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is what it means that the faces of those who look at Him are not ashamed, and His Spirit is the one who did the settling while you were sending flowers.