The Table Is Very Quiet Now

The table is the same table.

That is what makes it odd. It is not that anything was taken out of the room. The chairs are where they were. The lamp is the same lamp. There is nobody at it between four and six, which for about nineteen years was the noisiest stretch of the day.

Homework was done there. Arguments were had there. Somebody was always halfway through something and leaving a coat over the back of a chair.

And now you have started making things at it, in the afternoon, in the quiet.

I want to name the thing that has been bothering you, because I suspect you have not said it to anybody and it is a slightly embarrassing thing to say.

You cannot tell whether this is grief or boredom.

If it is grief, then it is legitimate and there is something to feel and you are allowed to feel it. If it is boredom, then it is rather small, a woman with a whole free afternoon complaining about quiet, and you would not want anybody to know.

So you have been going back and forth on the classification for months, and the going back and forth is more tiring than either of the two things.

Here is what I would say first. You do not have to know which it is.

The two are not as separate as they look, and neither of them is disgraceful, and the classifying is not the thing that gets a person through an afternoon.

The sparrow hath found an house

There is a line in a psalm about the temple, and about longing to be there, and in the middle of the longing the writer notices a bird.

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God. (Psalm 84:3, King James Version)

The sparrow hath found an house.

A bird has got in. She has built in the rafters of the place, and she has raised young there, and nobody has moved her on. The psalm is written by somebody who feels far away from that house, and the detail he fixes on is a small creature who lives in it as an ordinary matter.

You are in a place where a small ordinary life is welcome, and Psalm 84:3 puts a nest in the rafters of the holiest building in the world. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a longing psalm and a bird in the roof and lays them down on a kitchen table between four and six.

And notice where she nests. Even thine altars. Not in a corner, not tolerated at the edges. The altar, which is the most serious place there is, has a sparrow living on it.

You have a small ordinary life that is welcome in the serious place, and it is already settled in the written word that nobody moved that bird on. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been wondering whether her afternoon is worth anybody's attention.

The classification can wait

Now let me stay with the question that keeps going round, because I want to take it off you rather than answer it.

Grief or boredom.

They overlap far more than the words suggest. Nineteen years of a certain kind of noise ended and the quiet arrived all at once, and a person can miss the noise and be at a loose end in the same afternoon and both of those are honest.

And there is a third thing in it that neither word covers, which is that a woman who was needed at four o'clock every day for nineteen years is now not needed at four o'clock, and that is not grief and it is not boredom. It is a change of position, and it has no good short name.

So stop naming it. Not forever. For this week.

And this: what comes off that table is not a measure of how you are doing. It is not a report card on how well you are adjusting. It is a thing somebody made in an afternoon.

You are not obliged to classify what this is, and heaven has never once required a person to name a season before living in it. Psalm 84:3 notices the bird and never explains her, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman be at a table without a diagnosis.

And do not fill the afternoon on purpose. Do not go and get a job to have somewhere to be, not this month, not as an answer to this. That is naming it by the back door.

You have permission to sit in an unnamed afternoon, and this is yours: the sparrow was not asked to account for herself before she built. It is written in Psalm 84:3 that she found an house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary life welcome in a serious place.

Twenty minutes at that table

So here is the ask, and it has a location in it on purpose.

This week, between four and six, make something at that table for twenty minutes.

Not somewhere else in the house. That table. The one where the homework was.

You are welcome in that room without a name for what you are feeling, and Psalm 84:3 puts a nest on the altar and asks the bird nothing. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary small life at home in a serious place.

Use what is already there. It does not matter what you make. Twenty minutes.

And do not name it. Not at the table, not afterward. If the word grief arrives, let it go past. If the word boredom arrives, let that go past too. Neither one gets to stay this week.

What you make will be poor and unfinished at the end of twenty minutes. Leave it on the table rather than putting it away, and let it be there at four o'clock the next day.

You are welcome at that table in an afternoon that has no name, and Psalm 84:3 is the ground under that. The written word makes room for a nest on an altar without asking the bird anything, and the Spirit of God is present in a kitchen at half past four with the house completely quiet.