The Book I Dust and Do Not Open

It sits on the round table by the window with a cloth under it, and Marlene lifts it every Thursday, wipes underneath, and puts it back exactly square to the edge.

Eleven years this autumn.

Her father read out of that book every evening of her childhood. Not long. Half a page. He had a particular voice for it that was not his ordinary voice and not a preacher's voice either, and he never explained anything he read, and when he had finished he would close it and say right, and then somebody would put the kettle on.

He died in the spring eleven years ago and the book came to her, and she has kept it beautifully.

She has never opened it.

She has opened other Bibles. There is a small one in her handbag. There is one in the bedroom she reads at night sometimes, in bits, with her glasses pushed up. She is not a woman who avoids Scripture.

But that one, the big one with his handwriting inside the front cover and the ribbon that has gone soft, she has not opened once, and if you asked her why she would look surprised and then she would go quiet for a long time and then she would say something like, well, I would do it wrong.

Which sounds like nonsense and is not nonsense.

Because in her head that book has a voice, and the voice belongs to a man who is dead, and she is fairly sure that if she opens it and reads a paragraph out into that front room in her own ordinary voice on a Thursday afternoon, one of two things will happen. Either it will sound thin, and she will have found out something about herself she would rather not know. Or it will sound like him, and she is not sure she could stand it.

So she dusts it.

And that is a kind of love. Nobody should be unkind about it. Eleven years of care is eleven years of care.

But here is what has slowly happened underneath the care, and Marlene half knows it. The book has become a monument, and a monument is a thing you tend rather than a thing that feeds you. She has an inheritance in her front room that she has been maintaining rather than eating.

And you may know a version of this. Perhaps not a book. A chair, a set of tools, a way of praying that belonged to somebody in your house who did it properly, and a quiet decision you made without noticing that these things are not for you to handle, because you would do them wrong.

The word was never on a table, it was always nearer than that

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have been carrying it eleven autumns and it was never yours.

You are not disqualified from handling holy things by not being the person who handled them before you. You never were. Scripture puts the word into ordinary mouths and never once appoints a reader in chief for a household, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the voice you read it in, who makes it live in a room. Set that down, my love. It is heavy and it has been keeping you at arm's length from your own father's table.

Now hear where the word actually is, because it is not where you have been keeping it.

The people are being told something at the end of a very long journey, and the whole point of the sentence is that this is not a thing kept in a high place by qualified people.

The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.Deuteronomy 30:14

In your mouth. Not in the study. Not with the ones who read well. In the mouth of whoever is standing there.

And it says very near. The whole passage before it takes the trouble to say it is not up in heaven so that somebody has to go and get it, and it is not across the sea so that somebody has to sail for it. It is near. It is in the room. It is closer than the table by the window.

So the book is not the distance. There was never any distance. That is what you have been protecting yourself from something that was never far away.

You have it. Right now, in the chair you are in, in your own ordinary voice with your own ordinary Thursday around you. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who put it in your mouth, and He did not do it provisionally and He did not do it only for people with a voice for it.

Now let me say the careful part, because I am not sending you into a ditch.

There is a real gift in a person who reads well, and in the ones who teach, and in the long patient work of people who studied so that your language could carry these words at all. Your father's half page every evening was a gift to a whole household and it did what it did in you and it is doing it now. None of that is being set aside. A reader who will hear nobody and sit under nothing ends up small and certain, and that is its own sad ending.

But listening to others was never meant to be a substitute for opening it yourself, and that is the swap that has quietly been made in your front room.

Here is the tender center of it. You are afraid that reading it will show you the size of the gap between him and you.

There is no gap of that kind. Scripture says the word is very near you and in your mouth, and the same Spirit who was in that room every evening when your father read is in this room now while you are reading this, and He was never impressed by his voice and He is not disappointed by yours.

And I will say the honest thing gently, the way I would if we were sat there together with the pot between us. Dusting it has kept it. It has not fed you. And you are the one who has gone hungry in a house with bread on the table.