It Took Ninety Seconds to Say

Sorcha has not opened it properly in eleven years and the reason takes ninety seconds to tell.

She would not have described it that way. If you asked her, and people occasionally do, she would say she has got out of the habit, or that she has never been much of a reader, or that she gets more out of being outside.

All of those are partly true and none of them is it.

What is actually true is that when she was twenty-six she read something and took it to mean a thing it did not mean, and made a decision on the strength of it, and the decision was wrong and it cost somebody else something.

Nobody rebuked her. That is worth saying plainly, because the obvious version of this story has a person in it who was hard on her, and there is not one. Two people were extremely kind about it at the time. One of them still is.

She did the rest herself. Quietly, over about a year, she arrived at a conclusion: that she is not safe with that book. That she reads things into it. That the sensible and humble thing, given what happened, is to leave the handling of it to people who will not do what she did.

And so she has, for eleven years. She hears it read. She listens to it explained, and she is glad of that. She has a copy on a shelf and she is not angry at it and there is nothing dramatic in any of this.

She simply does not open it on her own.

Fionnuala got it out of her at a kitchen table this spring, in the way that friend does: by asking a question and then not filling the silence afterward, which is a skill and a fairly ruthless one.

She said, "Why do you not read it?"

And Sorcha said the thing about the habit.

And Fionnuala waited.

And Sorcha said, "Because I got something badly wrong once."

And Fionnuala said, "Tell me."

So she told her. All of it, properly, for the first time in eleven years.

It took ninety seconds.

That is the part that undid her. Not the telling and not the kindness. The length. Eleven years of a thing she has carried as a permanent fact about her character, and said out loud to one person at a kitchen table it lasted a minute and a half and was, plainly and obviously, a young woman who misread something.

She sat there afterward and said, "Is that all it is?"

Now let me ask you what yours is.

Because if this is you, there is an incident. And you have almost certainly never told anybody the whole of it in one go, and it has been growing quietly in the dark for years the way things do when they are never said at their actual length.

He is the one who opens

At the end of Luke, after the road and the meal, there is a sentence that says who does the understanding.

Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.Luke 24:45

He opened their minds. Not: they applied themselves. Not: they got better at it. He did it, to them, and the verb has Him as the subject.

And look at who is in the room when it happens. These are the disciples. Not beginners: people who have been with Him for three years, who have heard every parable, and who have, between them, an extraordinary record of getting things wrong in public and at volume. One of them denied Him nine days earlier.

He does not open the minds of the ones who have proved reliable. He opens theirs.

So hear this said over you, at a kitchen table with the tea going cold. Understanding this book is something He does in a person rather than something a person earns the right to, and eleven years of self-imposed exile has not been humility, it has been a sentence you handed down. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described throughout the New Testament as the one who leads into truth, and He has never once been kept out by a reader's misreading.

Now let me be careful here, because there are two errors available and I do not want either.

The first would be to tell you the misreading did not matter.

It did. Somebody paid for it. This article is not going to smooth that over, and if I told you it was nothing you would rightly stop trusting me, because you were there and I was not.

And the second error is the one you have been living in.

You took a real event and drew a permanent conclusion about your character from it, and you have never once said the event out loud at its own size to test whether the conclusion fits.

Ninety seconds. That is the size of it.

Now, here is the thing that will actually help you, and it is not reassurance.

Being unsure is not the same as being unsafe.

That is what happened at twenty-six: not that you read it, but that you read it, were certain, and acted fast. And the correction for that is not to stop reading. It is to read and be allowed to not know.

You can open a page, read three verses, find the second one strange, and simply leave it strange. You do not have to resolve it. You do not have to act on it. You are permitted to hold a thing open for a year.

That is what the eleven years have never let you find out, because a woman who does not open it never gets to practice being unsure inside it.

The word says He opened their minds, and the Spirit of God is the one who leads into truth, and both of those describe somebody else doing the work while you sit there with it open. That takes the weight off the reading entirely, and it puts it where it has always been.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that put this book into the hands of ordinary people at real cost, knowing perfectly well that some of them would misread it. They were not naive; they argued about misreadings constantly and at length. They did it anyway, because they thought a person who never reads it is further from safety than a person who reads it and gets some of it wrong.

They built the schools and they built the courts and the arguing rooms, and all of it was a way of saying: read it, and you will not be reading it alone.