Nothing Happened

Órla could not answer when somebody asked her what was wrong, because nothing is.

Nothing happened. That is the truest sentence available and it is also the thing that has kept her silent for about nine years.

There was no event. There is nothing to point at and nothing that would sound like anything if she said it out loud, and she has tested that twice, in her head, and both times she heard how it would land and did not say it.

It went quiet. That is all. Over about eighteen years, in a way she cannot date and could not draw on a graph, something that was there stopped being there, and now there are two people in a house who are unfailingly polite to each other and kind about practical things and who have not said a real sentence in a very long time.

Nobody was cruel. There is nothing to forgive.

And that is exactly the problem, because a loss with a villain in it has a shape, and other people can hold a shape. A loss with nothing in it is not recognized as a loss at all.

So there is no vocabulary for it and there is no permission for it, and she has been carrying something for nine years that, if she described it accurately, would sound to most people like a description of an ordinary life.

She has also noticed that she cannot pray about it.

Not blocked, exactly. She sits down and there is no first sentence. Every opening she tries requires her to say what the matter is, and the matter has no name, and so she gets to about the fourth word and stops.

She has settled into a version of praying that is entirely about other people, and she is good at it, and she has done it for years.

Maeve asked her something in April, over tea, in the flat straightforward way she has.

She said, "What would you even call it?"

And Órla sat there.

And then she said, "That is the whole thing. There is no word."

And Maeve said, "Then it is worse than if there was one," and got up and put the kettle on again and did not make her say anything else.

Now let me ask you what you would call yours.

Because if this is yours you will have just tried to name it, and it will have come out sounding smaller than it is, and that is the ninth or the nineteenth time that has happened.

The one that does not turn

There is a psalm most people have never read, and the reason is that it does not do the thing psalms do.

Almost all of them turn. However dark they get, and some of them get very dark, there is a moment where the writer swings round: but I trust in Your lovingkindness, yet I will praise Him. You can feel it coming and it is a relief when it lands.

Psalm 88 does not turn.

It runs to the end in the dark, and the last verse is this.

You have removed lover and friend far from me; my acquaintances are in darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is where it stops. That is the final line of the whole psalm, and in the Hebrew the very last word is darkness.

No turn. No yet. No resolution, no lesson, no closing statement of confidence.

And God put it in the book.

That is the thing I want you to sit with, because it was not an accident and it was not overlooked. Somebody assembled that collection and it was used in public worship for centuries, and this one is in there with its number on it, and generation after generation of God's people have read it out loud and gone home without it having been fixed.

The whole psalm is addressed to God, by the way. Every line of it. The man is not complaining about God to somebody else. He is talking to Him, continuously, right to the last word about darkness.

So hear this said over you, at a kitchen table with the rain on the window. What you are carrying is real and it is a loss even though nothing happened in it, and God has put language for exactly this in His own book and left it unresolved on purpose. That is written into a psalm that ends in the dark and was still sung in public for two thousand years, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, which is what He does with a prayer that cannot find its first sentence.

Now let me be careful about several things at once.

I am not going to tell you what to do about your house.

Not one word of that. I do not know your marriage, I do not know that man, I have not been in that kitchen, and an article that starts giving instructions about somebody's home on the strength of nine hundred words is not ministry. Whatever the next thing is for you, it is a conversation with people who actually know you, and it is not this.

And I am not going to tell you what God is doing in it.

No reason, no purpose, no lesson. Nothing here is going to suggest that this was arranged to grow you or to teach you something. I do not know and neither does anybody, and offering you a reason would be the same as offering you a lie with a kind face on it.

What I am telling you is that you have been denied the one thing you were always entitled to, which is to call it what it is.

You have been holding a real loss with no permission to name it, because there was no incident, and every time you nearly said it you heard in advance how small it would sound, and so you swallowed it and prayed for somebody else instead.

That is nine years of a person with nowhere to put something.

And here is what Psalm 88 gives you, which is not a fix. It is a form. The man in that psalm does not have a solution and he does not manufacture one and he is not rebuked anywhere in Scripture for it. What he does is take the unresolved thing to God, in full, in words, and keep addressing Him all the way into the dark.

That is available to you tonight and it does not require you to have a name for anything.

The word says pour out your heart before Him, and pour out has no requirement in it about the contents being tidy. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we should, which is God's own account of a woman who cannot get past the fourth word.