Naming It In A Room That Does Not Want It Named

You can feel it when you walk in. That is the strange part. Nobody has said anything and there is nothing written down, and the shape of the agreement is as clear as furniture.

It is a real room with real chairs and eleven decent people in it, and there is something in that fellowship that is wrong. Not criminal. Not a scandal, and nothing that would ever get into a newspaper. It is a way things have gone, over about six years, that is unjust to a particular group of people who are not in that room and have no vote in it.

Everybody knows. He is sure of that now, and he has tested it obliquely three times in the last year, and each time got the same thing back: a small pause, a slight change of subject, a warmth that arrived a half second too fast.

They are not wicked. He wants that established first, because the easy version of this story has villains in it and the true version has none.

Here is what he has worked out about how the agreement got made, and he thinks it is worth saying plainly.

Nobody in that room ever decided to protect anything. What happened is that the first person who might have raised it was tired, and it was late, and there was a difficult item before it that had taken ninety minutes. The second person waited to see if the first would, and drew a conclusion from the silence. By the third meeting the silence itself had become a piece of information that everybody was reading, and by the second year the not-mentioning had become the thing being maintained rather than the original matter.

That is how rooms do this. It is not conspiracy. It is exhaustion, and courtesy, and a hundred small deferrals, and it produces something with all the force of a decision that nobody ever made.

And he sits in that room every six weeks knowing the shape of it, and knowing that if he says it, the temperature changes for a year and the people affected by it may or may not be any better off, and he has been carrying that since the spring.

What a stream does when nothing is in its way

Amos is the most physical of the prophets and he gives the whole thing one image at the end of chapter five.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.Amos 5:24

Read the verb. Run down.

That is not a word about being generated. Water is not manufactured at the top of a hill and it does not need somebody to push it. It runs down because that is what water does, and the only way to stop it is to put something in the channel.

Which tells you what the prophet thinks the problem is. It is not that justice is missing. It is that it is obstructed, and an obstruction is a different kind of problem from an absence and calls for a different kind of response.

So hear this, in a hall between meetings: the thing you are carrying is not a weight you have to generate, it is a channel you can see. That is not my metaphor; it is what His word does with the image, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a hydraulic picture from an eighth century prophet and puts it under a man who has been sitting on something since spring.

Now let me say the thing about the eleven people, because it matters and it is where this could go wrong.

They are not the obstruction. That is important and I want it clear. The obstruction is the agreement, and the agreement is not a person and it is not eleven people, and it does not live in anybody's heart in that room. It lives in the space between them, made of pauses and deferrals and one difficult meeting six years ago that ran long.

You can name a thing like that without accusing anybody, and the ability to tell those two apart is precisely what makes a man safe to hand a room to.

And now the part I am not going to do.

I am not telling you to say it. Not at the next meeting, not at all, and there is no line coming where a silence of yours becomes complicity, because you do not have the information required to make that judgement about yourself and neither do I. You may sit in that room for another two years and be entirely right with God.

What I will take off you is a fear that is not doing you any good.

You have been holding this partly because you cannot be sure how it lands. You said it yourself: the people affected may or may not be any better off. And that has functioned as a reason, and it is not one, because it applies equally to every action anybody has ever taken in a room like that, including the action of saying nothing.

You are not required to secure the result before you are permitted to have a view. Scripture puts the running down in the nature of the water and never in the strength of the man standing beside the channel, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves things in a room over the following eighteen months by means nobody present ever traces.

And one more, because it is the tender part of this. Seeing it is not a burden you asked for. You did not go looking. It arrived because you pay attention, and paying attention is not a fault, and the loneliness of being the one who can see the shape of a room is a real loneliness and it is allowed to be one.