The Whole Answer

The form was two sides of A4 and she had done all of it except one box.

Pre admission, a Thursday, the small waiting area off the main corridor where the chairs are bolted together in fours and there is a poster about hand washing that has been on that wall for years and a tank with three fish in it. Surgery on the Monday. Nothing dramatic. The kind of operation a surgeon does before lunch and you remember for the rest of your life.

Name. Date of birth. Next of kin. Allergies. Regular medication, and she had written out the doses properly, because she is that sort of person. GP practice. And then, three quarters of the way down the second side, in a box exactly the same size as the one for allergies:

Religion.

She sat with the pen over it for a long time.

For thirty one years she would have put one word in that box without breaking stride. She had written it on school forms and on a mortgage application and on a form very like this one the night her son was born. She could not write it now. Not because it had stopped being true. Because of eighteen months inside one building, and because the word had acquired a set of other people attached to it, and she could not put her own name underneath theirs.

And she was not going to write none. That was a lie in the other direction and a considerably bigger one.

So the box stayed empty, and the pen stayed over the box, and a fish went round.

Eventually the clerk came, a young man with a lanyard and a stack of the same forms, and he took it off her and ran his eye down it the way you do with a thing you have read four thousand times, and he stopped at the empty box, and she braced.

And he said, "Oh, don't worry about that one. It's only so we know who to call."

Then he asked whether she wanted a cup of tea while she waited, because the machine was working for once, and went off to get her one.

She made it as far as the car park before she cried, which she was pleased about.

Because for eighteen months she had been carrying that box around inside her like an examination. What are you. Say the word. Now defend the word. And a boy with a lanyard, with no idea on earth what he was doing, had just told her that the question was a great deal smaller than she thought, and that what it actually wanted to know was who is with you.

You have your own box. It might be a real one on a real form, or it might be the third question at a work dinner, in the pause after somebody clocks something and says, so are you religious then, what are you.

And you have started doing the thing you do. The small laugh. Oh, a bit. I was brought up. Something vague enough to close the subject, and then the whole drive home spent thinking about it, and a fairly low opinion of yourself by the time you get in.

I do not think that is cowardice, and I want to tell you what I think is actually going on, because once you can see it you will stop paying for it.

The man who would not give them a longer answer

There is a man in the ninth chapter of John who gets asked the question you are dreading, twice, by people who did this professionally, and his answer is the shortest one in the book. It is written down and it has outlasted two thousand years of longer answers, one line from a man with no training at all, kept in the book by His Spirit while the longer answers went to dust.

He was born blind. Jesus had healed him that morning. And instead of a good day he got an interrogation, and then a second interrogation, because the first one had not produced the answer they wanted. Men with real training, real authority and a real position to protect, leaning on a beggar to make him place himself.

Here is what he gave them.

Whether he is a wrongdoer I do not know. One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I see.John 9:25

Look at the size of it. Look at all the ground he refuses to take.

He does not bluff a longer answer. He does not attempt the theology, and he could not have won that argument on his best day and he knows it. He does not apologize for the length of what he has got. He simply declines the entire frame he is being pushed into, and says the one thing that is his.

And notice what his answer actually is, because this is the part that changes the dinner party for you.

It is not a noun.

They are asking him to be a category. What are you, whose are you, which side of this are you standing on. And he answers with two verbs and a Man: I was blind, now I see. He never tells them what he is. He tells them what happened to him and he leaves the doing of it exactly where it belongs.

That is why the question keeps flooring you. It asks for a noun. Every word you used to reach for was a noun, and the nouns are what got spoiled, and you have been standing there hunting for a replacement noun and finding nothing, and concluding from the silence that you have lost the faith.

You have not lost the faith. You have lost the label, and they are not the same object, and one of them was never the thing anyway. That is not encouragement. John 9:25 is a man with no category left and a whole answer still in his mouth, and the same Spirit who kept that line in the book is the one keeping yours.

Now the honest part, because a short answer that stayed short forever would be a stunted little thing and I am not selling you that.

His story does not stop at verse 25. They throw him out of the building for it. And then Jesus goes looking for him, which is what the whole chapter is really about, and asks him a question he cannot answer, and he says so out loud without embarrassment:

He answered, "And who is he, Sir, that I may believe in him?"John 9:36

He did not know. He was not pretending to know. Minutes after the finest short answer anybody has ever given, he is asking a beginner's question, and then:

He said, "I believe, Lord." And he bowed down before him.John 9:38

So the small answer was never the end of his learning. It was the thing that survived the interrogation, so that there was still somebody standing there to be found.

That is your sentence and that is what it is for. It is not the ruin of a bigger answer you used to have. It is the part that was never up for argument in the first place, the beam that was holding the building up the whole time, which you only notice when everything decorative has come off it.

And no new word for the box is coming from me. You do not need one. Nobody is owed a category from you at a work dinner, and the last thing in the world you need is another noun that some other set of people can spoil for you in eighteen months.