Under The Hood, Before The Objections

The chorus had four lines and his father only ever got through two of them, because two lines was as much as any job under a hood ever gave him.

He sang it flat and unhurried and a little off the note, from somewhere down inside an engine bay, with his boots on the gravel and the rest of him swallowed by a Ford. It came up out of there muffled, the way a voice comes up out of a well. Safe in the arms of Jesus. Safe from the storm and something, and Neil Ashby never learned the third line, because his father never sang the third line, because by then the hose clamp was usually on.

That was the whole liturgy of Neil's childhood. Two lines and a socket wrench and a man's boots on gravel.

Neil is forty six now and he can tell you what is wrong with that chorus. He came by it honestly. Twelve years of hard reading and three of formal study and a decade of teaching other people, and none of that was wasted and none of it was dishonest.

So last October, on Quarry Road, with his own hood up and his own hands in his own engine bay, he heard himself start it. Safe in the arms of.

And they arrived. All four of them, in order, before he could get to the second line.

The sentimentality of the century that produced it. The fact that "safe" needs about six pages of definition before it can be said honestly to anybody who has stood at a graveside. The way the whole image lifts from a passage that is doing something considerably harder than comfort. And the fourth one, the one he is proudest of and least comfortable with, which is that a song like that is how a certain kind of house keeps people from asking the questions he spent his thirties asking.

He is not wrong. That is the part nobody wants to say out loud. He is not wrong about any of the four.

He stood there anyway with his hands on the fender and could not finish two lines of a song his father sang for twenty years over a valve cover.

He shut the hood. It did not latch the first time, the way it never does. He stood on the gravel in the cold with his breath going up and he thought about how his father, who was not a scholar and never claimed to be, had somehow been able to sing while he worked, and how he himself has not sung anything in about nine years.

Neil is not trying to get back to being twelve. He knows what he knows. He would not give any of it back and nobody should ask him to.

He would just like to get underneath it for ten minutes.

The weaned child is not the baby

There is a psalm three verses long that a lot of people read as a poem about being simple. It is not. It is a poem about a man who has been in great matters up to his neck, and who has, on purpose, put himself somewhere else.

David is the one writing. This is a man who ran a government, argued with prophets, buried a child, and knew a great deal more about high and difficult things than he was ever comfortable knowing. And what he says is that he does not exercise himself in great matters, in things too high for him, and that he has quieted his soul like a weaned child with its mother.

You have not read yourself out of reach of that psalm. You read yourself into the only position from which it can honestly be prayed, because Psalm 131:1 is written by someone who plainly could have gone into the great matters and chose the other thing, and the Holy Spirit who moved him to write it that way is in the room with you while you take it in. The quiet in that psalm is a trained man's quiet.

LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:1-2

Now the picture itself, because it is precise and almost everyone softens it. He does not say an infant. He says a weaned child. An infant at its mother is there for something it needs to get. A weaned child has grown past that and is there anyway, leaning on her, wanting nothing but her. It is not a picture of going back. It is a picture of going further in and finding that what you wanted at the beginning is the same thing you want now, with the getting taken out of it.

That is what your father was doing under the hood, whether he could have said so or not.

You were given something real at the beginning, and it did not stop being real when you learned what was thin about the way it was handed to you. Second Timothy 1:5 talks about a faith that lived first in a grandmother and a mother and then in a young man, and the word for it is unfeigned, and the Spirit who inspired that line has kept the same thing alive in you all the way down. What came down that line to you was not the wording. It was the thing the wording was carrying.

Let me be careful here, because this is where an article like this usually goes wrong. Nothing in this is against study. Your objections are real objections. You did not manufacture them to get out of anything, and some of them are load-bearing and should be kept and used. Put them down for ten minutes if you want to; do not throw one of them away. Going underneath a thing is a different direction from going backward, and only one of those two is available to a grown person anyway.

And nothing in this is against the house that gave you the chorus. Somebody in that house loved God enough to sing about Him with a wrench in his hand at seven in the morning. That is not nothing. That is most of what any of us have ever managed.

You have the same access to Him this morning that you had at nine years old, and it is not a lesser access and it is not a nostalgic one. Jesus said in Matthew 11:25 that these things are hid from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes, and He said it in a prayer, out loud, thanking His Father for it, and revealing is the Holy Spirit's own work, and He has not changed His methods since. The door you came in by is still the door.