What The Old Stone Still Holds

The side door of the old stone church at the end of the road is propped open with a fire extinguisher every Tuesday and Friday at seven in the morning.

He knows this because he walks past it at seven, and has walked past it at seven for six years, and a man notices a fire extinguisher holding a door.

He had decided about that place a long time ago. Not loudly. He had never said a word against it to anybody, and he would have been honestly offended by any suggestion that he had something against it. He had simply decided, the way a person decides about weather, that whatever was in there was not for him and had not been for a long time.

Then it rained. Not ordinary rain, the sideways kind that arrives in the twenty seconds a person is furthest from any door, and the porch of the old stone church was the nearest roof, and he stepped into it with his collar up and his shoes already gone.

The porch smelled of wax and Brasso and cold flagstone.

There was a woman inside with a mop bucket, the old kind with a wringer on the side that had cracked and been taped. Sixty something. A cardigan over a housecoat. She looked up, said come in out of it, and went back to the sconces. She was polishing brass candle sconces with a rag and a tin, and there were fourteen of them, and she was on the fourth.

He stood in that porch for eleven minutes and she did not ask him a single question. At some point she poured tea out of a tartan flask into the cup that was also the lid, set it on the step beside him without a word about it, and went back to the fifth sconce.

And while she worked she talked. Not to him. Under her breath, in the way of somebody who has done a job long enough that the job has a soundtrack.

He caught about half of it over the rain. Lord, You are here. I am Yours. Hold the ones I love today, the ones in this town and the ones far off. And keep me kind until dinnertime.

He stood very still.

Because that is what he says. Not the last line. He has never thought of the last line, and standing there he rather wished he had. But the rest of it, more or less word for word. At his own sink at half past six with the immersion heater ticking, for years, out of a place he could not have explained to anybody, he has been saying almost exactly that.

The rain eased off. He said thanks for the tea. She said any time, love, and did not look up from the sixth sconce.

He has walked past that door twice a week for six years.

What holds the stone up

A wall like that is three feet thick at the base, and it is not solid. There is dressed stone on the outside face, dressed stone on the inside face, and rubble and lime packed between them, and the whole thing stands up because of the way the weight travels down through it. Survey the outside face and it explains almost nothing about why the wall is still there. The load path is on the inside.

Now the thing that has to be said before anything else, because there is a dishonest version of this message and it gets handed out a great deal.

The dishonest version says the differences do not matter. That is not true, it has never been true, and saying it would be its own kind of verdict. It would tell a woman on her fourth of fourteen sconces that fifty years of her life have been decorative, and she would be entirely right to be insulted. People have gone to prison over these questions and a few of them went cheerfully. Nothing on this page settles one of them, leans on one of them, or asks anybody to give up a position they hold for reasons.

What is on this page is smaller than that, and considerably harder to argue with. At seven in the morning, in a cold porch that smelled of Brasso, a woman he had quietly written off was saying his prayer.

You have far more company in this than you have been able to see. That is not a nice thought I am offering you, it is Colossians 1 read straight down: He is before all things, and by Him all things consist, and His Spirit has been putting the same handful of words into a great many mouths at half past six in the morning.

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.Colossians 1:17

That word consist is a load bearing word. It does not mean He agrees with everything. It does not mean He supervises. It means He holds it together, the way the weight in a three foot wall travels down through the rubble core, and if He stopped, the face of the wall would not stand for a minute on its own good looks.

Which means the thing under the woman with the mop bucket and the thing under the man at his sink are not two things. You were being held together by Him long before you had an opinion about any of it, and that is not sentiment, it is precisely what is written in Colossians 1:17, and it is His Spirit, and not anybody's agreement, that has kept it true through every year you spent deciding about people.

Here is the shape the loneliness takes, and it is worth naming plainly. When a person walks away from a word, they nearly always assume they walked away from everybody who uses that word. It feels like arithmetic. It is not. The word went and the people did not, and there are far more of them still saying your own prayer than the arithmetic allowed for.

And then the sconces.

Nobody was watching her. There was no service that morning, no congregation, nobody due in the building for hours. She was on the fourth of fourteen, in a cardigan, in the cold, with a tin of polish. You are looking at somebody who believes He is worth polishing brass for in an empty room, and whatever else is or is not settled between you and her, that is a person the word would call faithful in a very little, and the Spirit who wrote that phrase down did not attach a footnote about which tradition it was available to.