The Oath He Still Keeps To Nobody

There were seven terms and he could still say them in order.

He said them out loud, in a room, in front of eleven people, on a Thursday evening about twenty years ago. It was not dramatic. There was a trestle table and a plate of biscuits and somebody's coat over the back of a chair.

He meant every syllable.

The thing he said them to has not existed for eleven years. Not paused, not restructured. Gone, in the ordinary way things go, without a fight and without a moment anybody would be able to point at.

Of the eleven people in that room, four have died and the rest are scattered across three countries, and he is not in regular contact with any of them.

And he still keeps the terms.

All seven. He does the Tuesday one on Tuesdays. He does the quarterly one in the quarter. He has not missed the annual one in twenty years, including the year of his mother's funeral, when he did it in a hotel car park at eleven at night.

His wife knows about Tuesdays. She thinks it is a habit, and she thinks it is a nice one, and she has never asked.

It is not a habit. He knows precisely what it is, and he has known for eleven years, and he cannot say it to her or to anybody, because there is no way to say it out loud without sounding like a man who has come loose.

Here it is anyway.

He is still reporting to somebody who is not there.

Every Tuesday, in an empty house, in his own kitchen, a grown man completes a term of an oath that has no other party, no witnesses left, and no organization behind it, and then he makes his coffee and goes to work.

If you are still keeping the terms of something, pull a chair round. Nobody in this room is going to ask you what they are.

The clause in the middle of the answer

There is a psalm that opens with a question about who gets to stand in the presence of God, and then answers it with a short list, and one item on the list is going to matter to you a great deal.

Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? ... He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.Psalm 15:1, 4

Read that last clause slowly, because it is describing a specific man.

Somebody who gave his word. Somebody for whom keeping it turned out to cost more than he expected. And somebody who did not change it when the cost arrived.

That is in a list of the people who dwell on the hill of God. It is not filed under eccentricity. It is not filed under things a sensible person renegotiates. It is put down as one of the marks of somebody who belongs in the presence.

You are described in a psalm that puts costly keeping into the list of who dwells with God. Psalm 15:4 names the man who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not as one of the ones who abides, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that clause in a list about the presence of God rather than in a chapter about admin, which means eleven years in an empty kitchen has been counted somewhere.

An oath is filed, and it was never filed with them

Now the thing that has been sitting on you, and let us take it apart properly, because it comes apart cleanly once you look at it.

You have believed that an oath is a contract between the person swearing and the people listening, that when the listeners go the thing becomes void, and that a man who keeps a void thing has lost his grip a little. That is not what an oath is and it never was. The eleven were witnesses, and witnesses are not parties: a witness confirms that a thing was said, and is not the one it was said to.

You have an oath that was filed with somebody who has not dissolved, and eleven witnesses going does not close a file. Hebrews 6:16 says an oath for confirmation is to them an end of all strife, and it is written of a word given in the sight of God rather than in the sight of a room, and it is the same Spirit who has kept that word live in a kitchen for eleven years without a single person to confirm it.

The organization was the occasion of the oath. It was never the recipient of it.

What the Tuesdays have actually been

Here is the part that has been hardest to say, said plainly.

You have been afraid that the Tuesdays are grief wearing a uniform, that a sensible man would have let go, and that what looks like faithfulness is really an inability to accept that a thing ended. Look at what the Tuesdays actually are.

You were worshipping, and it has been worship for eleven years without you having a word for it. Psalm 61:8 says so will I sing praise unto thy name for ever, that I may daily perform my vows, and it puts the daily performing of a vow right beside the singing rather than in a separate category, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person at a thing when nobody is watching, which means a man alone in a kitchen doing the Tuesday term has been in the presence the whole time.

Nobody has been marking it. That is what makes it worship and not performance.