Two Of Every Occasion

There is one on the Friday and there is one on the Sunday.

Same food. Same room. The same amount of work, done twice, eleven days a year by his own count if you include the birthdays.

He does the second one with his coat still smelling of the first.

Everybody thanks him. Both halves. They are warm about it and they mean it, and one of his aunts always says something about how he holds this family together, and he says something modest back.

And in four years not one person has said out loud why there are two.

Including him.

Here is how normal it has become.

His youngest asked, last month, which one her cousins come to.

He said the Sunday one, love.

And she said okay and went back to what she was doing, and she is seven, and to her this is simply how families are arranged, in the same way that some houses have stairs and some do not.

He has thought about that a great deal since.

Because he can see two things at once and cannot hold them together. The first is that the two occasions are a kindness. Nobody is left out. Every person in that family gets a table with food on it and people who love them, and that is not nothing and he would do it again.

The second is that he has spent four years building an elaborate arrangement whose entire purpose is that a fact never has to be mentioned.

If you are running two of everything, come in and sit down. The glasses are out and nobody here is going to ask you anything about it.

Two men who parted and kept the word brethren

There is a scene where two families who cannot stay together separate, and the striking thing is what does and does not get said.

And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I pray thee, from me.Genesis 13:8-9

Read both halves, because most people only take one.

He says: for we be brethren. And then, in the very next breath, he says: separate thyself from me.

Neither sentence cancels the other. He does not pretend the separation is not happening, and he does not withdraw the word brethren in order to make the separation bearable. Both are true at once, said out loud, by the same man in the same conversation.

And notice what is absent. There is no account of who was at fault. The text does not adjudicate the herdmen. Nobody is named as the cause, and the record simply says the land was not able to bear them.

You are able to name a separation out loud and keep the word brethren in the same sentence. Genesis 13:8 has Abram saying for we be brethren and separate thyself in one exchange, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both halves in the record without deciding whose fault it was, which means saying plainly that something broke has never required anybody to take a side.

What the two occasions actually are

Now the arrangement, and let us be fair to it, because it is about to be examined and it is not a fault.

The two occasions are love. Eleven days a year, done twice, by one man who could have refused and did not, so that nobody in that family sits alone on a Friday.

That is the fifth commandment being kept at considerable personal cost by somebody nobody has thanked properly.

The trouble is not the arrangement. The trouble is what has grown around it, which is a silence so complete that a seven year old now believes this is what families are.

You are keeping a family together at real cost, and nothing in this is a charge against what you have built. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it puts the qualification in twice, as much as lieth in you and if it be possible, and it is the same Spirit who works that peace in a person, which means what you have been doing is the verse rather than a failure of it.

What has not been said, and to whom

Here is the thing that has been sitting under it, and it is worth being exact about.

The silence is not protecting anybody from information. Every adult in that family knows precisely what happened. There is nobody who needs to be shielded from the facts.

The silence is protecting everybody from a moment. Somebody would have to say a sentence, and the room would go quiet for about four seconds, and nobody wants to be the person who caused those four seconds.

So the moment gets deferred, eleven times a year, for four years.

You have been carrying a moment nobody wants to have, and the carrying has never once been assigned to you. Ecclesiastes 3:7 says there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak, and it puts them side by side as seasons rather than ranking one above the other, and it is the same Spirit who leads a person into the truth they can hold, which means the silence had a season and the season is allowed to end without anybody being blamed for it having lasted.