Mouthing The Words On Christmas Eve

Twenty two of them go, every year, in two cars and a van, and they take up nearly three rows.

His mother has done this since before he was born. There is a photograph of it from about 1994 in her hallway and there is another one from last year on the same wall.

They sing. That family sings the way other families argue, which is to say constantly and at volume and with a general disregard for whether anybody has asked them to.

And for about six years, he has mouthed it.

Nobody has noticed. He is careful about it: the mouth moves properly, the breathing looks right, he is looking at the sheet. His sister is on one side of him and his uncle on the other and neither of them has any idea.

He does not know exactly when it started. Somewhere after the year that was bad, and after the following one, which was worse in a quieter way.

It is not anger. He would like to be clear about that if anybody asked, which nobody has. He is not furious with God and he has not stopped believing anything.

It is that at some point the sound stopped coming out, and mouthing it was easier than explaining, and then a year went by, and then five more, and now it is simply what he does at Christmas.

He is thirty eight. He stands in a room with twenty one people he loves, at the warmest hour of the family's year, and makes no sound.

They sang on the worst night of their lives

There is a sentence at the end of the last supper that goes past so fast that most people have never once stopped on it.

And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.Matthew 26:30

Take that in the pew. You are permitted to make a sound before anything else has come right. The word says when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives, and it is the Holy Spirit who was in that room with them.

Look at what has just happened in that room and what is about to happen outside it.

He has told them one of them will betray Him. He has told Peter he will deny Him three times before morning. Every man at that table has been told, in effect, that the worst night of his life starts now.

And then they sing.

Not because anybody in that room felt like singing. It was the Passover and there were psalms appointed for the end of it, and so they did the thing that was appointed, in a room with the bottom falling out of it, and then they walked out to the garden.

And He sang it. That is the part I want in your hands, in that pew, with your sister beside you. Jesus sang, with the cross a few hours away, and the singing did not require the feeling.

So take this on Christmas Eve, and know it is not my sentiment, it is what is written: you are permitted to make the sound before anything else has come right. His word says when they had sung an hymn they went out, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sung thing carry, and He has never once required a man to feel it first.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns for people with no reason to sing.

Coal miners. Servants with fourteen hour days. People who could not read a word, being handed doctrine in a tune because a tune goes in and stays in and comes back on a night when nothing else will.

The theory was never that the singer arrives full. It was that the words are true independently of the singer, and go in through the mouth, and are available later.

Which means what your family is doing in those three rows, badly, at volume, is not a display of how they feel about God on the twenty fourth of December. It is a load bearing structure, and you have been standing inside it for six years with the sound off.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the tune was the hinge, particularly for the ones in the room with nothing.