Every Form I Know Went Hollow

He could give you a hundred of them without looking anything up.

The psalms first, obviously, and not just the famous ones. He has the whole of one in Hebrew from a year in his twenties when he set out to do that and, unusually for a project started at twenty-four, actually finished it. He has Hannah's. He has Solomon at the dedication. He has the prayer Daniel prays in chapter nine, which he thinks is the best of them and rarely says so because people ask him to explain why and it takes an hour.

And he has used them. Properly. Not as decoration.

For about thirty years, when he sat down to pray, one of them would come, and it would be the right one, and he would go through it and mean it and come out the other side.

That stopped in the spring.

Not dramatically. There was no crisis, and he wants that understood, because he has watched people manufacture a crisis to explain a change and he will not do it.

What happened is that he sat down in April, reached for the usual thing, and it came out of his mouth like a piece of furniture.

He tried a different one. The same. He tried the Hebrew one, which has never in twenty-five years failed to do something in him, and it was a beautiful arrangement of sounds and it was nothing.

He has kept going since. He sits down every day. He works through something.

And it is all hollow, and he is a man with a shelf of the finest words ever written and nothing whatsoever of his own to say, and he has begun to wonder whether the thirty years were his at all or whether he has been borrowing somebody else's coat and calling it warmth.

And that is you at your own table, or you would have closed this an hour ago.

What was holding the forms up

Let me put the passage down and then tell you something about the shelf.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.Romans 8:26

Now. You have concluded that the forms have failed and therefore they were probably always empty and therefore the thirty years were borrowed.

That is a chain of three, and the first link is wrong, so the other two do not hold.

The forms did not fail. Something under them became visible.

For thirty years there were two things going on when you sat down. There was a psalm, good and true and well chosen. And underneath it, holding it up, was the interceding that Paul describes, which never once ran on the quality of the words on top of it.

You could not see the second thing, because the first thing was in the way. It was doing its job so well that it hid what it was resting on.

You have not been borrowing a coat for thirty years, and the words on that shelf were never the thing that made them work. It is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), and too deep for words puts it beneath every form there has ever been, including the good ones. The Holy Spirit was under Daniel's prayer when you prayed it and He is under the silence now.

And this is worth saying to you specifically, because you will want it stated precisely rather than warmly.

The hollowness you are describing is not the absence of the interceding. It is the absence of your ability to feel the form working. Those are two different things and only one of them has changed.

You are not further from Him in April than you were in the twenty-five years the Hebrew one did something. It is written that we do not know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26), and the not knowing was as true in your fluent years as it is now. The Holy Spirit met it then in exactly the way He meets it now.

Now let me say the thing about the shelf itself, because you are one step from doing something you would regret.

Do not throw them out.

A man in your position often decides that the forms were the problem and goes looking for spontaneity, and what he finds is that he is now bad at both. The psalms are not the obstacle. They are some of the finest things ever said to God and you have them by heart, which is a gift a great many people would want.

You are not being asked to give up the shelf, and nothing you have learned needs undoing. It is written that the word of God is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), and a psalm does not stop being living because a man cannot currently feel it. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to trade a good form for a poor improvisation.

He is asking for one breath in which you say nothing at all, so that for the first time in thirty years the thing underneath is not covered by anything.