I Cried In The Car And Could Not Say Why

You got to the car before it happened, which you have been quietly grateful for ever since.

The woman in the office had been lovely. She said congratulations and she meant it and she handed over the envelope and you said thank you about four times and walked out into the parking lot in the ordinary light of a Tuesday afternoon.

And you got in and put your bag on the passenger seat and did not start the engine.

And then it came up out of you, hard, with a sound you did not recognize, and it went on for something like four minutes.

And afterward you sat there with the visor mirror down fixing your face, and the thing that has stayed with you since is not the crying.

It is that you have no idea what it was.

It was not happiness. You have been happy and that was not it. It was not relief exactly, although relief was somewhere in it. It came from a long way down and it had four years in it and you could not have told anybody, then or now, what came out of you in that car.

And your husband asked how it went and you said fine, they were really nice, and you have not mentioned it to a living soul.

Four years of holding

Let me offer you something about what was probably in it, and then let me tell you why the not knowing is fine.

Something has been held in this house for four years.

Not the same thing the whole time. In the first year it was hope, which is heavy. Then there was the stretch where it fell through, and after that it became something more like guardedness. Then the applications, and the waiting, and the thing in February that nearly ended it.

Four years of a muscle held tight without ever being released, and then a woman in an office said congratulations and handed over an envelope, and the muscle let go in a parking lot.

You have been holding something for four years, and a body that finally puts it down has never once needed to explain itself first. The Holy Spirit is the one who was in the passenger seat with you, and it is written in Psalm 126 that when the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.

And here is why you cannot name it, and it is not a deficiency in you.

What came out was not one feeling. It was four years of several, compressed, arriving at once because the lid came off. Joy was in there. So was the February thing. So was every evening of not knowing, and a good deal of tiredness that had nowhere to go while there was still something to be got through.

A person cannot label that, because it does not have one name. It is a stack.

You have been trying to name a stack rather than a feeling, and four years arriving at once has never once been a thing anybody could put one word on. Psalm 126 reaches for a dream rather than for a word, and the Spirit of God is the one who let the language be that loose.

We were like them that dream

Here is the verse, and notice what the writer does when he runs out of words.

When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing. (Psalm 126:1, King James Version)

Like them that dream.

That is a man describing the best day of a nation's life, and what he reaches for is a simile about not being sure it is happening. Not joy. Not gratitude. Dreaming, which is the state of a person who cannot verify their own experience.

And then the laughter arrives in the next line, and the singing, but they arrive after. First there is the disorientation.

You have had the first part of that psalm and not yet the second, and a mouth that has not filled with laughter yet has never once been a mouth that missed its turn. Psalm 126 puts the dreaming ahead of the singing on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set the order and is in no hurry about it.

You are permitted a moment that does not have a name yet, and a mouth full of laughter has never once been required to arrive in the same minute as the news. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept them in that order, and the written word puts the dreamlike part before the laughing.

And I want to point at something in that psalm that is directly for you.

Look at what preceded it. Captivity. Years of it. And the psalm does not pretend those years were nothing; it goes on later to talk about sowing in tears and coming again with rejoicing.

So the strange, unnameable, dreamlike quality of that day is understood in that psalm as the natural consequence of what came before it. It is not a sign that something is wrong with the person. It is what arriving feels like after a long time of not arriving.

You have been reacting exactly the way that psalm describes, and a day that does not feel the way it was supposed to feel has never once been a day that went wrong. Psalm 126 puts the dreaming and the long captivity in the same short poem, and the Spirit of God is the one who connected them.