I Think I Have To Earn The Gladness

There is a sequence and you have never written it down and you could recite it.

First the gutters. Then the thing in the roof space, which will take a weekend. Then the door at the side, which is not urgent but which bothers you.

And then, somewhere past all of that, in a place you have never specified, the part where you sit down in this house and are glad about it.

You would not call it a condition. If somebody asked you directly whether you have to earn the right to enjoy your own home, you would say no. You would probably laugh.

And you have been here since June and the sequence has never once had an end put on it.

Because each time you finish something, a new item joins the list before the tools are back in the bag, and the place where the gladness sits moves along with it, and it has been moving all summer, and you have not noticed because you have been busy.

Where the sequence came from

Let me say something about the sequence, because I think it is older than the house and I think it explains why it is so hard to see.

Somewhere a long way back, gladness got attached to usefulness.

Not by anybody cruel. It happens in ordinary families. A boy is praised for what he does rather than for being there, and the praise is real and well meant, and over twenty years a rule forms underneath it: what I get is downstream of what I produce.

And a rule like that does not stay in the part of a life it was learned in. It goes everywhere. It goes into work, and into a marriage if nobody catches it, and it goes into a house.

You have been carrying a rule about production from long before this house, and gladness has never once been the sort of thing that came downstream of anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been on the roof and in the roof space with you all summer, and it is written in Psalm 30 that thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing.

And here is why the sequence cannot be completed, which is not a psychological observation but a fact about houses.

A house generates work at roughly the rate a person can do it. That is simply what a building is. So the list will be the same length in November as it was in June, with different items on it, and the position of the gladness will have moved again.

You have been chasing a line that moves every time you get near it, and a list that refills has never once been a list anybody reached the end of. Psalm 30 has God doing the turning without waiting for a man to finish anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the verb on His side and left it there.

A condition attached to the end of an endless list is not a condition. It is a refusal wearing a schedule.

You have attached a gladness to the end of a list that does not end, and no house anywhere has ever once run out of work for a man to do. Psalm 30 has God doing the turning rather than the man earning it, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the verb on His side.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing

Here is the verse, and every verb in it belongs to somebody other than the man speaking.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness. (Psalm 30:11, King James Version)

Thou hast turned. Thou hast put off. Thou hast girded.

Three actions, all of them performed by God, all of them done to a man who is described as passive throughout. He is not taking off his own sackcloth. It is being taken off him.

And girded me with gladness is the strangest image in the sentence. Girding is what you do with a belt: you fasten a thing round a man. So the gladness in that verse is not something he worked up. It is put on him, from outside, like clothing.

You have a gladness that is put on a man rather than produced by one, and nothing in that verse has ever once been earned by the person wearing it. The Holy Spirit is the one who arranged the grammar that way, and the written word gives every verb to God and leaves the man being dressed.

And notice what he was doing to deserve it. Nothing. He was in sackcloth. The sackcloth was the whole of his contribution.

The turning happened to a man in mourning who had produced no gutters, no roof space, and no side door.

You are being clothed rather than paid, and no invoice has ever once been raised against a man for a thing that was fastened on him as a gift. Psalm 30 has the sackcloth coming off before anything else happens, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the taking off.