He Died Certain

He took the funeral because the family asked and because nobody else would have done it as carefully.

The man was eighty-eight. He had held a set of convictions his whole adult life, seriously and at real cost, and they were not the convictions of the building the service was held in and everybody knew it and nobody said so.

He had lost work over them in his forties. He had lost a friendship of thirty years. There is a letter, which the family showed him, written in 1983, in which the man declines something that would have made his life a great deal easier, and the reasons given in that letter are lucid and calm and completely wrong.

He was not a crank. That is the thing that has stayed. He was a careful, kind, meticulous man who read widely and thought hard and arrived somewhere and stayed there for sixty years and paid for it.

And at the graveside, with about forty people, what he said was true and warm and said nothing about the content of any of it.

And afterwards, in the vestry, with his coat over the back of a chair, the man's daughter said: he was so sure, wasn't he. Right to the end. That has to count for something.

And he said: it counts for a great deal.

Which is a sentence that means nothing, and he knew it as he said it, and he has been carrying it since May.

Because what he wanted to say and could not was: it counts for everything about him and nothing at all about whether he was right, and I have used the fact that people are sure as an argument from the front of that building for nineteen years.

The man who wrote most of the letters says he was convinced and wrong

Let me deal with the vestry first, because the sentence you gave her was not a failure.

Her father had been in the ground about forty minutes. A daughter saying that has to count for something is not opening a discussion about epistemology, she is asking whether her father's life had weight. It counts for a great deal was the right answer to the question she actually asked, and a man who had given her the other answer at that moment would have been a worse minister and not a more honest one.

What is true is that the other sentence has been standing in you since May, and it is not about her.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as excuse: sincerity was never the argument, and the account you preach from says so in the first person. That is not my kind reading of a hard summer, it is what stands written in the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that vestry with you.

Read it. It is Paul, in front of a king, describing himself.

I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth.Acts 26:9

I too was convinced.

Not deceived. Not half-hearted. Convinced, and acting on it, at real cost to himself and enormous cost to other people, and completely wrong.

The man who writes most of that collection puts his own sincere wrongness on the record, in front of a king, as part of his own testimony.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a way to reconcile May: you have never needed sincerity to do the work, because the written word has its principal author testifying that he was convinced and mistaken, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the concession stayed in the speech.

And here is the thing that has actually been bothering you since May, which is not the daughter and not the letter from 1983.

It is that you have used it. Nineteen years of nobody dies for something they know is a lie, from the front, in a building where people trusted you, and in May you stood at a graveside and watched what the argument actually costs when it meets a real eighty-eight year old man. Nothing written ever made that claim, and the Holy Spirit has been letting the discomfort stand rather than settling it for you.

That is worth facing and it is not a catastrophe. The narrow version of that argument survives. The one you have been using does not, and you have known that since about three o'clock on the day of the funeral.