I Could Not Tell You Now What I Meant

You said them and you cannot get back to what you understood.

That is not the same as regretting them. It is that you were young, and there were people watching, and the words were handed to you by somebody else in a form of language nobody uses in a kitchen, and you repeated them accurately in a room that smelled of flowers, and twenty-two years later you could not tell anybody what you thought you were agreeing to.

You know you meant it. That much you are sure of. You do not know what it was.

I am not going to teach you about vows. There is a whole shelf of that and it usually arrives as instruction, and instruction is not what a person needs when they cannot find their own words.

And I am not going to ask whether you meant it. That question is an examination, and this is not an examination. You said them and you meant them and the meaning is not on trial today.

What I want to do is something much smaller. I want to get the words back into ordinary speech, so that they are something you have said rather than something that was said at you.

Whither thou goest, I will go

There is a promise in the book of Ruth that nobody wrote out for her, and the reason I want it here is that it is entirely in her own words.

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (Ruth 1:16, King James Version)

Whither thou goest, I will go.

There was no ceremony. Nobody handed her a form. There is no officiant in that scene and no witnesses and nothing that could be called a service. It is two women on a road, one of whom has told the other to go home, and the other one says a sentence.

And look at how the sentence is built. It is made of ordinary things. Where you go. Where you sleep. Your people. Your God. It is a list of the most concrete things in a life, and there is not one abstract word in the whole of it.

That is a promise a person could still recite in a kitchen.

Ruth 1:16 records a promise in plain words rather than in formal ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who has lost the language of their own.

You are able to hold a promise in plain words, and it has never once needed the original phrasing to be real. Ruth 1:16 puts the whole thing in ordinary concrete things, said by somebody with no ceremony around her, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes plain speech enough.

The words were never the problem

Now the thing that is actually going on, because I do not think you have lost anything.

Formal language does something odd to memory. Words you would never use, said once, under pressure, in front of people, do not encode the way ordinary sentences do. You can probably still remember what somebody said to you in a car park years ago, because it was said in the language you actually think in. Ruth 1:16 is remembered in exactly that plain register, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see it as a fact about language.

Ruth 1:16 is remembered by everybody who has ever read it, and it is remembered because of how it is built, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see that this is a feature of language rather than a fault in them.

So the blank is not evidence that you were not serious. It is what happens to formal speech, and it happens to almost everybody who has ever stood in that kind of room.

You are not looking at a lapse in yourself, and formal words have never once stayed in a person the way ordinary ones do. The written word records the promise everybody remembers in the plainest possible speech, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a self-accusation off somebody whose memory behaved normally.

Say them out loud, alone, to God

So here is the assignment, and it is quieter than it sounds.

Say your vows out loud, alone, to God.

If you can remember the actual words, say those. If you cannot, and most people cannot, then say what you can and put the rest in your own language. To have and to hold, and then whatever your version of the rest is: I am not going anywhere. I am staying in this house. Your people are my people.

Say them out loud, which is the whole point. They were spoken once and have been silent for twenty-two years, and a thing said out loud exists differently from a thing thought about.

Alone, because there is nobody to perform for and no room to get through.

And to God, because He was there, and because saying them to Him puts them where they were addressed in the first place.

This is not a renewal. Nothing is being re-signed, nobody is being told, and it changes nothing about your week. It is a recovery of your own words.

Ruth 1:16 has the promise spoken aloud on a road with nobody to witness it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody says theirs out loud in a car.

You are able to say them again in your own language, and the words have never once had to be the original ones. Ruth 1:16 is spoken plainly and aloud with no ceremony around it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a person hears their own promise in their own voice.