I Can Name Every Position

Noam can give you all of it, fairly, without you being able to tell where he stands, and he is quietly proud of that and has begun to suspect it has cost him something.

He can lay out each account of what this is and how it works. He can give you the strongest version of each, which is harder and rarer than giving the weak version and knocking it down. Two people have told him he changed how they think about it, and neither of them ended up agreeing with him, because he did not tell them what he thought.

He is forty-one. This is genuinely a gift and it serves people.

And somewhere in the last eight years he has stopped praying about it.

Not stopped praying. He prays. He prays for his wife's father, and for a man at work who is in trouble, and about money in the specific way you pray about money when there is not much of it.

But about this, nothing. He noticed it about a year ago and he has been unable to un-notice it since.

And when he tried to work out why, he got to something uncomfortable in about two minutes, which is fast for a man who normally takes weeks.

He cannot pray about it because he does not know what to ask for.

If he asks for the thing one group means, he has taken a position. If he asks for the thing another group means, he has taken a different one. If he asks vaguely, so as to be fair to everybody, the prayer becomes so hedged that he can hear himself doing it, and a man cannot sustain a prayer he can hear himself constructing.

So he stopped, in the way careful people stop, which is without ever deciding to.

You may know that room.

Maybe your version is not about the Spirit at all. Maybe there is something you understand from every side so thoroughly that you can no longer want anything about it out loud.

Somebody else does the wording

There is a verse in Romans 8 that I think has been sitting there waiting for you, and it takes the entire problem off the table.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Look at the middle clause. We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

Paul does not present that as a failing of the immature. He writes it as a general condition, in the first person plural, about everybody, including himself, and he is not being modest.

And then the solution he gives is not that you should study until you know what to ask for. The solution is that somebody else does the asking, and does it in a form that has no words in it at all.

Groanings which cannot be uttered. Beyond language. Beyond, specifically, the department in which you are excellent.

And you are not required to know what to ask for. The written word says we know not what we should pray for as we ought and treats it as the ordinary human condition, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a release in a man who stopped praying because he could not word it.

And the interceding is being done for you in a language you do not have to master. The word puts the groanings beyond utterance, which puts them beyond precision, and the Spirit is the one doing them rather than waiting on your formulation.

The gift and the cost, separated

Let me put these apart carefully, because I think they have been tangled and you deserve them untangled.

The even-handedness is a real gift. Two people came away thinking better and neither carried your opinion, and that is rare and difficult and most people in this subject cannot do it. Nothing here asks you to become partisan or to know less.

What has happened is that a discipline you developed for other people's benefit has been applied to your own private life, where it does not belong.

Fairness is what you owe a listener. It is not what you owe your own hunger.

You are allowed to want something for yourself without that constituting a position on a disputed question. Nobody is minuting your kitchen.

And you are allowed to ask without it being an argument. The word says pour out your heart before him, and it does not require the heart to be internally consistent first, and the Spirit is the one who makes an unhedged sentence safe.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that rather than requiring you to have resolved a question first.

And I am not going to make you pick

Let me be plain about what this article is not doing, because you of all readers will be checking.

I am not going to tell you which position is right. I have not implied it and I am not going to smuggle it in at the end. Sincere and careful people have divided over this for a very long time and there are people on each side I would trust with my life, and you did not come here to be recruited.

There is no exam here and nothing to fail.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word makes the Spirit a wind nobody can account for, and a thing beyond accounting cannot have a mark scheme, and the Spirit is the one who settles rather than examines.