The Spade in the Back Garden

There is a man in his own back garden at eleven at night with a torch held in his teeth.

He has a coat over pajamas and no socks inside his boots. The kitchen light is off behind him because he did not want to wake anybody, and he is standing at the far end where the grass gives out and the soil goes heavy, and he is digging.

He knows exactly where. He does not have to look for it. Three feet in from the fence and one spade width to the left of the post, and he has dug this same hole so many times that the ground here has stopped fighting him and just opens.

He is not digging it up to move it. He is digging it up to see it.

He wants one look, to check that it is still dead. That is all. He tells himself every time that this is the last check, and every time the checking settles him for about a fortnight, and then he wakes at two with the same cold feeling and he is out here again with the torch in his teeth.

Years ago he stood in front of people who loved him, in water up to his chest, and he said out loud that this thing was going in the ground. He meant it. He has never once stopped meaning it.

And still, every few weeks, the spade.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you know that soil. Maybe yours is not a garden. Maybe it is a stretch of motorway you drive and re-run one conversation on. Maybe it is a ten minute window from a year you do not talk about, and you take it out at two in the morning and hold it up to the light and check the pulse. Maybe you do it so quietly that the person asleep beside you has never once known you were awake.

And here is the thing that has begun to frighten you. It is not the memory. It is what the checking seems to prove. If it really went down, you think, why am I out here with a spade.

Burial is not pretending

Let me take that fear off you first, before anything else, because it is the wrong fear and it has cost you years.

Remembering is not digging.

Those are two different acts and they use two different muscles, and the whole of this hinges on telling them apart. You are allowed to remember. You are allowed to grieve what happened, to name it accurately, to sit with a friend or a counselor and take it apart slowly and put it back down. That is honesty, and God has never once asked a person to lie about their own history in order to be free of it. Nothing here is telling you to look away, to hurry up, or to call a real wound a small one. It was not small. You would not have needed a grave for a small thing.

Digging is different. Digging is going back to check whether it is still dead. It is a watch. It is standing sentry over a piece of ground because you do not trust what is under it, and the exhausting part is not the sorrow. It is the vigilance.

And you are allowed to remember all of it in full. That is not my permission to give: the written word never once asks a person to lie about their own history in order to be free of it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who separates honesty from a watch in a man at two in the morning.

So look at what was actually said over you.

We were buried with him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.Romans 6:4

Read who is in the sentence with you. Buried with him. Not buried near Him. Not buried under His supervision while He stood on the bank and watched you go under on your own.

And read the second half, because half a verse is where most of this trouble comes from. The sentence does not stop at the grave and it was never meant to. The whole reason for the burial is the walking. Newness of life is not a reward you get later for having guarded the plot well enough. It is the point of the burial, and it is the part you have been too tired to do, because a man standing sentry over a grave cannot walk anywhere.

And you were buried with Him and the burying was done to you. The word puts the verb in the passive and names the Father as the one raising, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ground rather than argument in a man who has been holding something down himself for nine years.

Now here is the thing I most want you to hear, and it is a piece of history with dirt on it.

There was one grave in all the world that somebody genuinely tried to guard. A stone across it. A seal set on the stone. Soldiers put on watch through the night, professionals, with orders. And the guarding did not hold, because what was inside was stronger than what was outside, and it came out.

That is the only grave that ever had a watch on it, and the watch was useless. Yours has never needed one.

And you are not the keeper of that ground. The word says the LORD is thy keeper and gives the keeping to Him rather than to the one being kept, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a patrol at two in the morning.

You are not the keeper of that ground. You never were. Nobody ever handed you the spade and told you the job was yours, and you picked it up because you love the people in your house and you were terrified of what would happen if you took your eye off it for a week. I understand the picking up. It came from the right place. It is still not your job.