What He Does Not Despise

Anselm has taught in that room for thirty-one years and there are two chairs in it and one of them is where people sit.

He is careful. That is the word everybody uses about him and it is meant well and it is exact. He prepares. He does not say things he has not thought about. In thirty-one years nobody has ever heard him say something he would want back.

And in the second week of a bad February he sat in that room on his own with the kettle boiled and not poured and found that he could not do the thing he has always done.

His arrangement with God, and he would call it that himself, has been a finished one. He brings conclusions. He works a thing through, on his own, sometimes for weeks, and then he brings the result of it, in order, in decent shape.

He is not proud of this and he is not ashamed of it. It is simply how he was taught, by a man he loved, who did it the same way.

What happened in February is that a family matter went badly in a way he cannot fix and does not understand, and he sat in that room for four evenings running trying to work it into a shape he could bring, and it would not go.

He said to his colleague Ida, who does not knock either, "I have nothing finished."

And Ida, who is blunt and has known him twenty-two years, said: "Anselm. Is there a rule?"

He said what.

She said: "Is there a rule that it has to be finished? Where is that written?"

He sat with that for about a week. He is a careful man. He went and looked.

He said afterwards that he could not find it. Not in the psalms, which are full of unfinished things. Not in the prophets, who complain. Not anywhere. He said he had been operating a rule for thirty-one years that he had inherited from a good man who had inherited it from somebody, and that at no point in the chain had anybody checked whether it was in the book.

You may have the same arrangement. You bring the sorted version, the conclusion, the tidied account of the thing. And then a season arrives where nothing will go into that shape and you find you have no way of coming at all. And nobody has ever asked you where that rule is written.

The One Thing Named As Not Despised

There is a line at the end of the most famously wretched psalm in the book, and it names, specifically, the thing God does not turn away.

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."Psalm 51:17

Read the noun. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.

That is offering language. The word sacrifice in that sentence is the technical vocabulary of what gets brought and placed and given, and the psalm puts a broken spirit in that slot.

Not as a substitute. Not as what you bring when you have nothing better. In the slot.

You are holding an offering rather than an excuse. Psalm 51 names the broken thing in the vocabulary of what is brought and given, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sets it down in a study with two chairs and a kettle that was boiled and never poured.

And then the second half, which is the reason this article exists. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

Of everything a person could bring, that is the one Scripture goes out of its way to say is not looked down on. It anticipates the exact fear and answers it by name.

You have been carrying the one thing named in the text as safe to bring. That is what the written word says about the unpresentable version of a person, and it is the Spirit of God who takes thirty-one years of an unexamined rule off a careful man in about a week.

Where That Rule Actually Came From

Now the part worth being precise about, because Anselm is precise and this deserves it.

The rule did not come from Scripture. It came from formation, which is a different thing, and formation is mostly good and is transmitted by people who love you and is almost never audited.

Somebody watched somebody else do it a certain way. That is the whole mechanism. And it produced, in this case, a man of enormous integrity who could not come to God in February.

That matters because it means the fix is not repentance. There is nothing to repent of. It is simply that a practice was inherited without a source, and once you go and look for the source and cannot find it, the practice loses its authority quite quickly and quite quietly.

You are not being corrected here, you are being shown a rule that was never in the book. It is written that we may come boldly to the throne of grace, and the word there is about frankness rather than about confidence, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that room through all four of the evenings when nothing would go into shape.

And say the guard. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No method, no wording, no state, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If you keep bringing the finished version for another thirty-one years, you are exactly as much His the whole time, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a new practice to be careful about.