Nobody At Our Congregation Knows

There are about sixty of them and Ari could tell you every one of their names.

He could tell you whose father is ill, and which two families are not speaking, and who lost work in the spring, and which of the boys is struggling in school, because in a room that size everybody knows everything and it is mostly a gift.

They have been part of that congregation for nineteen years. They were married out of it. Their children were dedicated in it. When Ari's mother died, eleven people were at that house inside two hours with food they had clearly not had time to cook.

And not one of those sixty people knows about his wife.

She comes most weeks. She is warm, she is funny, she has been on the committee for the summer thing three years running, and she is very good at that room, and Ari watches her be very good at it while knowing what Thursday looked like.

He is not protecting his reputation. He wants that clear because it is the first thing anybody would assume. He would take the whole hit himself in a second and be glad of it.

He is protecting hers. Because she has asked him to, once, at a kitchen table, badly, crying, and he said yes and he meant it, and he is going to keep his word.

And here is the thing that has begun to happen to him and that he has no vocabulary for.

He is more alone in that room than anywhere else on earth. Not at work, where nobody knows him. Not in a supermarket. In that room, at the long table, in the middle of sixty people who love him and would do anything, holding the one thing he cannot say.

I am surrounded and I have never been this alone in my life. And I am not going to break my word. So what happens to me?

And here is where I stop talking about Ari, because you are carrying somebody's else's secret in a room that loves you, and you gave your word, and nobody has ever addressed what that does to the one holding it.

Let me say the first thing carefully, because you are about to be told to tell somebody and that is not what is coming. You gave your word to your wife and I am not going to spend this message trying to talk you out of it. What I am going to deal with is you.

A man in a cave named it exactly

Let me put the true thing down first, because it is the only sentence that has ever described where you are.

You are not the first person to be entirely surrounded and entirely unknown, and Scripture has the exact words for it, written by a man who was not exaggerating: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried to You, O Lord: I said, You are my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.Psalm 142:4-5

Read the first half slowly, because you have never heard it said out loud and it will do something to you.

There was no man that would know me. Not: no man was present. David wrote that psalm in a cave with four hundred men, which is to say with a whole crowd around him. He was surrounded. And the sentence he wrote was about being unknown in the middle of it.

Refuge failed me. He is not being polite about how that felt.

And then the turn, which is not a solution and does not pretend to be: I cried to You, O Lord: I said, You are my refuge. He does not get a person. He gets a place to put it, and he names God as the thing that has not failed. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

So this exact loneliness is in Scripture, described accurately, without being scolded, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own sympathy, and God's Spirit is at that long table on the weeks nobody knows anything.

Keeping her confidence does not mean carrying it alone

Now let me say something precise, because there is a distinction here that could change your year and almost nobody makes it.

Keeping a confidence means not telling that congregation about your wife.

It does not mean carrying it with nobody.

Those two have collapsed into one thing in your head, and I understand why, and they are not the same. There are places where a man can put this down that are not that room and that do not expose her: a counselor, who is bound by confidentiality more tightly than any friend could be. A family group for people who love somebody using, where you can speak without naming her to anybody who knows her. A rabbi or a minister in another town. One person outside those sixty, chosen carefully, with her knowledge if that can be had.

And here is a thing worth putting to her, gently, at a kitchen table, sometime that is not a crisis: she asked you to keep this from that room. She may never have considered that you might need one person somewhere who is not in it, and it is entirely possible she would say yes if she were asked, because she loves you and she has never once wanted you to be destroyed by this.

But even before any of that, hear the thing that is true tonight, whether or not anybody is ever told: you are known. Fully, at that table, on the weeks it is worst, by God, who was named as refuge by a man in a cave surrounded by four hundred people. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can sit down inside rather than something you affirm.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists for you and none of it is small faith. The groups are real and they exist in most towns and online, and everybody in them is holding what you are holding. A counselor is not a betrayal of your word. And if she is ever in danger, get medical help immediately, and in the United States she or you can call or text 988 at any hour. In that situation you are not breaking a confidence, you are saving a life, and she would want that, and any promise made at a kitchen table was never meant to cover an emergency.