Softness Was A Leak In The Roof

Nobody ever sat him down and told him. That is what he keeps returning to.

There was no lecture. His father did not deliver a philosophy of manhood at a kitchen table and neither did anybody else, and if you had asked any of those men whether softness was a fault they would probably have said no and meant it.

It came another way. It came in what got laughed at and what did not. It came in the difference between how a man was spoken about when he held things together and how he was spoken about when he did not. It came in a hundred small weathers over about fifteen years, and by the time he was twenty he had a rule that he could not have stated and has never once broken.

Softness is a leak in the roof.

Not wicked. Not even weak, exactly. A leak: a small failure of the structure that lets the weather in, and which a competent man notices and deals with, and which gets worse if you leave it.

He is sixty three.

He has kept that roof sound for forty three years. He did not cry at his father's funeral and he did not cry at his mother's, and he was steady both times and useful both times and everybody was glad of him.

And here is what happened in the spring, and it is why this article exists.

His granddaughter, who is four, fell over in his yard and came to him, and he picked her up and did the thing you do, and she put her whole face into his neck, and something in his chest went sideways.

He stood in that yard holding a four year old for longer than the fall required.

And afterward, when she had gone off after the dog, he stood there for a bit and understood something he had never let himself see, which is that he had felt that before, and it was the same feeling he has had at every funeral, and he had always called it a leak and dealt with it.

You know the rule. Yours may have come from somewhere else. But you know what it is to have learned a thing about yourself that nobody ever said out loud, and to have run it for forty years, and to have found out late what it cost.

He did not think He was admitting to a weakness

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about men and feelings you will put it down inside a paragraph, and you would be right to.

The pit is a definition. Somewhere in fifteen years of weather you learned that softness is structural failure, and the definition went in below argument, and it has been running ever since without ever once being examined, because a thing that goes in that way does not present itself for examination.

And it has run on God as well. That is why we are here rather than talking about your childhood.

Here is the verse. It is out of a song Moses sang to a nation at the end of his life, which is not a sentimental setting.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two halves in one line, and one God in both.

The Rock that begat thee. That is a father's word and it is strong, and there is nothing in it a man like you would flinch at.

And the second half, in the Hebrew, is the word for a woman bringing a child to birth. That is why a good many translations render the clause as the God who gave you birth.

Now look at what God does with that, because it is the whole of the article.

He put it in a song. He put it in a public song, sung to an entire nation, in the same line as the Rock, and He did not soften it and He did not qualify it and He did not put it somewhere quiet where it would not be noticed.

He did not think He was admitting to a weakness.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a soft side to go with a hard one. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, for one God whom neither exhausts. He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay in the form He gave them.

Take that on the step, and know it is not my sympathy, it is what is written. The thing you have been calling a leak for forty three years is in God, at full strength, in His own song. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a definition like yours off a man, which no argument has ever managed and no lecture ever will.