I Stop When The Fan Goes Off

The extractor over that stove is nineteen years old and it is far too loud for the size of the kitchen, and everybody in that family has complained about it at some point, and she has never once agreed with them.

Because under it she is a completely different woman.

She sings. Not carefully. She sings the way she sang when she was twenty-two in a room with two hundred people in it, full out, from the chest, with her eyes half shut and one hand doing something involuntary, and she says things between the lines, out loud, to God, in the middle of chopping an onion.

And the extractor has a switch that is stiff and goes off with a definite clunk.

And in the half second after that clunk, in the quiet that follows, whatever was coming out of her mouth stops.

Not fades. Stops. Mid-word, sometimes, and she has heard herself do it and been startled by it, and gone on with the onion in a silence that is a completely different quality of silence to the one she was in before.

She is fifty-eight.

There is nobody in the house. That is the part she has stopped trying to explain to herself. The children are grown and gone and her husband works away four days a week and the house at eleven in the morning is as empty as a house gets.

She has tried to work out what she is stopping for. The best she has managed, and she has only ever managed it in her head and never out loud, is that under the fan it is not exactly saying it. It is closer to something being carried by the noise, and when the noise goes, there is a woman standing in a kitchen with her own voice on her hands and nothing to put it into.

The quiet is not a room

I want to say the thing that will do the most work first, and it is one distinction.

You have been treating silence as though it were an audience.

That sounds odd until you look at what actually happens: under the noise you are unobserved, and in the quiet you are, in some sense, heard. By nobody. In an empty house. And your mouth stops anyway, mid-word, which tells you that whatever is doing the stopping is not reasoning about who is in the building.

A quiet room is not a listening room. It only feels like one because the last thing left in it is your own voice, and your own voice, unaccompanied, is the thing you have never been able to sit with.

Now here is what David does with exactly this.

I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.Psalm 34:1

Read the second half and notice how odd it is as a claim about a mouth.

Continually in my mouth. Not continually offered, not continually intended. Located there, permanently, as a fact about the organ rather than about the occasion.

And at all times is doing the same work from the other direction. It is not a promise to be enthusiastic on the good days. It is a statement that no category of moment has been excluded, and that includes the half second after a stiff switch goes clunk.

You are somebody in whose mouth His praise is continually, and that is not encouragement for a woman with an onion, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on that half second rather than on a psalm you have doubtless sung.

Now let me take your own explanation seriously, because it is better than most people's.

Under the fan it is not exactly saying it. It is closer to something being carried by the noise.

That is very precise and I think it is right. The noise is doing some of the work: it fills the room, it makes the singing an event that is happening rather than a statement that is being made, and it means your voice is one of two things in the air rather than the only one.

Take the noise away and your voice is alone in the room, and it turns out that is the thing.

You are not afraid of being overheard. You are unused to being unaccompanied. Scripture puts the praise in the mouth continually, which is a claim about a solo instrument, and the Spirit of God has been in that kitchen at eleven in the morning under nineteen years of an over-loud extractor and in every one of the silences after.

I want to say something about the woman of twenty-two, since she is in your account.

You sing the way you sang at twenty-two in a room with two hundred people in it.

That is not a small thing to have kept. Most people lose that entirely by fifty-eight, and you have preserved it, in a kitchen, under a fan, for decades, at full volume from the chest with your eyes half shut.

You have kept the voice. The word says the praise is continually in your mouth, and the Spirit is the one who has kept it there, and the only thing that has ever been missing is about four seconds of quiet with nothing else in it.

You are somebody in whose mouth His praise is continually, which is a fact about the organ rather than the occasion. Scripture says at all times and excludes no category of moment, and the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen under nineteen years of an over-loud extractor.