Decoration Day on the Ridge

They start at about nine and by half past ten there are sixty people on that hillside and eleven vehicles parked along the track and somebody's dog has been shut in a truck for its own good.

Buckets, clippers, a wire brush that goes round, a lot of flowers, and folding tables at the top end that will have food on them by one.

Vesta is sixty-eight and she has come to this every year since she was old enough to be brought, which is every year of her life.

She does her family's row.

Eleven of them, along the third terrace, back to a great-grandmother she never met and forward to a brother who has been there eleven years and about whom she still does not say very much.

She does it properly. Clippings bagged, not scattered. The wire brush on the two old stones where the lichen has got into the letters. Water carried up twice, because she is not going to make one bucket do.

It takes her about two hours and she does it on her own, and everybody on that ridge knows to leave her to it, and she has never once asked anybody for help and would be genuinely bewildered by the offer.

And this is how she has done everything.

Her faith particularly. Sixty-eight years, and it is real, and nobody who has watched her would question it for a second. Prayer, the reading, the giving, forty years of quietly doing right by people who never knew where it came from. Thorough. Alone. Well done. Her own row.

At about half eleven she straightens up because her back has told her to, and she puts a hand on the top of the nearest stone and looks along the ridge.

Sixty people. And every single grave up there is being done by somebody.

The Combses are three terraces up and there are five of them at it. Two women she does not know are doing the row of little ones from 1948 that has no family left. Somebody has already been at the far end where the ground is bad, and there is fresh gravel down that nobody was asked to bring.

And she thinks about her grandmother's stone, which is the fourth in her row.

It has never once been overgrown. Not in forty years.

And Vesta has not been up here for forty years. She missed 1994 entirely, and there were two years in the eighties when she was three states away, and there was the year of the operation.

Somebody did it. Several somebodies, over four decades, without mentioning it, because that is what happens on this ridge and always has.

You have that row. Yours might not be in a cemetery. But you know the thing you do alone and do properly, and you have probably never once checked whether the parts you missed stayed undone.

The phrase has no singular

Deuteronomy 26 is the end of a long covenant passage and it finishes with two verses where both sides declare themselves, and the phrase in it is the one this whole site is named for.

And the LORD hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments; And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the LORD thy God.Deuteronomy 26:18-19

An holy people.

That is the phrase. Not a holy person. Not a holy man or a holy woman.

Go looking, and you will find it stays that way all through. A kingdom of priests and an holy nation. Ye shall be holy, plural in the Hebrew, spoken to a whole assembly. A chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, all four of them plural in Peter's hand.

You are part of a phrase that Scripture keeps in the plural, and there is no singular of it in that passage. That is the written word and not my comfort on a hillside, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the end of a covenant passage and lays it on a ridge at half past eleven on a bright morning.

That is not a small point about grammar. It is the shape of the thing. When God says holy about people, He almost always says it about a people, and He says it to a crowd, and the individual is inside it rather than being an instance of it.

Which means sixty-eight years of doing it beautifully on your own row has been sixty-eight years of doing something that is genuinely good inside an arrangement that is genuinely larger.

Both sides declared

Now look at the verse before, because the passage has two halves and they mirror each other.

Thou hast avouched the LORD this day to be thy God.

And then verse eighteen: And the LORD hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people.

Two declarations, made the same day, in the same passage, one from each side.

And notice that yours is singular in the English and His is plural. Thou hast avouched. His peculiar people. You declare as yourself, and He answers by naming what you are part of.

This is yours, and He answered a personal declaration by naming a people, and it is already settled. Deuteronomy 26 puts the two avouchings side by side, and the same Spirit who kept that covenant language alive for three thousand years is the one making it a present fact in a woman with a wire brush in her hand.

Now let me guard this the way I would on my own ridge.

I am not telling you that forty years of doing your row alone was wrong. It was not. It was faithful and it was hard and there were years when nobody else would have done it and God saw every bucket carried up that hill.

And I am not telling you the answer is to be at more things. That is not what this site says and it is not what that passage describes. A people is not a room you sit in on a Sunday; it is a ridge full of folk doing rows, most of whom will never mention it to you.

And if you are reading this with no ridge and no row and nobody who knew your grandmother, you are not outside this. The phrase is an holy people, and God is the one who avouched it, and He did the avouching before anybody in that valley did anything at all.

What I am telling you is that the sentence has no singular in it, and you have been living as though it did, and there is a stone in your row that has been cared for in years when you were three states away.