The Salon Chair on a Saturday

Saturday in that salon is three chairs going at once, a dryer that has needed replacing since before the pandemic, a radio nobody is really listening to, and about six conversations happening across each other at all times.

Yvette has been coming here twenty years. She is fifty. Cherie has done her hair since Cherie was twenty-four and doing it badly, and now does it beautifully, and knows exactly how Yvette likes it without asking.

And for fifteen of those twenty years, Yvette has been leaving.

Not dramatically. That is the thing about it. A conversation goes somewhere, and Yvette remembers an appointment. Her phone goes off, which it does not. She realizes the time. She once left with one side done and a cape still on, went home, took it off in her own bathroom, and came back on the Tuesday and said something about her sister.

Cherie has never asked. Cherie has stopped even pausing when she does it. That is what fifteen years does.

Today the room is loud and the talk goes where it goes, and it is about somebody's ex-husband and it is not kind, and Yvette feels the whole thing rise in her the way it always does, the sense that she is being coated in something, and her hand is on the strap of her bag before she has decided anything at all.

And Cherie, comb in her mouth, not looking up, says the sentence.

She says: you know you do not have to go. You could just not join in.

She says it completely without edge. She is not making a point. She has been thinking it for years and today it came out because her hands were busy.

Yvette sits in the chair with her hand on the strap and one entire assumption of her adult life quietly falls over, because in fifteen years it has never once occurred to her that between joining in and walking out there was a third thing.

You have had your hand on that strap. Your room is a different room, an office, a hallway, a family kitchen, a group chat. But you know the rise in the chest, and you know the two options you have been choosing between, and nobody has ever shown you a third.

Paul had to write a whole correction because of this

This is not a passage where Paul is teaching something new. This is a passage where Paul is going back and fixing a misunderstanding of something he already wrote, which tells you how old and how common this misunderstanding is.

He says: I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators. And then he says:

Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.1 Corinthians 5:10

They had read his first letter as a rule about everybody. Stay away. Do not company with. And a whole church started building the architecture, the way you did, and Paul hears about it and writes back and says, no, not the world, I never meant the world, because if I meant the world you would have to leave the planet to obey me.

You have been living inside a misreading that Paul himself sat down and corrected in writing. That is the written word and not my sympathy from the next chair, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's correction and lays it in a salon on a Saturday with the dryer going.

Then he tells them what he actually meant, and it is entirely about the church's own house: how a congregation handles someone inside it who is doing damage and will not stop. That is a real instruction and it stands. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the woman doing your hair.

Fifteen years of leaving rooms, on the strength of a sentence the man who wrote it came back and corrected. That is not a small thing to find out on a Saturday, and I am not going to rush you past it.

What you thought you had to choose between

Here is the third thing, and it is so ordinary that you will wonder how it stayed hidden.

You can be in a room and not be in the conversation. You can sit in the chair, and let the talk go where it goes, and not add to it, and not perform your disapproval either, and stay. Nobody has to know anything is happening. You do not announce it. You simply do not put your weight on that end of the seesaw, and the conversation carries on without your contribution, and in about four minutes it will be about something else.

That is not a compromise and it is not a technique. It is what most quiet holiness has looked like for two thousand years in kitchens and workrooms and back rows, and it is almost invisible, which is exactly why nobody taught it to you. Leaving is visible. Joining in is visible. Staying without joining in looks like nothing at all from the outside, and it is the only one of the three that keeps you in the room where the people are.

You are able to stay, and it is already yours, and staying has never once been the sin. Paul wrote in First Corinthians 5 otherwise ye must needs go out of the world in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who moved him to correct himself in writing is the one holding a woman in a chair with a cape on.

I will guard it, because I am not telling you that everything can be sat through. There are conversations that a person genuinely leaves, and there are rooms where leaving is the only faithful move, and if you are in one of those you already know it and this message is not asking you to sit down in it. Paul's actual instruction, the one he was clarifying, is a real one about real damage.

But you left the whole salon. Not one conversation. Every conversation, for fifteen years, in advance, on principle, and the woman who has done your hair since she was twenty-four has stopped even pausing when you go.