The Word They Only Said Quietly

Karim has been on the roof since about four, which is not a spiritual discipline, it is that he cannot sleep and the flat is small.

It is a good roof. Laundry lines. Two water tanks. Somebody's chair. The parapet is low enough to sit on if you are not sensible, and he is not, and he has a glass of tea going cold beside him.

And at about twenty past five the street starts.

It does not ease into it. A shutter goes up like a train, then another. A bread cart with one bad wheel that everybody on this street could identify blindfolded. Two men shouting at each other about something that is plainly not urgent, because they shout at each other about it every morning and have for years. A radio. A moped. Somebody's mother, from three streets over, telling somebody something at a volume that carries.

The whole thing comes up at once. It is loud, it is bright, the light comes over the roofs and hits the water tanks and turns them gold, and Karim sits there with his cold tea and is, for a minute, extremely happy.

And then he thinks about the word.

He was raised near it, and it was in the house, and it was never once loud. Holy was said the way you say the name of an illness. Voice down, eyes flick, the way people say a thing that could go badly if it is handled without care. It was the word that arrived just before the room went careful.

Nobody sat him down and explained it. It came in the tone, which is how the important things always come in.

So Karim is thirty-six and he has an entire body that knows what to do when that word is said, and what it does is lower. Voice, shoulders, expectations. A word about God arrives and everything in him gets smaller and quieter and more careful, and that has been the whole of his experience of it, and he has never once thought to ask whether that is what the word does anywhere else.

The bread cart goes past under him. The two men are still shouting. The gold is on everything.

You know that tone. Yours came from a different room. But you know exactly what your voice does when that word gets said, and you have never once asked who taught it to do that.

The only time we hear it said, they are shouting

Isaiah 6 is the throne room, and it is the one place in the Bible where we are told what creatures who can actually see God do with this word.

And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.Isaiah 6:3

Cried. Not murmured. Not said carefully. Cried unto another, which is a word for calling out across a distance, and the very next verse tells you what it did to the room: and the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.

The doorposts moved. That is a structural report. Whatever that sounded like, it was not careful.

You were taught a tone that Scripture does not use, and the correction is already written down. That is the written word and not my enthusiasm on a rooftop, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a vision of a throne and sets it down over a street at twenty past five in the morning.

And here is what should turn your whole body over. The creatures crying it are the ones who can see. They are not being reckless because they do not understand what they are near; they are the closest, they have the clearest view of anybody in the passage, and their response to a clear view is volume.

Isaiah, who is the one in that room who cannot bear it, is the one who goes quiet. And what happens to him is not that he is told to stay quiet. A coal is brought and his mouth is opened and he ends the chapter speaking.

Three times, and then the size of it

Say the line the way Hebrew builds emphasis, because it is doing something with the repetition.

Hebrew does not have our stack of adjectives. It intensifies by structure: king of kings, holy of holies, doubling and tripling a word to mean the utmost. Holy, holy, holy is the highest form of that in the whole language, and it is used exactly here, once, about God.

So the word is not a small careful thing that has to be handled gently. It is the biggest word in the room, and it is being said at maximum volume by creatures with their faces covered.

You are standing under the biggest word there is, and it is already yours to say at full height. Isaiah 6 has the doorposts moving at the sound of it, and the same Spirit who filled that house is the one making it a present fact on a warm roof with a glass of cold tea.

And then the second half of the verse, which nobody who was taught the whisper ever gets to. The whole earth is full of his glory.

Full. The whole earth. Not, one room in the earth is holy and the rest is dangerous. Not, keep it away from the ordinary. The seraphim look at the same world you are looking at from that parapet, the shutters and the bread cart and the two men who have been shouting since before you were born, and they call it full of His glory.

I will guard this carefully, because I am not asking you to be casual. Isaiah goes to pieces in that chapter and he is right to. The word is serious and there is a proper trembling in it and anybody who has lost that has lost something real.

But trembling and shrinking are two different things. The seraphim tremble and shout. What you were taught was to get smaller, and to make the room careful, and to hold the word away from the ordinary, and none of that is in this chapter anywhere.

And whoever taught you the tone was not trying to shrink you. In most houses that lowered voice is reverence that lost half its vocabulary somewhere. Nobody in your family is being prosecuted this morning. There is only a roof, and a street coming up gold, and a verse where the door moved.