The Shelf Was Too High

In that house it lived on the top shelf and nobody ever took it down.

It is a big one. Leather, or something that was leather once, with a spine you could read from across the room. The kind of book that was bought for a wedding and not for reading.

And in the front of it are the births. Six of them in one hand, then four in another, then a gap, then two more in ballpoint, and the last entry is in the hand of a woman who is still alive and put her granddaughter in it in 2013.

Nando grew up in that room. It was above the good plates. He remembers, with complete clarity, being told not to touch it when he was about five, and he remembers it being said kindly and being entirely right, because he was a child with jam on him and it was the family's only record of anything.

Nobody was hiding it. That has to be said at the start.

What happened is subtler and it is what this article is about. He absorbed, from a shelf height and a tone of voice, a fact that nobody ever said and that has stayed with him for forty years: that book is an object, and it lives somewhere you cannot reach, and it is not the kind of thing you take down and read.

He has his own Bible now. He is a grown man with a family, he goes, he listens. And there is still something that happens in him when he goes to open it on his own, a very small hesitation, the exact height of a shelf above the good plates.

They took it down when his grandmother died.

Not for any reason. They were in the house, and the room was full of people, and somebody wanted to see the births, so his uncle got the steps.

And they put it on the low table and opened it, and everybody crowded round, and there they were, all of them, back to 1911.

Then a cousin turned past the front pages by accident.

There are marks in it.

Not many, and all in soft pencil, and all faint. A line down the side of a paragraph in Isaiah. A word underlined twice in one of the letters. A small cross beside about eleven verses across the whole book, and nobody in that room has any idea what the cross means.

Nobody knew she read it.

Fifty-one years of that book on that shelf, and a woman who cooked in that kitchen every day of her adult life had been getting it down, and putting it back, and marking it in pencil so lightly that you can only see it in a certain light.

Nando sat on the floor with it in his lap for a long time.

Now let me ask you where yours was kept.

It might have been a shelf. It might have been a drawer, or a room you did not go in, or a tone of voice. And you may well have your own copy now and still feel it: a very small hesitation at the moment of opening, which you have never traced back to anything.

Everybody in the square

There is a day in Nehemiah that is one of the great scenes in the Old Testament and it is mostly a description of a crowd.

The city walls have gone back up. And the people ask for the book, and Ezra brings it out into the square by the Water Gate, and stands on a platform made for the purpose, and reads.

He read from it before the square which was in front of the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of men and women, those who could understand; and all the people were attentive to the book of the law.Nehemiah 8:3

In the presence of men and women, those who could understand. Luke of the Old Testament could have written the leaders. He writes the whole square. Men, women, and anybody old enough to follow it, which in that culture is a deliberately wide net.

All the people were attentive to the book. Not to Ezra. The sentence puts the people's attention on the book itself, and a few verses later the Levites go out among the crowd to give the sense of it, and even then the book is the thing everybody is looking at.

It came out of the place it was kept. That is the physical event underneath the whole chapter: the scroll left the building, went into a public square, and was opened in front of everybody.

So hear this said over you, sitting on a floor with a big book in your lap. This was never meant to live where you could not reach it, and the hesitation you feel at the moment of opening is a shelf height and not a rule. That is written into a day when a whole city stood in a square, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher in an ordinary person, and He did not begin doing that with people who had permission.

Now let me guard the family, because this article is not a complaint about anybody's grandmother.

Nobody in that house did anything wrong.

The shelf was reverence. A woman who puts a book above the good plates is telling you what she thinks of it, and she was right about what she thought of it. The five-year-old with jam on him should not have been handling the only record of ten births.

And it is not a small thing that the record was kept at all. Somebody wrote those names down, in three different hands, across a century. That is a form of love and it is why the book is still in the house.

What went wrong is not a decision anybody made. It is that a height and a tone taught a child a thing nobody intended to teach him, and the thing has outlasted everybody who was in the room.

So hear it again. You are not too ordinary to hold this and you have never needed anybody permission to open it, and what you absorbed from a shelf height was never a rule. That is written into a day when the book came out of a building into a public square, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives the sense of it to a person with no training at all.

That is the whole of it, and here is what undoes it.

She read it.

Not a scholar. Not a person with permission. A woman who cooked in that kitchen every day of her life, getting a heavy book down off a high shelf on her own, and marking it so lightly that fifty years later you have to tilt the page to the light.

If she could reach it, you can. And the written word says the Levites went out among the people to give the sense so that the people understood, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that work now, in a man on a floor with a book in his lap.

You are holding the same book she was holding, and you were never the one it was being kept away from. Scripture puts men and women and everybody old enough to follow in one square in front of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land in an ordinary person.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that took the book out of a building and put it into houses on purpose, and built schools so children could read it, and their entire argument was Nehemiah 8: that the square is the right place for it and the whole crowd is the right audience.

They were not trying to make it less holy. They were trying to get it down off the shelf.