The Depth I Went For

She has gone deep and she has gone there on purpose.

Twelve years of it. Silence, at first light. A rule of life she wrote herself and mostly keeps. Long stretches with no words at all, which she found unbearable for two years and then found she could not do without.

And she is not performing. There is no audience for any of it and there never has been. She has never told anybody the half of it.

What she has is genuine. If you sat with her for an hour you would come away quieter than you arrived and you would not be able to explain why.

Now here is the thing she thought about last Thursday, standing at the window with a cup in her hand.

Nothing in her week is different because of it.

Not one thing. Her diary is exactly the diary of somebody who has not spent twelve years doing this. The same commitments, the same avoidances, the same seven people, the same route.

There is a woman three doors down who has been ill since February and she has thought about going round perhaps forty times.

Twelve years of depth and a door she has not knocked on.

So let me ask you.

What has all that depth actually cost you this week?

He wrote it to people who were good at the first half

There is a line in John's first letter that is so short it goes past you, and it was written to people who were, in every visible respect, doing rather well.

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.1 John 3:18

Notice which two things he sets against each other. Not love and hatred. One kind of love and another kind. You have the first kind in abundance, and the Holy Spirit has been asking for the second one in a house three doors down.

Now look at what he is contrasting.

He does not put love against hatred. That would be an easy sentence and nobody in his audience needed it. He puts one kind of love against another kind of love, and the first kind is words or speech, which in that community would have meant something quite beautiful and entirely sincere.

He is writing to people whose interior life and whose language about love were both genuinely good. That is the audience. And he says: not that. That is not the one.

And notice what he does not say either. He does not tell them to feel more, or to go deeper, or to examine themselves harder. There is no instruction anywhere in that letter to intensify the inward part.

He says actions and in truth, which is as blunt as that language gets.

Hear where you stand, twelve years in.

You are not a woman with a fraudulent interior life. Scripture puts the correction to people whose words about love were sincere, and the Spirit has never once been given so that a person would have a deeper week alone.

And I want to say the gentle thing, because the harsh version of this message would be unjust to you and would also be wrong.

Twelve years of silence has done something in you. It is not nothing, and I am not going to stand here and call it self-indulgence, because I know what those two years of unbearable felt like and most people never get through them.

But depth has a property that nobody warns you about, which is that it is entirely satisfying on its own terms.

It does not run out. It does not signal when it has become the whole of the thing. A person can go deeper every year for the rest of their life and never once be told by the depth itself that something is missing, because that is not information depth carries.

The word says actions and in truth, and John put it in an imperative, and there is a woman three doors down who has been ill since February.

But you are not carrying a fraudulent interior life. First John writes the correction to people whose words about love were entirely sincere, and the Spirit was never given so that a person would have a deeper week on their own.