The Apology That Never Came

There is a man in this parish who did something to my father in 1998 and he has never said one word about it since.

I am not going to say what. It involved money and it involved a piece of ground and my father took it the way he took everything, which was quietly and without ever once discussing it with anybody including me, and I only know about it because a third man told me at a funeral in 2019.

That is when it started for me. Not in 1998. In 2019, at a funeral, from a man who did not know he was handing me anything.

My father was dead by then. That is the part that makes it what it is, because the person who was actually wronged had made his peace with it two decades before and had taken the whole thing with him, and I picked it up off the ground afterward and carried it for six years.

Six years, waiting for four words. That is what it comes down to and I have said it to myself often enough now that it does not sting the way it did. I wanted him to say I am sorry, and I wanted him to say it to me, about a thing that happened to somebody else, who had already let it go.

He is eighty one. He is not going to say it and it is now plain that he does not know there is anything to say.

I sat behind him in church for six years working out where the back of a man's neck sits in relation to a hymn book.

Toby is nine and he does not know any of this, and he asked me last spring why we take the flowers to that grave and not the other ones, and I said because it is my father, and he said, well, does anybody take flowers to the man in the corner, and the man in the corner is that man's wife's family plot.

I went round in June. Not to raise it. I asked him about his knees, which are bad, and he talked about them for eleven minutes and was delighted to be asked, and I have never once regretted the eleven minutes.

Bucky went with me in the truck and ate the wing mirror on the way back, and I did not mind about that either, which is unusual.

Give place, and what the place is

Paul writes an instruction that people read as an instruction to be passive, and it is nothing of the sort.

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)

Give place. It means step aside so that somebody else can get past. The instruction is not do nothing. It is get out of the doorway, because there is a party in this whose job this is and it is not you.

And then he quotes Deuteronomy on it, which means he is not softening a hard thing, he is citing a settled arrangement that has been in place a very long time.

You are being asked to step out of a doorway rather than to lie down, and Romans 12:19 uses a word about making room. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being relieved of a job rather than as being told to take it.

Which reframes what waiting for an apology actually is. It is standing in the doorway with an invoice, holding a position that was never assigned, because a person who is waiting to be paid is doing the collecting.

You have not been appointed to collect on anything. The written word names who does the repaying and it is not the injured party, and His Spirit is what makes handing a job over feel like being let off rather than like giving up.

What Paul says to do instead, which is stranger

The very next verse is not what anybody expects and it is entirely practical.

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. (Romans 12:20)

Feed him. Give him a drink. These are small domestic actions, and they are given as the alternative to the invoice, which means the alternative to holding an account is not letting go in the abstract, it is doing something specific and ordinary in the direction of the person.

The coals of fire line is argued about endlessly. Whatever else it means, it is plainly not the person keeping the account doing the burning.

You are being handed something to do rather than something to stop doing. Romans 12:20 replaces the account with a meal, and the Spirit of God is what makes an action easier than a resolution.

And the chapter ends with an instruction about the direction the whole business runs: Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

You have not been left with only two options. Romans 12:21 puts a third one on the table, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a principle into eleven minutes of asking an old man about his knees.