The Thing Wattles Said at the Potluck

Deacon Wattles said one sentence at the harvest supper about how some farms are kept and some farms are managed and it took him about four seconds.

He was not talking about me. I need to say that at the front because it is true and because it is the whole reason this is worth writing down. He was talking generally, about farming, in a room, and it was a general observation of the kind a man makes when he has said everything else he came to say.

There were about forty people in that hall and about six of them looked at me.

That is what did it. Not the sentence. The six.

And here is the thing about a sentence like that. It is not slander and there is nothing to correct, because in the plain words of it he said nothing about anybody. If I had stood up and said something I would have been the man who made a scene at the harvest supper about a remark on farm management, and everybody including me knows that.

So I sat there with a plate and did the small arithmetic a man does: who saw, what they think they saw, and how long before somebody mentions it.

I was in a state about it for about eleven days. I have to be honest and say that I was worse to live with in those eleven days than the sentence deserved by a very considerable margin, and that Toby had eleven days of a father who was somewhere else.

Wattles has no idea. That is the part that eventually got me. He genuinely has no idea, and he never will, and if I told him now he would inflate and apologize enormously and I would feel worse rather than better and so would he.

Bucky ate the hem of that man's coat off the back of a chair in the same hall about a month later, and Wattles took that a great deal better than most men would, and I stood there watching him be decent about a coat and understood that I had been carrying a sentence about a man who was, at that moment, being kinder about a hem than I had been about four seconds.

What the covering is and is not

Peter writes an instruction with a strong adverb in it and a strange verb.

And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)

Fervent is a word about being stretched, the way a muscle is stretched at full extension. It is not a warm word, it is an effortful one, and Peter puts it above all things.

And cover has been misused hard in both directions. It has been used to hide real harm, which it was never for, and it has been dismissed as sentimentality, which it also is not. What it describes is the ordinary work of not repeating a thing, not developing it, not building a case out of four seconds.

You are being handed a covering rather than a case, and 1 Peter 4:8 attaches it to a stretched kind of love. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as strength instead of as being soft.

The multitude in that verse is worth noticing too. Not one sin. A multitude, which is the accurate description of what any two people who spend time together will produce in each other over years.

You have not been asked to cover something rare. The written word assumes a multitude and provides for it in the same sentence, and His Spirit is what makes that realism a comfort in an ordinary parish.

Charity that is stretched rather than soft

The famous chapter about this uses a list of verbs, and two of them are exactly about the situation in a hall.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. (1 Corinthians 13:4)

Suffereth long is one word in the original and it means long tempered, a fuse rather than a feeling. It is about duration under pressure and not about pleasantness.

And a few lines later comes the one that does the actual work here: thinketh no evil, which in that context is closer to keeping no account, the way a ledger keeps a record of a transaction.

You are being asked to keep no record rather than to feel no sting, and 1 Corinthians 13:5 uses an accounting word. The Spirit of God is what makes not writing something down possible in a man who has already felt it.

And the whole list is given as a description of something rather than as a set of instructions, which matters, because a person is not being told to manufacture it.

You have been described rather than commanded. 1 Corinthians 13:4 tells you what charity does rather than what you must do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a wedding reading into a man on a folding chair with a plate.