Say a Few Words

Dave had eleven days and he could not write it.

Kev's sister asked him at the house, on the Tuesday, in the way people ask when they have already decided: "You will say a few words, will you, Dave."

And Dave said yes, because you do.

Thirty-one years. They met on a site in Peterborough when they were both twenty and hated it and got through it and stayed friends the whole way. There is a photograph of the two of them from about 1998 that is going to be on a board in a function room next Thursday and Dave has looked at it four times and had to put his phone down.

He started that night.

Draft one was a list of things they had done, and it read like a CV.

Draft two had a joke in it and the joke was fine and everything around the joke was terrible.

Draft three he wrote at half two in the morning and it was honest and he cannot say those things in a room with Kev's mother in it.

Four, five and six were all the same draft in different orders. Seven had a line in it about the kind of man Kev was, and Dave read it back and thought: that is the sort of thing people say.

By day nine he had a page with four sentences on it and a lot of crossing out, and he had begun to feel something close to panic, and he could not tell anybody, because everybody in that family has more right to be in pieces than he has.

On the day, he stood up with the piece of paper.

And he got about two words in and stopped.

He stood there for what he says was a very long time and what everybody else says was about four seconds. And then he put the paper down on the little shelf, and he said:

"I cannot do this. I am going to say the other thing instead."

And he started the twenty-third psalm.

He learned it at seven, in a school hall, off a woman called Mrs Batt who has been dead for twenty years. He has not said it since his father's funeral.

He got as far as he leadeth me beside the still waters and the room came in with him. Not everybody. About half. Enough that Dave could hear it around him, and he says the thing he remembers most clearly about the whole day is the sound of Kev's mother's voice somewhere behind his left shoulder, saying it at the same time.

Now let me ask you what is coming.

There is something, or there was. A date, a room, a page you cannot get right. Or maybe it has already gone and you have never forgiven yourself for what you did or did not manage to say.

The words a great many people have stood on

The twenty-third psalm has been said at more gravesides than any other set of words in the English language, and there is a reason, and it is not sentiment.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Even though I walk through. Through. Not around, and not instead of, and there is no suggestion anywhere in the psalm that the valley is not a valley.

I fear no evil. And notice the reason he gives, because it is not that the situation is fine. For You are with me. Company, in the valley, is the whole basis of the sentence.

That is why it works in that room. It does not deny anything. It does not tell a family that this is for the best or that everything happens for a reason. It says there is a valley and there is somebody in it with you, and then it stops.

So hear this said over you, with your four sentences and your crossings out. You are not required to compose something adequate for this, and the words that are adequate already exist and are lying around free. That is written into the most spoken passage in the language, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the Comforter, which is a job He has not delegated to you or to your page.

Now let me take a weight off you specifically, because you have been carrying one that nobody handed you.

You have been trying to write something worthy of thirty-one years.

That is what draft seven was about. That is why draft three was honest and unsayable and why everything since has been careful. You have been trying to produce, in eleven days, in a state you have never been in before, a piece of language that measures up to a man.

Nobody can do that. Nobody has ever done it. And Kev's sister did not ask for it, and neither did anybody in that room, and if you asked them afterward what they wanted they would say something like: we wanted you to stand up, because you were his mate.

The standing up is the thing. The words were never the thing.

And here is why the old ones do the job that yours cannot. They have been used before. That is not a defect, it is the entire quality: thousands of people have stood in the exact place you are standing in and said those words and found they took the weight, and when you say them you are not producing something, you are joining something.

The Word says to speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and that is a corporate instruction: the words are meant to be shared, handed round, used and used again, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old line land in a new room.

Let me say the last thing, and it is the one that matters most in this category.

Nobody in that crematorium cared how Dave said it.

He is not a good reader. He went too fast in the middle and had to go back, and there is a bit in the fourth verse where his voice went and he waited and then carried on.

Not one person there thought less of it. It is the opposite: the going was the reason it landed.

You do not have to do this well. You have to do it. Badly is fine. Badly with a stop in the middle is better than a polished paragraph nobody remembers.

There was a man five hundred years ago who put the psalms into ordinary language and ordinary tunes precisely so that people who could not compose anything would have something to say at a graveside. He wrote that a Christian should be able to die with words in their mouth that they did not have to invent, and that this is one of the plainest kindnesses God gives His people.