Silent betrayal

Public confession may be difficult, but it's half the gospel | Andrée Seu

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

I have made the Word of God complicated. I have taken the Psalms—"I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord, forever; with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations" (Psalm 89:1)—and rendered them inert. One can do that in at least two ways: Regard them as prophetic ecstasy; regard them as bygone liturgical recitations.

A day is coming when we will groan at how simple this all was: You do not tell your lover in private how awesome he is, and then act embarrassed about him in public. This would not be called discretion but betrayal. And yet I have called discretion my public silences about God, and have spun Byzantine rules for the when, where, and how of it, until my sledge has bogged down in the mud and I hardly speak of God at all. No wonder Jesus loves children best.