A Dry Summer In the Garden

At twenty to seven in the morning in the middle of August the air is already warm, and the ground under the yew is cracked in a pattern like crazed glaze on an old plate.

Lorna comes through the gate with the same two cans she always uses, one green, one with a broken rose that sprays sideways and which she keeps meaning to replace and does not.

There is a watering ban. There has been a watering ban since the second week of July. So it is the rain barrel by the vestry downspout, which has had nothing going into it in six weeks, and the water in it now is the water that was in it in June, and it smells of tin and old leaves.

She waters eleven things. She could list them in her sleep and sometimes does. The two hydrangeas by the path that go floppy by ten if she skips them. The little cherry that was planted for somebody. The bed of hostas that the slugs have made lace out of. The pot of rosemary by the door that would honestly survive on a rooftop in Spain. Eleven.

The barrel runs out halfway through the second can.

She stands and looks at the tap on the barrel, running its last, going from a stream to a stutter to a drip, and she waits it out, tilting the barrel forward with her knee to get the last inch, which she has learned to do.

Ray comes round the corner with the mower he is not going to use, because there is nothing to cut, because the whole lawn has gone the color of a paper bag.

"Forty-one," he says.

"Forty-one what?"

"Mornings. I have been counting." He looks at the brown lawn without much concern. "It comes back in September. Always does. Looks dead, is not."

Lorna does not say what she is thinking, which is that she is fairly sure she is running the same way the barrel is, and that she has been giving out of the June water for a long time now, and that there is a morning coming when she tilts the whole thing forward with her knee and nothing comes.

She kneels down at the hydrangea and pushes the mulch aside to pour the last of the can properly at the root, the way you are supposed to.

The top two inches of the soil are dust and run through her fingers like flour.

Three inches down it is dark, and cool, and damp.

She sits back on her heels with her hand in the ground.

You know that barrel.

You have been pouring for a while now out of something that stopped being refilled a good while back, and you have kept going because the eleven things still need doing and because you are the one who does them. And underneath the tiredness is a specific fear that you have not put into words: not that you will stop caring, but that you will simply run out, mid-can, on an ordinary Tuesday, and that will be the end of your part in all of it. You are being held up by a covenant that is being kept toward you every single day, and it does not draw on your barrel. Scripture says the Lord commands His lovingkindness in the daytime and puts His song in the night, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that true in a person kneeling in dust with their hand in the ground.

The psalm you are living in was written for a choir

Psalm 42 is the one everybody half knows. As the deer pants after the water brooks, so my soul pants after You. It gets printed on things.

What gets left off the printed version is that the same psalm says, twice, why are you cast down, my soul, and why are you disquieted within me. It is a song about dryness written by somebody in it. And crucially, it is not a private diary entry. The heading puts it with the sons of Korah, who were a family of temple singers, and it was written to be sung by a congregation, which means a whole roomful of people were expected to open their mouths and sing about having nothing left.

That is the church, and this is why the corporate reading of Scripture is not a technicality. The dryness is sung in company. A whole people say it together, and the psalm even remembers walking to the house of God with a crowd, which is the memory the singer is aching over. It was never one soul alone with a feeling. It is a person inside a people, and the people have a song for exactly this.

You are inside a company that has a song for the month you are having, and it was written for you to sing while it is still dry. That is in the written word, in the psalm's own heading and its own words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands an old choir piece to somebody kneeling by a hydrangea.

Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

Look at the verb in the middle of that: command. Not offer. Not send if conditions allow. The psalmist pictures God giving an order to His own steadfast love, the way an officer details a detachment, and the detachment goes where it is sent regardless of what the ground looks like when it gets there.

You have lovingkindness under orders toward you today, and the order was not issued on the strength of your reserves. The word says He commands it in the daytime, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it out in real hours in a real week.

Faithfulness is a kept thing, not a felt thing

Now hold two sentences together, because the whole of this rests on them.

Your dryness is not distance. Your dryness is not sin. Nothing in this psalm treats it as either, and nobody here is going to hand you a diagnosis dressed as encouragement. A dry season is a dry season. Lorna's lawn has gone the color of a paper bag and Ray is not worried about the lawn, and Ray has been mowing it for years.

And your part in this is not held up by what you feel while you do it. That is the whole difference between a covenant and a mood. A covenant is a thing kept, on both sides, by people who go on keeping it in weather that gives them nothing back. You are keeping a covenant on the mornings you feel nothing, and it counts exactly as much as the mornings you felt something. Psalm 42:8 says His song comes in the night, which is the hour when nothing is visible, and the Holy Spirit is the one singing it there.

Notice also what is not being asked of you. There is no regime here. Nobody is handing you a fuller schedule, an earlier alarm, a plan to get the feeling back. The answer to a drought is not more effort with the watering can. You are not being asked to manufacture anything, and the pressure to feel more has no right to stay on you. His word puts the commanding on God's side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the weight of that off a person who has been trying to generate weather.