The Curtain That Is Not There

She grew up in that house, and she still waits in the hall to be told where to sit.

Everybody has stopped noticing. It has been going on for forty years, so it reads as manners now. She comes through the door with a tin of something, she is kissed and taken in, and then at the doorway of the dining room there is a small pause while she waits, coat over her arm, until somebody says where they want her.

Her name is carved into the underside of the table leaf. She did it herself with a bread knife when she was seven and got into a great deal of trouble for it, and it is still there, upside down in the dark, in a child's shaky capitals.

She has never once mentioned that at a Sunday lunch.

This particular Sunday the gravy is late and everybody is milling, and her granddaughter, who is four, comes in from the garden with grass on her knees, walks the length of the room without breaking step, climbs onto the chair at the head of the table, and takes a roast potato out of the dish with her fingers before anybody has said anything at all.

The room laughs. Somebody says her name in the voice adults use when they are pretending to be cross. She eats the potato.

And the grandmother, standing in the doorway with her coat still over her arm, feels something go through her that is not amusement.

The child had no theory about that chair. She did not weigh whether she was allowed. She had never once in her life stood in a doorway calculating her welcome, because nobody had ever given her the slightest reason to, and so she simply came in and sat where she liked in a house that has always been glad to see her.

You know the doorway. Maybe yours is not a dining room. Maybe it is the first eight seconds of every prayer, and it goes something like this.

Lord, if it is all right. If You are not busy. I know I have not been very good this week, and I know I only come when I want something, but if I may, could I just.

And then, finally, the actual prayer, four sentences in, from someone who is by now slightly out of breath.

Nobody taught you that. Or rather, everything taught you that. You learned it in rooms where welcome had to be checked first, and you carried the habit into the one room where it does not apply, and you have been standing in that doorway with your coat over your arm ever since.

Nobody rehung the curtain

There was a curtain once, and it was not decorative.

It hung in the temple, it was enormous, and its whole job was to say not you, and not yet. One man, one day a year, with blood and with fear. Everybody else stayed on the other side of the cloth, and everybody else knew exactly why.

It came down on a Friday afternoon, top to bottom, and the tearing started at the top, which is worth noticing, because that end was out of human reach.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.Hebrews 10:19-20

Boldness. Not permission slips. Not a preamble. The word there is the ordinary word for the confidence of somebody who belongs in the room and knows it.

You are already inside, and the way in was opened by Someone else's blood and not by your week. That is exactly what Hebrews 10:19 gives you, boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus rather than by conduct, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a doorway feel like a doorway you may walk through instead of a checkpoint.

And here is the thing to be clear about, because it is where a page like this can do harm.

The asking is not a sin. The eight seconds of preamble are not disobedience, and God has never once been irritated by them. He has listened to every one of them with the patience of a Father who knows precisely which house you learned that in. Nothing here is telling you off for standing in the doorway.

You have not been offending Him by asking. Scripture calls Him a Father who has compassion on His children and remembers our frame, that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind you with a clipboard timing your run-up.

It is simply that the curtain is not there. And a person can spend a very long time being extremely careful about a cloth that came down before they were born.

What an heir does that a guest does not

Guests and heirs behave differently, and it is not about confidence as a personality trait.

A guest checks. A guest apologizes for the trouble, waits to be shown, brings something to justify the visit, and leaves before it gets awkward. All of that is lovely behavior in someone else's house. It is not behavior that fits a daughter.

An heir has the odd freedom of not having to establish anything on arrival. The relationship is not being decided today. It was decided elsewhere, by somebody else, and the paperwork on it is not in her handwriting.

You were made an heir by adoption, not by an application you filled in. Romans 8 says the Spirit of adoption is the one in whom we cry Father, so even the word you use for Him is given rather than achieved, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that cry rather than assessing it.

Now the fear underneath, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is the sentence that keeps the coat over the arm.

I am here on sufferance. I am the relative He puts up with. If anybody ever added it up properly, I would be asked to leave.

You are not a tolerated guest in that room. Scripture says you have been made accepted in the beloved and that nothing in creation separates you from that love, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your own spirit that you are a child of God, which is not a feeling you have to generate before you sit down.

And notice that none of this is a reward. Not one line of it arrived because of a good month. The access came by the blood, it was granted before you knew about it, and it is present tense today whatever kind of week you have had.