From an Aunt I Barely Knew

Aoife had met her perhaps six times, and four of those were before she was eleven, and there is a photograph of two of them.

The letter came from a solicitor in Sligo in a way that felt, honestly, slightly ridiculous, and Aoife assumed for about a day and a half that it was a mistake or an administrative formality about something worth almost nothing.

It was not. It cleared the whole thing. The arrears, the card, the loan she took to cover the card, and the thing she had not told her brother about. All of it, in one go, from a woman who was her mother's cousin rather than an actual aunt and who everybody called Aunt Rita because that is what happens.

She has been genuinely, uncomplicatedly grateful about that, and she is still grateful, and there is no part of this article that is going to complicate it.

What she cannot get past is the note.

There was a note with it, one line, in handwriting Aoife had never seen: for the girl who writes everything down.

Aoife has kept a notebook since she was nine. She has never once mentioned it to anybody in that family. She could not tell you how a woman she met six times knew that, or when, or what she saw, or what she thought about it.

And Aunt Rita died in February, so there is nobody to ask.

What got her was in July. She was at a thing for somebody's confirmation, standing outside, and an older woman she did not recognize came over and said, without introducing herself: you are Rita's girl who writes. She talked about you at my kitchen table for twenty years.

She talked about you for twenty years.

Aoife stood at the edge of a car park with a paper cup in her hand and had to say something about the weather, and she could not have explained it to anybody at that gathering.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the arrears.

She thought: it cleared everything I was afraid of, and the thing I actually cannot manage is that I was known for twenty years by somebody I did not know, and I never once looked up.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be honest than impressive with a woman standing at the edge of a car park.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not what arrived from a solicitor in Sligo, not the arrears cleared in one go. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something remarkable with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me be plain about something else before we go any further. Nothing on this page suggests the money was a lesser gift or that a person should not be relieved to have arrears cleared. That would be a foolish thing to say to somebody who had been carrying what you were carrying. It was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad of it and so is God.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want to sit with the note, and I would rather the word of God sat there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what it has done to you.

He calls His own by name

John records something Jesus says about a shepherd and a fold, and the detail everybody skips is the one that matters here.

To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.John 10:3-4

He calls his own sheep by name.

That is not a general statement about shepherding. In a fold with several flocks in it, which is what the picture assumes, a shepherd standing at the gate calling names is doing something specific and slightly extraordinary: he knows one animal from another well enough to have a word for each of them, and they know his voice well enough to come.

And read the direction of the knowing. He knows them first. They follow because they recognize a voice they have been hearing longer than they can remember, and nobody in that fold ever set out to study the shepherd.

That is what happened to you in a solicitor's letter. Somebody knew a small true thing about you, and had known it for twenty years, and you were not paying attention, and the not paying attention did not stop it being true.

You are not ungrateful and you are not sentimental. You are somebody who has just found out she was known, and cannot go and ask about it, and the written word does not scold anybody for what that does. It puts the naming on the shepherd's side of the gate, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with that and being able to breathe about February.

And here is what is true of you today, before anybody explains anything to you. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says he calls his own by name, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a picture in a Gospel.

What the letter did not clear

Think about what got you at that car park. It wasn't the compliment. She was not paying you one.

It was: she talked about you at my kitchen table for twenty years. It was a stranger casually confirming that a whole conversation about you had been going on for two decades in a house you have never been in. You were starving to find out you had been carried in somebody's mind, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as vanity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the note. It is not grief exactly, because you barely knew her and it would be dishonest to call it that. It is that you have discovered you were known, and the discovery arrived at the one moment when the knowing could not be returned, and no cleared arrears could touch that.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a knowing of you that is not over and cannot be missed. Jesus told a man He had never met that He had seen him under a fig tree before anybody called him, and He was at the edge of that car park before the woman came over.