Verse Fifteen

Seventy Times

Chapter 26: Verse Fifteen

Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever.

Ezra read the verse and the word perhaps hung in the room like a door that had been opened to a room no one was sure they wanted to enter.

Perhaps.

Not certainly. Not definitely. Not the reason was. Perhaps.

"Paul does something here that Paul rarely does," Ezra said. "He hedges. Paul is a man of certainty. Paul writes with authority. Paul says I know and I am convinced and nothing can separate us. But here he says perhaps. Maybe. Possibly. It might be that the separation had a purpose. But Paul is not certain."

"Why isn't he certain," Jerome said.

"Because the question of whether suffering has a purpose is the most dangerous question in theology."

The room was still.

"If you say suffering has a purpose, you risk saying the suffering was justified. That it was planned. That God designed it. And if God designed the suffering — if God designed the robbery and the murder and the sentence and the seventeen years — then God is either cruel or incomprehensible, and neither option is adequate."

"And if you say suffering has no purpose," Ray said.

"Then you're left with a world where things happen without meaning, and the faith has nothing to stand on, and the room we're sitting in is just a room with chairs and coffee and men who are pretending that the words in this book matter when they do not."

"Paul says perhaps," Khalil said, "because perhaps is the only honest word. It admits the possibility of meaning without asserting the certainty. It leaves space for God's purpose without requiring the sufferer to believe that the suffering was God's design. Perhaps is the word of a man who trusts God enough to believe in purpose but who respects the sufferer enough not to claim it as fact."

Ezra looked at Khalil. Every week he was reminded that the Muslim from Detroit understood the nuances of Paul's letter with a precision that most Christian theologians did not achieve, because Khalil approached the text not as an insider defending his tradition but as an outsider honoring a neighboring one, and the outsider's position gave him a clarity that proximity obscured.

"Separated for a little while," Tyrell said. "A little while? Onesimus ran away. He was gone — how long? Months? Years? And Paul calls it a little while. That's not a little while. That's a life."

"Time works differently in the faith," Ezra said. "Paul is not measuring time the way the Bureau measures time — in months and years and sentence calculations. He's measuring it against forever. Against eternity. And against eternity, the separation — however long it was — is a little while."

"Tell that to the man serving the sentence," Tyrell said.

"Paul is serving a sentence. Paul is in prison when he writes this. He is not speaking from the outside about something he does not understand. He is speaking from inside the same system, measuring the same time, and calling it a little while — not because the time is short but because the forever is long."

"And the forever," Darnell said. "What does forever look like."

The room turned to him.

"Paul says Philemon might have Onesimus back forever. Not for a visit. Not for a season. Forever. But forever between two people — one who wronged and one who was wronged — what does forever look like? Does it look like the relationship restored to what it was before? Does it look like something new? Does it look like the room?"

He was looking at his Bible. Not at Ezra. His eyes were on the verse, on the word forever, on the page that contained the question he had asked, which was a question the text had not answered and which two thousand years of scholarship had not answered and which the room would not answer today because the answer was not a thing that could be spoken — it was a thing that could only be lived, verse by verse, Sunday by Sunday, in a room where the person who wronged and the person who was wronged sat twelve feet apart and read the same letter and drank the same coffee and tried, within the constraints of an institution designed to contain rather than to reconcile, to discover what forever looked like when it began in a prison.

"I don't know what forever looks like," Ezra said.

He said it without preparation. Without theological framing. Without the chaplain's carefully constructed context that he used to hold the study's discussions within boundaries that were productive. He said it as a man who did not know, and the not-knowing was audible, and the men heard it.

Ray heard it and leaned forward.

Khalil heard it and closed his eyes.

Jerome heard it and looked at the table.

Darnell heard it and was still.

"I do not know what forever looks like," Ezra said again. "But I believe — and this is belief, not knowledge, and the distinction matters — I believe that forever begins with the perhaps. With the possibility that the separation had a purpose. Not the certainty. The possibility. And the possibility is enough to keep the room open and the text moving and the question alive, because the question of whether suffering has a purpose is not a question that can be answered once and for all. It is a question that has to be asked every Sunday and held every Sunday and lived with every Sunday, and the living-with is the forever."

The room held this.

The room held it the way it had held every verse and every discussion and every truth since September — with the willingness to contain what was placed in it, with the strength that came not from the walls but from the men, with the particular capacity that a room develops when the people in it have decided that the room matters more than their comfort and that the truth matters more than their safety.

"Perhaps," Curtis B. said.

One word. The word Paul had used. The word that was not certainty and not doubt but the space between the two where faith lived — the space where a man could believe in purpose without claiming to understand it, and could accept suffering without calling it justified, and could sit in a room with the man who had wronged the chaplain who held the room and hold the perhaps like a cup of coffee or a foam cup or a Bible or a truth — held, not solved. Present, not resolved.

They finished the verse.

At nine-thirty Ezra closed the Bible.

"Next week. Verse sixteen."

The men stood.

The men knew.

They had not spoken it. They had held it in the way Ray had described to Khalil and Khalil had called sitr and Curtis B. had called holding and that had no single name because the thing they were doing was the thing the room did, which was to carry what was placed in it without requiring the truth to be spoken before it could be held.

They filed out. Nine men. Nine truths. Nine cups in the trash.

Ezra stood in the room.

He had said I don't know.

He had said it in a room where his job was to know — to hold the theology, to frame the questions, to guide the discussion, to maintain the space where the men's truths could survive.

He had said I don't know and the room had held it.

The room held the chaplain's not-knowing the way it held the men's truths — without judgment, without condition, with the willingness to carry what was placed in it for as long as the placing required.

The room held.

Perhaps.