The notebook · August 10, 2026

The Comfortable Verses

I used a word in passing the other evening, without thinking about it: I said that I prayed a psalm comfortably. The word stayed with me. I wanted to know how many verses of that kind I had.

So I listed the ones that come to me without my going to look for them. There are five or six, always the same, and they share one property: they give, and they ask for nothing. “Peace I leave with you” (John 14:27). “The Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). These are real words, I did not invent them, and I have no wish to cheapen them. But I notice they make up a small and very well-chosen collection in which I am always the one receiving.

The first on my list is this one: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, World English Bible). I know it by heart. I say it when I have nothing left. And I have realised that I do not know what comes next — not because it is obscure, but because I stop before it.

What comes next says: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

A yoke. Which is to say, something you put on and do not take off when it suits you. It is described as light, and I am willing to believe it, but light is not nothing. The sentence I have been reciting for years is the first half of a sentence, and the second half puts something on my shoulders.

What strikes me most is that the word rest is in both verses. The rest promised in 28 is the same rest found in 29 — except that in 29 it arrives with the yoke, and not before. I have always managed to take the rest without its instructions.

This is not the same problem as a verse that resists. That one I skip, and I know I skip it. Here I skip nothing: I stop in the right place, at the exact point where the text stops being pleasant to me. It is harder to see, because it looks like piety.

I have not changed my list. I am not going to pretend I will start reciting verses that cost me something; that would be a notebook lie. I have decided one thing only: when one of them comes back to me, I read the line after it. One line. It is astonishingly little, and it is enough for the sentence to stop being entirely at my service.

In Manna, the verse arrives with its neighbour — I don’t get to choose where the quotation ends.