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    Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery
    Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery
    Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery
    Ebook209 pages1 hour

    Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery

    By John West

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    About this ebook

    Maybe redemption is not a place you find, but a system of mapmaking. Sketch a land. Pencil in dragons. Imagine it real, resplendent, and broken under a waxing moon.
     
    Lessons and Carols is a genre-bending memoir that explores the aftershocks of alcoholism and mental illness through a fresh look at the powers of poetry, ritual, and community. As a new parent, West grapples with his own fragmented recovery and grief for the friends he lost to addiction, asking if anyone can really change, or if we are always bound to repeat the past. 

    Echoing the form of a traditional Anglican Christmas service of stories and songs, West’s lyrical prose invites readers into an unorthodox rendition of the liturgy called Lessons and Carols. Each December, a faithful circle of irreligious friends assembles to eat and sing and reimagine an old story about love made flesh. In that gathering’s glow, resentments turn to quiet wonder at the ways a better world can appear. 

    Both tender and bracing, West’s poetic meditation of the possibilities of change will resonate deeply with anyone who has tired of their own destructive loops. In this stirring account of recovery, redemption remains elusive—and as tangible as the promise of a newborn. 

    Hardscrabble winter, gray and lonely, requires Christmas. Or, rather, in its depths, I require Christmas: words no longer cold, chrome, and barren, but alive, golden, cradled in my arms.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEerdmans
    Release dateMay 2, 2023
    ISBN9781467465588
    Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery
    Author

    John West

    John West is a technologist and writer, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards and been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked at the MIT Media Lab and the digital publication Quartz. He holds an MFA in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College. He lives in Boston with his partner, their daughter, and a cat.

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      Book preview

      Lessons and Carols - John West

      PROLOGUE

      The past unfolds into the present like a flower opening its petals, revealing its gold-dusted center. Like, in the beginning was the Word, and then, suddenly, a baby is born in a stable, and then the beginning’s meaning arrives, pollen borne on a bee’s body. At night, when the flowers in my yard cover their faces while the moon gilds them silver, nothing exactly changes, except the past promises tomorrow instead of today.

      I walk out of the psychiatric ward two weeks before Christmas. In the parking lot, the waning moon looks for a place to hide from the midmorning sun, brightening piles of half-melted snow. In the car, on the way home, I make myself a deal. No, I never have to put myself back there—in writing or in life. Yes, I have to get better.

      In the beginning, the Lessons and Carols is a wooden shack and a story. It is December of 1880, and Bishop Edward White Benson, who would later become the archbishop of Canterbury, hatches a scheme to keep his congregants engaged over Christmas while the grand Gothic Revival cathedral at Truro is under construction. His son: My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve—nine carols and nine tiny lessons. The lessons are snippets of Bible verses, stretching from original sin to Christ’s birth. In 1919, King’s College in Cambridge adapts and produces the Lessons and Carols with new works for organ and choir. It becomes an institution, happens every year, leaps from church to church, travels across radio waves and continents.

      When I arrive at my off-campus apartment, I pack clothes and books and toiletries so I can go back to my parents’ home for the Lessons and Carols at my childhood church. A year before, almost to the day, I gathered some friends in my tiny apartment, and we enacted the Lessons and Carols like we weren’t atheists. I make myself another deal. No, I won’t re-create the Lessons and Carols this year. Yes, I will every year after.

      THE FIRST LESSON

      Here is your garden; keep it well.

      Genesis 2:15

      Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent. Other people tell me things—absurd things, things about seeing with baby’s eyes, etc.—and I resent that I do, in fact, sometimes see with baby’s eyes.

      Like in the morning, when a blue-gray bird whose name I don’t know preens on my white picket fence. When there are titters I’ve never noticed before from the swallows in the oak. When, once, Galen and I spy a mourning dove in the cemetery near our house. I mean, honestly.

      I often say that summer is the most desirable season, but, I confess, I wish it were winter. I wish the moon weren’t an abstract expressionist hurling silver onto my neighbor’s oak, watching its handiwork drip down onto my short-cut grass. I wish the baby were older. I wish I were older, were not resentful (re and sent: feeling again) all the time. But I am resentful, and she is still a baby, and the moon—yes, hello moon!—is just as annoyingly beautiful as ever.

      I want to buy a book about birding, so that I can identify that regal blue-gray one. I think I would notice him more—or at least notice more about him—if he had a name. Of course, he already has a name; I just don’t know it. This is exactly my problem when we find out about the baby, when the case worker calls to tell us that she is five days old.

      We don’t have a car seat, I say.

      Target’s open. I can hear the smile in her voice.

      That afternoon, as we leave Target with a cartful of baby things, we get sent a picture. A tuft of thin black hair, dark skin, a green, semitransparent pacifier like a small moon almost eclipsing her improbably round face. We call the hospital from the Target parking lot to ask if she’s getting attention. The nurse laughs.

      The doctors fight over who gets to feed her, she says. She’s a perfect baby.

      Here are some of the things that require names in Genesis: Air fowl. Field beasts. The gathering of waters. Dry land. A ground-tiller. A sheep-keeper. The cattle-havers. The tent-dwellers. The iron-and-brass artificers. The harp-and-organ handlers. Light. Darkness. The firmament. An eastward-goer. All living creatures. Her.

      Before we meet her, we call the hospital every day. We cannot go because of the pandemic.

      She’s such a love, a nurse says.

      She’s a great baby, a doctor says.

      She’s so strong, an occupational therapist says.

      Though I haven’t met her yet, I agree with all of them. She must be strong as an ox, as solid as a ground-tiller. I want nothing more than to surround her with stories of her own resilience. I hope we get the chance.

      Writing in the present tense is a way to avoid resentment, a paradox through which I crawl inside my resentment, so far down, I cease to feel again, but rather inhabit the moment I felt the first time, the spring that feeds resentment, which isn’t resentment at all but just what it was like to be.

      Of course, the lie of the present tense is that the me that felt first and the me that felt again are the same. In life, they are not the same, but on the page, without the past, these selves collapse into a point from which narrative distance cannot escape. But even though critics don’t like present tense, just like they don’t like the verb to be, I chose it for a reason.

      For example, parenting is like the present tense in that it transforms resentment into something with words and a spine. Mornings with her, awake before the sky is light, are a species of blessing—an Old Testament blessing of the kind you might not want. A blessing that cracks ground, water pushing up and out.

      Things I resent include my depression (always so boring). My stolid, plodding lack of hypomania (once so exciting). The fact that I miss my hypomania (am I a monster?). Thoughts of my own monstrousness (can I be redeemed?). The concept of the present tense.

      Resentment’s floodwaters have swept away so much of what I’ve tried to build. But maybe then, suddenly, everything changes.

      I am fluttering on the edge of a couch in the dorm’s common room, the youngest here, a mascot. I am on my second glass of wine. A body passes before the spindly light, and the shadows lurch into a different form. A glass or two later, I am not so nervous.

      A man in his twenties sits across the room from me on a stained love seat. The soprano is draped on his arm, and she is bending forward, laughing without dignity. He smirks at his own wit. His eyes catch mine, and the smile that takes his face would devour me. I want to be eaten.

      I am ignoring the talk around me to hold eye contact with this man when the wine in my throat and stomach solidifies. I stand up too quickly, walk to the door.

      Then, suddenly, the man is beside me.

      Going home? he asks.

      My whole body is tingling. Walk me? I reply.

      In the long field between the rows of dorms, he puts his hand on my forearm.

      Look, he says, and I look at the dark, mountain-shaped hole in the night jutting out over the end of the field. I look at the moonlight draped on the branches of a tree, at the shadow splashed across the tall grass. He leans toward me, like kisses are just things that anyone might give to anyone else at any time. I have never been kissed. Neon fireflies flare in the dark like the tips of cigarettes.

      The next few evenings, I cycle through different dorms, different common rooms. A gulp of gin and tonic here, a half inch of scotch there. Each night, I crisscross the field to find the man who kissed me. Each evening that I find him, blushes bloom across my face. We don’t kiss again.

      I learn about hangovers from the birds that scream outside my window.

      I am pretending to be a gay teacher at a boarding school who is in an illicit relationship with one of his students, but I am really a confused eighteen-year-old in a relationship—my first—with one of my female castmates. When I vigorously kiss the man who plays my student, the crowd goes wild, hooting and catcalling. He is

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