Modest Ceremonies: John West's Lessons and Carols by Mark Wallace
Lessons and Carols
by John West
Eerdmans Publishing Co.
207 pp.
Order is a luxury, it seems to me. Being able to count on what will happen when, and in what way, is something many people would like to take for granted, as it carries with it the promise of security and even a measure of control. For most of us, though, the idea that the sequence of our days will repeat itself, as if inertially, is merely aspirational, if it seems within reach at all. That doesn't stop us trying to create this feeling, though, in ways large and small. All the modest ceremonies of our lives pay tribute to our need for order. And we perform these rites at a variety of scales: We pray before our coffee, or the other way around. We stop off at the watering hole on Fridays after work. We get our teeth cleaned every six months, or maybe every four. We make the reliable annual pilgrimage to family, and—just as reliably, just as much part of the ceremony—wish we didn't have to.
In Lessons and Carols, John West's memoir of addiction, adoptive parenthood, and absent friends, he and his cohort—college friends, romantic interests across a spectrum of gender identities, acquaintances from rehabs and recovery meetings—seek order in a kind of annual ceremony, though not a metaphorical one. They devise a secularized version of the Christmastime tradition of Nine Lessons and Carols, which originated in the late nineteenth century, and which alternates Bible readings with the singing of Christmas carols, on or around Christmas eve.
For addicts and undergraduates like West and his friends—like most of the young precariat, in other words—order can be in short supply. Throughout the book—which is told in fragmentary passages that often resemble gemlike pieces of flash fiction, most less than half a page long—characters come and go seemingly at random, finding themselves in and out of counseling, of apartments, of colleges, detox units, hospitals, storylines. Many of these friends appear only as memories, their corporeal forms having been lost to the ravages of drugs or suicide. Better than most, West understands how even these urges can be the manifestation of a craving for order. "Then, suddenly, I am scoring my arms with a razor blade because I don't know what else to do," West writes, "but I know that this signals pain."
For the addict or the alcoholic, the idea that life feels out of control is more or less a given. For many, it is the underlying source of their uneasiness, of their "dis-ease" (if you'll pardon the deconstruction), and thus of their disease. West's narrator is prey to this, gripped by a compulsion to both silence the panic and reach for even the most miniscule grain of control—the ability to get uncontrollably drunk, for instance, or the ability to reliably cause oneself pain. When you are pursued by an unrelenting restlessness and the sense that you will never be able to pin down your life, you will seek any bulwark against it—even if it kills you.
But West and his friends locate a different kind of bulwark in the Nine Lessons and Carols. Each year, they gather for their own holiday feast and ceremony, complete with songs and kitchen sermons, Christmas trees and Christmas plays—despite the fact that most of them are atheists. In some years, the ceremony seems to be the only reliable event amidst a cacophonous procession of halfway houses, deaths, and false starts at schools and careers. It also provides an opportunity for self-examination, though the opportunity is often missed. "What do these lessons mean?" someone asks one Christmas eve. But there is no answer, and not all questions are allowed at all times. "What use is faith? is a summer question," West writes.
That may be, but this is a winter book, and we want to know the answer. Fortunately, the book itself tells us, not so much in its chapters and verses, but in its form.
"There is no order, save for what we give it," West tells us a little way into the book. "The break of a page. The beat of a cantata. The meter of a poem. Prayer." The phrases make an apt description of the book itself, which can sometimes feel like a somewhat disordered collection of impressionistic parables and paragraphs. West is not beholden to traditional narrative time here; past and present freely interweave, and topics—from addiction to sexuality to the affordances of language to the joys and horrors of new parenthood—come and go with the same liberty. The pages mimic, perhaps, a life, in all its glorious disorder. Like any life, it's up to us to bring the order to it.
The book's subtitle, "A Meditation on Recovery," provides a clue to how we are to read this text. And what emerges as we progress is, in fact, a story of order being birthed from chaos. West settles into a stable relationship. He gets his alcoholism under control, and happens into a good job. He and his partner adopt. The Christmas gatherings continue. More importantly, a modicum of order comes to anchor his life, as he finds himself able to let go, finally, of the things that have kept him away from the kind of inner security and stability that many people choose to call god.
"I'm not sure who I am without my sadness," West tells us at the end of the book. "Without my disease. Without my resentment." But he has found the small ceremonies of order that allow him to become a parent, a partner, a breadwinner. There are many questions left unanswered, but they are summer questions—we don't need to know. "Redemption is not a given moment but an ongoing practice," West tells us. "I take my medication every day and brush my teeth before I go to bed."
Mark Wallace is an essayist and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, The La Review of Books, and many other places. Pester him him on Bluesky at @markwallace, and read more about his chickens (and writing) at inlooking.substack.com