Abstract
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. (Steps 4 & 5, Alcoholics Anonymous)
In Lessons and Carols, John West courageously shares his moral inventory with all of us. He organizes his story around a tradition started by Edward White Benson in 1880 who, according to Benson’s son: “‘. . . 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” (p. 7). Although West and his friends are atheists, they started a tradition of “enacting the Lessons and Carols” as though they weren’t. He chose this Christmas tradition to organize his memoir about addiction and mental illness because his childhood memory of it seemed to be comforting (p. 7). At the end of the book he writes, It doesn’t escape me that I enact the same ritual every year about how everything is going to be different. We promise, every time, that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb—but when? . . . Maybe I want Christmas not because its promises are empty but because they are waiting for us to fill them. (p. 200)
In a six-minute video from the publisher entitled “A Memoir on Addiction, Art, Liturgy, and Loss,” West emphasizes that he tried to avoid telling his story in a linear fashion because the Christmas story means a lot to him, and it is an event that happens every year. He writes, And I think that the story that I wanted to tell was one that didn’t really have this tidy arc of things were bad and then they got better. Instead, I wanted to illustrate this kind of cyclical nature of how I understand addiction and how I understand sort of mental health, how I understand most things, . . . [life] moves in cycles as opposed to being like a clean kind of linear path. And so, it felt really natural to build it around the lessons and carols as this kind of cycle of things that happens once a year. (p. 29)
And yet, from a narrative perspective, the overarching tone of the author’s memoir is one of sadness. In fact, toward the end of his book, he frankly admits, “I’m not sure who I am without my sadness. Without my disease. Without my resentment” (p. 198). In the Twelve and Twelve, “the joy of living is the theme of AA’s Twelfth Step.” It means enjoying a bit of “emotional sobriety,” and finding a “spiritual awakening” (p. 106). A common feature of these awakenings is the discovery that what we could not do on our own, we can now do because we have been given a gift which amounts to “a new state of consciousness and being.” In effect, we have discovered a new source of strength which, “in one way or another, [we] had hitherto denied [ourselves]” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pp. 106–107).
West begins to recognize this gift he has received as he falls in love with his partner Galen. His comment on their early relationship is telling. After talking about how they enjoy lazy Saturday mornings, agreeing that they should move in together slowly, their books begin to appear on each other’s shelves “mixed together chemically, inseparable” (p. 169). Then, his single sentence on the next page reveals his surprise at how things have worked out: “I am sober, but I never intended to be sober. I am happy, but I always thought happiness would be mundane” (p. 170). This reminded me of the AA promises: “We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 84).
They decide to get married, embracing the very unoriginal tradition simply because they want to have a moment “where we visibly hold hands and step into the future together, where our family and friends can see us” (p. 174). They have a baby and as the author is feeding and burping her, ruminating on the fact that “billions of people have burped their baby, he confesses to his audience, “Joy in life, if there is any joy in life, comes when one does away with the idea that originality is a virtue—or even possible. Someday, maybe, I’ll surrender to that . . .” (p. 197).
Maybe he already has started to surrender and as evidence of that, the “empty promises” of Christmas are being filled in him, his wife, and his baby as the Word becomes flesh . . .
This would be a good read for Anglican priests who are looking for a new way to incorporate the lessons and carols into the Advent season.