Adeste Fideles

Like many American children of my generation, I grew up in a home in which religion was an afterthought. My parents, both liberal minded and determined not to inflict upon their children the same sort of mistakes their parents made, spent a lot of time discussing the theoretical aspects of religion, and had little time left over to engage in practical churchgoing. It’s hard to raise children to believe in absolute truth, when you spend so much time equivocating about what absolute truth is, exactly. Which explains why it is that I spent most of my childhood believing the only difference between Christianity and the rest of the world’s religions was that practioners of the former got shit from the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, and the latter did not. Jesus Christ, woefully uninteresting compared to a fat bearded Scandinavian who might bring you Barbie’s Dream house if you stop harassing your sister and a six foot tall magical rabbit who hand delivered an inspired selection of candy , was far too easy to confuse with Moses and hardly compelling.

My specter of my grandparents further complicated matters, by tacitly introducing a vaguely politicized religious quarrel into the proceedings Dad’s family was Episcopal, snooty, reasonably secular, and only inclined toward occasional shows of theatrical, rather Catholic piety for effect. My mother was the product of fundamentalist orthodoxy, raised in the Church of Christ built by her own father. Dad’s family thought the Church of Christ was a shack full of tasteless redneck fanatics, for whom snake-handling wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Mom’s family thought Episcopals were essentially Catholics and thereby heathenish idolaters and dabblers in the black arts ,whose relationship to Jesus Christ was tenuous at best.

All I knew was that the Episcopal church had better architecture, better music, elaborate costumes, and excellent raspberry cookies in the fellowship hall. When I asked Mom why the services at the Church of Christ were ugly, small, and boring, she told me that she’d been raised to believe that God was unimpressed by large cathedrals with artful stained glass and ambient lighting and fountains and towers and the string section from the symphony on loan for the occasional Sunday service, that, in fact, God preferred brylcreemed ministers, off-key renditions of “Are You Washed in the Blood,” and split-level churches that resembled Chez Brady. I found this very hard to believe. I mean, if I were God, and were planning on dropping in somewhere on a Sunday morning, I’d probably bypass North Carolina altogether and head straight for, say, Rome, or maybe Istanbul, or Mecca, or Tibet.

Perhaps I would have been more compelled one way or the other had my religious education consisted of more than my mother’s narratives[1] on the way to the mall and the lyrics to Christmas Carols[2]. Very early on, I’d shown a marked tendency toward insomnia, and my mother had invented a guardian angel named Lily, who would occasionally reward me with dime store trinkets if I would agree to stay in the bed, which again underscored my belief that Christianity was all about getting presents from supernatural trespassers.

Because no one bothered to parse things out for me, I was left to disseminate the bits and pieces of information I got from eavesdropping. I understood that Jesus Christ was born in a barn, because his parents had failed to make reservations on a holiday weekend. I understood that foreign dignitaries had set up a nice trust fund for him at birth, which his parents had subsequently squandered, forcing the son of God to find employment as a manual laborer. I understood that Jesus had been able to figure out that one of his friends had tipped him off to the cops. (I could not understand why if Jesus were so smart, he wouldn’t have split town at that point.) I understood that after Jesus died, he came back to life, and then flew, sort of like superman, into outer space, where God lived. Past that, my knowledge of the bible was limited to Noah having a lot of pets, talking snakes having a lot of apples, and that you’re more likely to get eaten by a whale than a lion.

None of this prepared me for dizzying realizations I would receive at seven years old, when my parents, fearful of my ignorance (and perhaps the judgment of other adults, upon realizing my ignorance) took it upon themselves to fill in some gaps. My father would introduce the Holy Ghost, and my mother, in a bit of inspired setting, would explain the concept of Hell to me in the parking lot of Belk’s at The Asheville Mall.

Of the two, I found the Holy Ghost considerably more unsettling. [3] Mostly because I believed that Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” was a book in the New Testament somewhere between Matthew and First Corinthians. I pictured the Holy Ghost looking like a cross between Skeletor and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Or more accurately, rather like the Ghost of John, described in the Halloween song they taught us in elementary school—“long white bones with his skin all gone.” And the idea that this grisly specter was God’s messenger seemed too awful to contemplate, especially when coupled with the flesh-eating, blood drinking business I’d heard about at communion. When I admitted the idea of the whole thing filled me with bone-chilling terror, my parents tried to alleviate my concerns by explaining that the Holy Spirit was a friendly ghost, which is how I came to envision the trinity as Santa Claus, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and some guy in his underwear who looked like one of the Allmans.

Suffice to say, by seven years old, the likelihood of me accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior was looking ever more, well, unlikely.

My first real inkling of what was going on with religion came occurred sometime around my second grade year. Through my viewing of some historical epic, I became acquainted with the concept of nuns, which made an indelible impression for reasons I cannot begin to explain. Around the same time, my lifelong fascination with the English Reformation and its aftereffects was ignited either by an study of Henry the VIIIth my mother completed for an art class or Herman’s Hermits.

I dove into study of Tudor/Stuart England with a kind of fervor, guided in part by the presence of many interesting women during that period. During this time, I learned that my parents were technically Protestant, and that was a good thing or bad thing depending on who you talked to. I also researched converting to Catholicism in order to join a convent, and then take pride in my eventual, inevitable excommunication.

When I aired my intention of becoming Catholic, my parents were appropriately non-plussed, suspecting my devotion to the papacy was likely ephemeral, and told me to do as I like, provided I kept conversations with my grandmother free of theology. My mother, perhaps noting the way I gazed curiously at the icicle minarets surrounding the mosque on the way to my grandmother’s house, again reminded me that God had nothing to do with architecture, which sounded just as ridiculous to me as it did the first time she said it.

By this time, I’d spent enough nights with friends to realize my lack of religious education was viewed as suspect. On Sunday mornings, I’d tag along with Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and a whole host of miscellaneous sects. My Jewish friends were learning Hebrew and my Catholic friends were learning catechism. I was learning to identify myself by whatever affiliation struck my fancy at the time, and learned, the hard way, that some religions are easier to fake your way through than others.

Giving a credible performance of piety when you have absolutely no faith in the existence of God is harder than it sounds. The Apostle’s Creed is hard enough to deliver with a straight face, even if you are a believer, but if said recitation is the only thing that stands between you and a free pass to Six Flags with the Central Methodist Youth Group, you’re going to give it a good college try. Even if the Youth Director nurses concerns that enthusiasm for “Appetite for Destruction” may be indicative of a direct line to Satan.

Though trips to various theme parks, concerts, church sponsored youth parties, and various events that afford you free t-shirts, the fundamental truth of Christianity—“Believing in Jesus gets you some pretty cool shit”—was reinforced. What’s’ more: belief wasn’t even required. In fact, with the slightest of effort, the whole system could be manipulated to work on your behalf if you had a modicum of acting skill. If you want to use the roller rink at First Baptist Church, mention casually that you’re thinking about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Want to get locked into an ornate neo-gothic cathedral overnight with clueless chaperones and the three hottest guys in the eighth grade? Drop hints that you think the Presbyterians are way more interesting than the Lutherans across the street. If necessary, mention Calvin and a passing interest in Scottish History. [4]

On some level, I think I’d like to tell you that I had some sense of a divine presence, that somewhere, in some text, I ran across a passage that opened a window, that I felt a pang of guilt whenever I conned some toothy representative of Young Life. And of course, I could lie and feed you some portion of the Spiritual Autobiography I created at age twelve (and have since edited for style and consistency), but the fact of the matter is, I didn’t and won’t.

There have been times when I have been moved, awed even, by that which was created in the name of a god. Soaring Bach cantatas from a fifty foot nave. Graham Greene's, “The Power and the Glory.” The Diamond Sutra. The Mahabharata. Rumi. The Reverend Al Green. Et al. Maybe not often enough to counterbalance the frustration, anger, and disgust I feel at all things that have been destroyed in the name of a god[5], but enough to recognize the power of the concept.

And with that in mind, I probably won’t attend midnight mass at the Episcopal Church with my father on Christmas Eve. And I probably won’t stop while fighting off crowds at Barnes and Noble to consider the Christ child, as instructed by the evangelical community. But I will let the Choir of Kings College soundtrack part of my drive home, down a darkened interstate on the night of the 23^rd. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is an awfully pretty song.

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[1] Occasionally told, rather like fairy tales, between G-rated synopses of Classic Novels and Greek Mythology (she was a classics minor). Of the three, her dramatic retelling of the Trojan War was most inspiring of reverence.

[2] At seven years old, I spent one whole afternoon scouring the King James for mention of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer, and the elusive Parson Brown, all of whom I believed to be canonical figures.

[3] From the first sentence, I could tell that the hell business was complete bullshit. I mean, my parents raised me to believe that witches and dragons and giant man-eating gorillas that lived under your bed and could suck out your brains were not real, so the idea of demons with pitchforks standing aside lakes of fire like sadistic lifeguards strained all credibility.

[4] Years later, I would employ a similar strategy to get free dinners from the Hare Krishnas.

[5] I can still get pretty fucking bitter about the Library at Alexandria and that came almost a seven hundred years before the first Crusader hit the highway.

White Christmas

Two years ago, about ten days after Thanksgiving, we had an ice storm of literary proportions. From approximately noon on a Thursday, to 5:00am the following Friday, the storm produced a continuous shower of fountain soda sized chunks, littering the ground like a hyperactive ice machine.

We were ill-prepared. Though we’d purchased beer and snacks and plenty of cigarettes, no one had considered the pressing need for batteries or candles. A realization we all had, sometime around 3am, hearing distant transformers cover the 1812 overture and giant tree branches splinter from trunks with a crack. Our tenuous connection to electric power, and by extension, the modern era was short-lived. And we tried to make light of it, noting the premonitory half-second outages always caused the CD player to start over, playing the first track on the Classic Queen CD “Kind of Magic,” at least four or five times. When I went to bed that night, I turned the baseboard heat in my bedroom up to its highest setting, and sweltered under many blankets, waiting for the inevitable cold and dark.

The power blew, finally, at about 5:30am.

By nightfall of the following day, I had accepted a humiliating, yet completely true fact about myself.

I’m a total wuss when it comes to cold temperatures.

For those of you who subscribe to some notion of geographical determinism, this should come as no great surprise. I’m from the mountains, yes, but the mountains below the Mason-Dixon line, where wintertime temperatures average out well above freezing and blizzards are rare. Seven inches of snow still cancels school for the better part of a week. Sure, we have four seasons, and it’s not unusual to get a little wintry participation, but seriously, a single digit wind chill gets top billing on the evening news. Some beefy local weatherman, who both looks and talks like an evangelist, makes ominous pronouncements of the “Do not go outdoors unless you absolutely have to. Prolonged exposure to such temperatures can be fatal” variety[1]. Which is true, I guess, but does little to explain the mystery of how people in Minneapolis function in January. Do they just not go outside? At all? It’s this sort of nonsense that led to me spending three days in Chicago[2] in February, staring down gusts of arctic winds, and wondering what portion of Michigan Avenue could be traversed before I shuffled off the mortal coil, or at the very least acquiesced to wearing an unfashionable hat[3].

I blame much of my intolerance for cold on growing up in houses with unrelenting radiator heat—the kind that turns any environment into a low country bayou, and allows you to travel barefoot throughout the house with all the windows open in the middle of January. When I was a kid, I remember holidays in which my father would stoke the obligatory fire, and we’d all sit by the hearth sweating profusely in velvet dresses and taffeta skirts singing carols and trying to pretend that the magic of Christmas would ward off heat stroke until Silent Night could be sung in English, German, Latin, and Spanish.[4]

Also, there’s the genetic angle: I have to believe, many years ago, my ancestors crossed the Atlantic and settled in Virginia for a reason. That winters in the North Atlantic were cold and gray and dreary and summers were, well, pretty much the same thing. New England probably sounded fairly uninviting. Shitty winters and Puritans? You jest. Why not go south, where you might get malaria, but probably won’t be burned at the stake? Added bonus: pirates! And while I’m slightly disappointed no one considered the benefits for posterity by settling in, say, the Caribbean[5], I’m extremely happy that I don’t need snow tires.

None of this is to say I can’t appreciate the quality of certain winter days. I like walking around in cold weather, when the air is crisp and burns your lungs when you breathe too deeply. When the sky is high and clear and mostly cloudless. The best sunsets always happen in the winter, and a lot of things smell and taste and feel better. I don’t even mind the early darkness—I’m more productive at night anyway—but by that time, there’s little left to recommend the great outdoors, unless I’m drunk and have no option but to take my cigarette outside.

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to revisit the conditions of the ice storm when a failing furnace met with a failed gas valve to produce a heating emergency. I had to call the gas company to report a leak, which lead to big trucks with flashing lights and beeping meters not unlike those things in “Ghostbusters” and much excitement for three am on a weeknight. While the landlord sparred with the property manager over how best to remedy the situation, I spent two nights shivering under many blankets, and wondered why in hell anyone would ever want to visit Alaska.

Though finally fixed, sort of, the furnace hasn’t fully recovered, and continues to spar with the thermostat. I’ve taken to drinking rum. Wishful thinking.

Last night, my mother called to report a brief, yet heavy snow shower in my hometown, and we mused about the possibility of a White Christmas. I regret to say I was unable to drum up any real enthusiasm. It’s already cold—28 and falling—and I’m not much of a skier. I suspect my parents know the only reason I ever wished for snow was the promise of snow days. There’s a sort of special excitement to waking up at 7:00 on a cold morning and hearing a dj announce your school closure over the clock radio. A special bliss that accompanies turning off the alarm and sleeping until after your parents have left for work, thereby leaving you home to watch movie channels, play video games, and embark on some soon-to-be-abortive art project.

In high school, the snow day bliss was doubly gratifying. As a day student at a boarding school, the official call on whether roads were traversable was increasingly mine to make. My mother had a liberal philosophy with regards to school attendance, and I was friends with the five other day students who lived on my side of town. With a modicum of effort, it was possible to convince the Headmaster’s office that the flurry that had merely dusted the rooftop of the dining hall had left North Asheville roads nearly impassable. If the public schools were closed, we felt we had a rock solid case. And while our classmates attended Calculus, we Northside day students gathered at a pre-selected parentless house to smoke cigarettes, order Mexican take-out, and discuss which artist on Alternative Nation was the biggest poser, confident that the administration would continue to be utterly oblivious when it came to our attendance[6]

Of the myriad disappointments of my adult life, I’d have to rank loss of snow days in the top 100. They were, along with cute jackets and plentiful opportunities for tights, one of the few positive aspects of winter. Workplaces don’t close unless conditions are truly cataclysmic, and no friendly DJ is going to announce over the radio at 7:00 on a cold, dark, Monday morning that you don’t have to drive twenty-five miles down a congested artery, through commuter traffic to make it on time to the 8:45 meeting with a potential client that may, in fact, decide to hire his intern to do your job for $8/hr.

Likewise, when I think about White Christmas, I can only imagine the driving 200 miles west on the same clogged corridor, behind Southerners even less equipped than I to deal with inclement weather, and friends stuck in airport terminals, and the vaguely oppressive notion of being stuck indoors with my extended family in the suburbs for days at a time.

It’s not exactly the real life analogue to Irving Berlin’s musical postcard.

In the meantime, I’ll pray for sun, unseasonably warm temperatures, and lots of rum at my mother’s house.

Does Harry Belafonte have a Christmas album?

Just wondering.

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[1] My theory is that weathermen in North Carolina have a lot of time to kill between hurricane seasons, and therefore must invent ways to make people watch the local weather during the wintertime. Ironically, their cold weather hyperbole inevitable trumps hurricane coverage in style and delivery. As if to say, “A fifteen foot storm surge and continuous winds of 100+ miles an hour can be dangerous; a snow flurry, my friend—deadly.”

[2] One of the few American cities I don’t completely hate. Except for the cold thing.

[3] Winter hats are a commitment. Once you put it on, you’re pretty much stuck with it for the rest of the day, and unless it resembles something worn by one of the female leads in “Doctor Zhivago,” I’m not big on wearing winter hats as fashion accessories.

[4] We weren’t multi-lingual. It was a glorified parlor trick.

[5] Existing family members looking to correct this retroactively can consider a bequest to me of a small villa with excellent views and beach access available from December 1-March 1. I promise I’ll take excellent care of it, and ban all Jimmy Buffett on premises.

[6] And they were. When your total student body totals less than two hundred, it doesn’t seem like it would take much to notice that the students with the highest number of sick days were always sick on the same days. At my high school, you could be expelled for buying Cliff Notes, smoking a cigarette, or having sex. At public high school, I could have been forced to repeat a grade for having as many sick days as I racked up in one semester of senior year alone. Interesting trade-off.