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.
Read an excerpt from West’s unique memoir, Lessons and Carols below.
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.
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