Wait

Glazed and confused.

A Moment of Calm (1939), Max Ernst

I’m waiting in joyful hope for snow today. My odds are good, I think, since there’s a verified winter storm coming this way. At first my weather app showed only the red clouds that indicate an icy mix, some sleeting, some freezing rain. But now the temperature is dropping and that blue cloud of snow is almost to Hillsborough, about 15 minutes away. It’s 36 degrees now, so we only need another four degrees to reach the truly freezing snowy glory that we all crave (shut up, you crave it too, shut up shut up). By 5 pm, it should be 32 degrees and precipitation likelihood of 87 percent. Thrilling!

I will sit right here staring out the window until then.

Once it starts snowing, that’s when I get to eat all of the ice cream I bought at Wegmans last night, in anticipation of being snowed in. Like all snowbound humans, I require six different kinds of ice cream bars and ice cream cones and ice cream sandwiches in order to survive. My freezer was empty before this because I just moved in, so I had the extreme satisfaction of placing SIX (6) different ice cream treats into my empty freezer. I understand, you’re jealous, of course you are. There’s nothing I can do about it. If I could scrape all of the frostbitten prehistoric off-brand ice cream and decomposing frozen peas and terrible ice packs for your bad knees out of your freezer and bring you a paper bag with six ice cream treats inside and let you fill your own empty freezer with ice cream yourself, I would do that for you. Nothing would bring me more joy.

Speaking of bringing glad tidings and great joy to others, though: Yesterday I went to see Handel’s Messiah with my mother and my sister, performed by the Duke Chapel Choir. This is the fourth time I’ve been to see it live. I saw it twice when I was very young and once last year.

Maybe you’ve never seen Handel’s Messiah. Let me explain: It’s very long, and they sing the same words over and over. Even the soloists do this. Everyone belabors the point. Relatable, but not necessarily scintillating. At the end of last year’s performance I thought, “This was a good thing to do with my mom for the holidays.” Right after that I thought, “I wonder if I can bite the bullet and do it again next year, or if I’ll snake out of it at the last minute.”

I had a cough early yesterday morning. I imagined having a huge coughing fit in the chapel. I started to write a text to my mom and my sister about how I needed to bail, thanks to my cough. Then I decided to wait an hour before I sent the text, and I didn’t cough once during that hour, so BLAM! I was on the hook for some dreaded holiday cheer.

Holiday cheer scheduled months in advance is sort of the opposite of cheer in my opinion. But when it comes to family, an opinion is a handicap, not an advantage. It’s certainly no excuse for demonstrating free will out of the blue.

***

My mother announced via email that she would arrive at 3 pm to get good seats, even though the performance started at 4 pm. The implication was that we should show up as close to 3 pm as possible, because she could only drive off the marauding hordes who wanted our seats for so long. My sister is a surgeon who always arrives at least five minutes early for any appointment, and this was no exception. I always arrive ten minutes late. By the time I got there, the hordes were starting to growl and grumble about the real estate my mom and sister had mapped out at the front of the chapel, but no one was losing limbs just yet.

So we settled in for the long wait — er, journey. Commit, I told myself. Sit up straight and commit. Lock in. We’re doing this.

The dean of the chapel stood at the pulpit and said hello. We all muttered hello back. The dean told us to say hello much louder than that. We all dutifully shouted hello. “That’s better!” the dean said, and even though he had just repeated a trick well known to every pop music and sports fan on the face of the planet, everyone laughed like he was the funniest man alive.

“He said the same thing last year,” my mom whispered.

“He did?” I couldn’t remember but it sounded plausible. My mom and I were instantly unified in a commitment to locking in while keeping our critical faculties intact. My family is built to withstand many things, but we lack the structural integrity to endure the amiable patter of church people.

Now let me be crystal clear. It’s not the FAITH part of the picture that puts me off church people. True believers are a firm yes for me, generally speaking. I love anyone who holds forth on their most passionate convictions, even if I find those convictions ludicrous. I find Christianity fascinating, even if I don’t buy it completely. Or, you can tell me that there is a tiny garden shrew who guides you in delightful, highly personal ways and my ears will perk up. You can say that the spirit of Frank Sinatra lives inside your walk-in closet and informs you of which shoes to wear if there’s a frosty winter mix threatening, and I will ask for more information — not skeptically, not with a challenge in my voice, not to debate you. I merely want to hear more about your faith. I won’t snicker about it to my friends behind your back, either. I respect an esoteric ideology.

In fact, I love people who construct little mind castles and then move into them without hesitation. I don’t care if they only do this because they’re desperate. All the better. I don’t care if they’re flat-out wrong. People who have their own personal creeds and say so with delight in their voices: YES to them! I love people who make abrupt announcements like: I am literally in love with frogs. We were placed on this planet to smoke weed. Everything blue is holy. The lead singer of Geese has a divine light inside him and I would like to see it up close. This variety of golden apple is hands down the best, it is sublime, there is nothing better, and I will grow an orchard full of these motherfuckers even if it kills me.

Of course there are exceptions. I met this UPS delivery guy, a regular at my local bar, and he was just great, but then he turned out to be a 9-11 Truther. That wasn’t fun at all.

Church people are a little bit like that for me. Even though their genial small talk sounds friendly to them, I’m always bracing for the moment it turns rigid or prickly or gloomy or even oppressively upbeat. I mean, this dean guy is busy, sure, but obviously he has the time to dream up a new greeting for the congregation/ audience/ music-loving heathens/ fair-weather Christians assembled before him. Why opt for a mandatory zombie prompt instead? SAY HELLO LOUDER. PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR. DO THE WAVE, STARTING WITH YOU, SIR, YES YOU, DO IT DO IT.

Church People Patter has a willful resistance to resistance itself embedded in it. It says: You will play the role I’ve assigned to you, mouth your designated lines, and be welcomed as a faceless accessory to my smooth and reassuring universe, in which you are merely an NPC. (Mom: This stands for Non-Player Character, which is like a character in a video game who reacts according to its programming and isn’t operated by one of the people playing the game.)

My favorite true believers aren’t insistent that you agree with them or even that you play along. If they explain their belief system, they do so with awkward glee, and only because they want to spread the joy of A LOVE OF FROGS or THE HOLINESS OF BLUE or THIS ONE PERFECT APPLE with others.

Once you truly lock in, Handel’s Messiah is similarly inviting. It’s also very awkward and quite gleeful, albeit in a darkly foreboding and repetitive way. Unlike the normie church people, who recount the story of Jesus’s birth like it’s a cuddly but predictable Hallmark Christmas special, Handel craved the suffering, the sins, the transgressions, the iniquities, the chastisements. From the start, he gives his soloists lines about breaking pompous sinners with a rod of iron, dashing them into pieces like a potter’s vessel. He forgoes lovely virgins and cuddly babies to inform us that this Jesus is going to be the boss of us for the long haul: “And the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”

That’s a lot of important job titles for a little baby, but then only a stalwart would quote Isaiah 9:6 instead of, say, Matthew 2 with its groovy traveling sages, its pretty star, its gold (bling), frankincense (calms you down), and myrrh (gum resin, toke away), and the suspense-thriller twist where Joseph is told to flee with the kid, the virgin bop, and the drugs immediately. No, I don’t know the Bible that well, I just looked that stuff up because I’m fully locked in now. Put down the gum resin and try it sometime, bro.

The point is that Handel skims over a lot of important story beats because he’s all hornt up to rub our noses in flesh-eating worms, shadows of death, and laughing scornfully at pompous non-believers. And forget the humble carpenter story. Handel prefers passages where Jesus sounds more like a moody goth teen: “He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

Handel displays his sadistic bonafides right after that, when he makes the chorus sing “All we like sheep have gone astray” about forty to fifty times in a row. Yep, he was almost as obsessed with the perils of conformity as my church-people-are-sus family is, which is also maybe why he chose the undead vibes of Corinthians 15:20: “For now is Christ risen from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep.”

THE FIRSTFRUITS OF THEM THAT SLEEP! Is this a seasonal Christian event or an unholy musical amalgamation of Deadwood and The Walking Dead? Is there a zombie horde of Swearengens headed our way? (Mom: Al Swearengen is the lead character from Deadwood, you should get the DVDs and watch it, he’ll remind you of your ex-husband.) If so, they aren’t after human flesh. They’re chasing power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing. And also? Blessing, and honor, glory and power, forever and ever!

***

True believers repeat themselves a lot. Whether you’re listening to an obsessive lunatic rave about the Wonderful Counselor who’s about to crush your disbelieving bones into dust or just hearing a zealot rave about frogs, apples, how to bake a perfect rustic loaf of bread, or the little-known migratory quirks of the Western Tanager, you’re definitely going to hear the same details over and over and over again. Whether the firstfruits are ripe or still just little undead seedlings, with true believers, the record skips and skips and skips forever and ever.

And even though I’m drawing thick lines between normie church people and true believers, the truth is that both groups tend to treat their personal preferences like doctrine. Whether you’re talking to a bird watcher, a baker, the dean of the chapel, or some other maker, you can never tell them to try something new because they’ve already tried it before and they already know that they hate it. Or worse, they see this new thing as positioned in direct opposition to their entire belief system for absolutely arbitrary and absurd reasons and as a result they would never dream of trying it, ever, and they disrespect you a tiny bit for even bringing it up.

You might naively think that this is because true believers like what they like and that’s that, but it’s more like a true believer’s preferences are carved into stone and inextricably wed to everything good and righteous inside their little mind castles, and what they don’t understand or have no familiarity with or don’t love isn’t merely not their cup of tea, it’s downright blasphemous, ignorant, and punishable by iron rod. “All you like sheep have gone astray!” they practically hiss at you when you make the most innocuous suggestion.

This makes true believers somewhat dissatisfying to talk to or hang out with regularly. You can ask them questions and explore their private mind castles with them and it’s quite a journey! They won’t necessarily force you in there like the church people will, nor will they make you spout their words or nod along or do the wave. But if you expect to interject, mention your own beliefs, suggest alternatives, give feedback, or invite them into your own equally festooned mind castle? No, sir. No thank you, very much!

These motherfuckers lock in, is the point. They might prefer that you approach with wonder and awe, ask curious questions, and even SHOUT HELLO LOUDER, but they’re still going to do it their way no matter what. They taste one good apple and then suddenly they’re cutting down a vast forest using only a rusty saw, and when you buy them a chainsaw to help them out, you’re treated to a five-hour diatribe on the relative inferiority of chainsaws in the face of the power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessings of rusty saws, forever and ever and ever —AND EVER.

“I did think I saw heaven open,” Handel once said, about writing the Hallelujah chorus, “and I saw the very face of God.” You don’t tell someone like that to maybe cut 50% of the “All we like sheep” from the program.

So instead, I locked in. I sat up straight and I only had one tiny coughing fit, and that was during the 15-minute intermission. I sucked on a peppermint from my mom’s pocket and I walked to the back of the chapel for a minute and then I was ready for parts 2 and 3.

***

After the final AHHHHHHHHHMEN echoed through the pews and we finally exited the chapel in the dark, proceeding very slowly down the dark stairs with the other sheep, I thought, “That was a nice thing to do with my mom for the holidays.”

And then I thought, “I wonder if I’ll do it next year.” But let’s get real, my mom is 83 years old. I’m not going to bail next year, or the year after that, or ever. I’ve got to lock in for the long haul because I am really, truly, completely locked in.

Maybe that’s what Handel was really saying. We’re all trapped now that our Wonderful Counselor has arrived, so we might as well just accept it. Sure, we could trick ourselves into believing that we’re free, but once our Everlasting Shift Supervisor gets back we’re going to get told, and there might just be an iron rod involved. Might as well wait in joyful hope and keep believing instead, just like I’m doing right now with the snow.

My friends and family are skeptical. They say it won’t snow. They say they’ll believe it when they see it. But what’s the fun in that? Far better to imagine the blessings, the riches, the power, the powder, the sleet, the slush, the ice cream treats, king of kings, lord of lords, forever and ever and ever and ever, AMEN.

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Thanks for reading Ask Molly! Ask Polly is 50% off for the first year until midnight tonight. I recommend this post about how everything hurts my feelings because I am a woman of sorrow, despised, acquainted with grief, and that’s also why I am such a WONDERFUL COUNSELOR, motherfuckers. p.s. Special thanks to Rusty Foster for the verb “hornt up.”