Merry In-Between, Happy What's Next

It's been a shitty year. This fact is indisputable among my colleagues and my family and the dwindling handful of friends I've failed to hold fast to. Years always have rhythms, but this year I found no stride or regularity. I've struggled even to find a basic footing. I've struggled altogether, seemingly ceaselessly.

So I find myself here, at the end of December. At the very end of this shitty year. Even in a good year, the stretch between Christmas and the New Year feels like limbo--like the space between a toll booth and the highway where five lanes with a speed limit of 15 merge into one with a speed limit of 70. Family members come and go, and the anticipation of the Christmas feast and the family bonding and the connection that we rekindle just once each year plateau into what feels like--and let's be honest here, what often actually is-- a state of perpetual holiday hangover. I spent months looking forward to Christmas, and it sat before me--the one unwavering constant, the one answer to the impending question in the in-betweeness of my life: "what's next?"

According to the Meyers Briggs personality assessment, aka my bible of self-understanding, I fall in the category of INFP, which means I possess introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving personality traits, and this labels me as a "mediator." Like any self-respecting mediator, when perusing the website that contains the secrets of my personality distilled into vague generalizations about "my kind" (the likes of which include Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Johnny Depp, apparently, as if anyone could possibly know this) I was ultimately drawn to the "weaknesses" section. I don't take this as a surprise, as the second characteristic on the INFP "weaknesses" list is "self-critical," proceeded only by "overly idealistic." I am, without a fragment of doubt, overly idealistic. This might explain the number of mental breakdowns I've had during this unpredictable 2020 or my frustrating inability to feel fully satisfied in any relationship I've had. It's hard to come to terms with excessive idealism and to accept the harsh realities that lie beneath the surface of idealistic projections.

If there's one thing I'm consistently overly idealistic about, it is Christmas Mass.

Attending church on a Sunday (or I suppose in the case of this year's Christmas Mass, a Friday) morning has been a near-lifelong staple in my 22 years. As could be expected, the further I strayed from home--and, consequently, the further I ventured from our church, which happens to be a block-and-a-half from my house--the more the staple of liturgy began to feel like a paperclip. I eventually reached the point where church felt even flimsier than a paperclip adhering the pages of my life. You know, more like that thing you do when you forget to staple your final paper, so you have to fold the upper-left hand corners of the pages together and pray the professor doesn't mark off points for presentation. Church has a rhythm that I struggle to place myself in. The rhythm feels harsh and repetitive and unwelcoming to me at times. I seek a gentleness and maternal warmth that cold hard tiles, unforgiving wooden pews, and the battle cries of fervent male congregants fail to emulate. I seek the humble and meek Virgin Mary, and find her shrouded beneath a sickeningly subtle robotic bow a handful of well-informed men attribute her during the creed.

The rhythm of our family is different this year. It is my younger brother--responsible and unbothered--and myself--overly idealistic--and my parents--church workers. We attend church on Wednesday evenings, on account of pandemic scheduling flexibility, and I'm thankful to emerge unscathed of the crippling comparisons my mind employs during Sunday morning church. The liturgy on a Wednesday is darker, a good deal quieter, and minimally more palatable to me. I feel I've outgrown stuffy Sunday attire both physically and mentally. Nonetheless, Wednesday evenings are not evenings I look forward to. My lingering sense of performative attendance prevails. Wednesday church is simply an item on my weekly checklist, marked off as the pastor speaks the same words at the very same time and I respond with the same less-than-fervent responses. My brother and I created a senseless ritual of our own by rushing out after a service ends, swiftly heading home as the cold wind whips our heels, and disposing of our church bulletins in the blue garbage bin that sits on our driveway before we reach the back door.

Something about Christmas Mass, or Christmas Eve Mass, or both,--as there has not yet been a year of my life when I haven't attended church three times during the week of Christmas--feels more important. My large and devout family returns home and I am inclined to dispose of my sense of detachment. I channel newfound idealistic energy into the outfit I plan to wear to church to wow all the Sunday-attendee congregants I haven't seen in months so that I might find my stride on the way to the communion rail. Each year I imagine the perfect tasteful Christmas outfit and each year I spend far too long pulling on button-ups and dresses and tights and boots and then pulling them off and scattering them on my floor and making a mess of my closest and examining all the different combinations in an attempt to pin down an unattainable "Sunday Best" that only exists in my mind.

This shitty year on Christmas Eve, I spent my morning working my pandemic job and returned home reeking of dark roast coffee beans and an eagerness to don a stunning Christmas Eve outfit and attend the ideal Christmas Eve Mass I envisioned. Before the service, there was a planned COVID-friendly church parking lot caroling session to attend, and despite my initial hopeful attitude, I left my house angry that I had to change outfits three times and that the temperature outside was frigid and that half of our family left the house before I was ready and that nothing felt stunning and that it would not be the ideal Christmas Mass. And then we began to sing.

We shivered in the cold and held bulletins that thrashed in the wind and the acoustics in the parking lot were undeniably unfortunate and we couldn't feel our toes and we couldn't project our trained voices from beneath our masks and we couldn't sing in four parts with no music on the page, and there was so much about that moment that lacked the liturgical rhythm we had come to expect. As I sang Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, I began to cry.

There is something utterly profound about a bunch of congregants singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing from a miserable, freezing parking lot when that same bunch of congregants has been trained to know Hark! The Herald Angels Sing with a well-orchestrated band of musicians leading them in a heated sanctuary while holding perfectly glowing candles.

There is something far less miserable about a freezing parking lot when it is full of little children scooping up parking lot snow, and old ladies arriving a few minutes late, and imperfectly dressed 22-year-old women who smell like dark roast coffee beans and do not like church anymore singing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing as loud as they can. I felt an inexplicable divine right in the midst of my ordinary. As I cried beneath my mask during Hark! The Herald Angels sing, I felt abundant joy.

There is beauty in our reality. There is happiness in the in-between. There is grace, and there is mercy, and there is peace right there in the parking lot. There is good in this shitty year.

Cover photo by Asael Peña on Unsplash.