An actual revelation: "Evensong" by Laurie Colwin (Best American Short Stories 2024 and moving past the election)

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

-Phillip Larkin, "Church Going"

A friend of mine was explaining to me the other day what her parents were like. She said her father's motto was "nobody lives forever," which didn't make him so much a thrill-seeker as just someone who accepted that he couldn't control everything in his life. My friend's mother, on the other hand, stressed to her children that they should trust in God. My friend observed that "in the end, they kind of came to the same thing," and she laughed at the thought that her parents, now divorced, would be chagrined to know how much alike they were.

That's pretty much what "Evensong" teaches us. The unnamed narrator is a control freak who desperately needs to learn to let go. She finds that while you can learn to let go without a religious experience, change will still share psychological similarities to metanoia. It will have "elements of" religious conversion, as the opening paragraph warns us. 

The narrator admits to her need to control. In the face of an uncontrollable and in many ways unknowable universe, some react by just going with the flow. The narrator chooses the opposite path: "I am by nature a person whose constant battle against encroaching chaos is fought by list-making and organizational thinking. I make grocery lists that cover our immediate needs, our staple needs, our long-term needs, and our long-term needs of a special nature, such as a dinner party a month away." This is a response to stress much like that of PTSD victims, who cope with trauma by staying always on guard. Her anxiety extends beyond planning for events. She also worries about being in emotional debt to others. After explaining how family friends the Billiards did very normal friend things to assist them, like help them find a home and recommend doctors to them, the narrator confesses that "Sometimes when I cannot sleep at night I am tortured, as if by bedbugs or red ants, at the size of this debt."

Is this attempt to control everything working out for her? It is not. "My family tells me that I can sometimes be seen baring my teeth or muttering to myself as I make these lists." 

So the narrator (I looked very closely to be sure she's not named. I thought maybe they slipped the name in there somewhere, but it looks like her lover Louis prefers to call her things like "silly girl") ends up in an affair with Louis Billiard, the patriarch of the family she is anxious about being in debt to. Why does she get involved? She claims she doesn't have reasons, but instead feelings. Her feeling is that Louis was attractive to her because he was fatherly. He does a lot of her family's household fix-up chores. 

There are two reasons a fatherly person appeals to her. First, it gives her a sense of order and safety in a world that makes her anxious on account of its unknowability and unpredictability. She thinks to herself at one point wistfully about "how beautifully ordered are the lives of children!" It's an order she longs for as an adult, and a relationship with a father figure allows her that kind of safety.  

The second reason is a more transcendental longing. God is called father in more than one religion, and dozens more cast God in the role of father even if they don't call him that. "This alliance had a preordained, familial feeling to it that I found irresistible." She is seeking comfort on a much greater level, even while she accepts solace on the much smaller scale of a human affair. 

Orderliness is the first thing she notices about the Anglican seminary in her town: "...the orderly workings of this place--its piper on St. Andrew's Day, its Christmas procession and Easter picnic--would remind you that the season had changed, and you would know, because the hours are marked by bell ringing, what time it was at least five times a day."

Louis is the opposite of a control freak. His surname, "Billiards" seems to suggest randomness, because of the way once a billiard ball is hit, it is controlled by forces of physics. It just goes wherever the universe takes it. That's what Louis does one day just after he and the narrator are done "fooling around" and she mentions that she doesn't know anything about the meaning of the church bells she's been hearing for a decade. He jokes "from the couch to church," sacrilegiously, but he seems to genuinely enjoy the service. He enjoys it the way he enjoys all other things in life, as a "sybarite" or hedonist. 

When the narrator complains about joining in the service, he seems to half pity her and half scold her. He points out how half-hearted her and her husband's Judaism is. When she worries she'll have to kneel, he asks, "What future for the Jews?" Meaning not "Jews are heretics," but rather, "You modern Jews with your lack of ceremony have forgotten what is enjoyable about religious services and why they're so popular all over the world." 

Louis introduces the narrator to the aspect of religion that is healing for her. It isn't that she actually converts--in many ways, the narrator stands out for being such an unusually reliable one on this subject--it's that the rituals help take the place for her of obsessing. She asks Louis how he gets so good at using the different books in the service, and he tells her "practice." So she starts to practice, too, going to Evensong every day for weeks on end.

In some ways, it's just another obsession, but the difference is that this obsession doesn't indulge her instinct to control. Instead, after wondering over and over why she is even going to the services, she arrives at an epiphany that's the opposite of trying to control:  "Then one day I had an actual revelation. It came to me that I might never know very much about anything. It might never be imparted to me what I was doing at Evensong. 'The thing about the unknowable,' I said to myself, 'is that you have to accept that it just isn't knowable, and that's that.' I found this very relaxing."

And just like that, she's better. She ends the story enjoying time with her family and wanting to examine her own faith tradition more deeply. Her affair has made her a better wife and mother. Maybe Louis, the father who fixes things, knew that's what she needed. Maybe he just did what he wanted to in his sybarite way, and this ended up also being the right thing, because the universe rewards people who don't try to control it. 

We all still have a longing for the ineffable and transcendent, even agnostics like me. We're the same species that built all those churches. For those of us who can't believe churches mean what they used to mean for centuries but who still feel the same psychological and emotional emptiness, we have to find something of equal sacredness and seriousness to replace it. I've said many times literature and the close study of it somewhat fills that hole for me. The narrator seems to have managed to fill it for her as well. 

A little puzzle I leave to others

I'm not going to get into this, but I think someone interested in racial or social theory could make a lot of how the narrator worries about how unknowable everyone is, but the only person she thinks she can confidently know is the woman in the African dress. She's sure that person doesn't have inexplicable affairs. Why is she so sure of this? Why, of all the unknowable people in the universe, does she think this one person alone is knowable? I leave it to someone else to pull this thread. 

Also see: Karen Carlson's post about this story, which looks closely at the language in it.