Chapter 14 The Advent Hymn
The Sunday before Christmas the Pinecrest Community Church held its Advent service, which Reverend Hobart approached with the specific enthusiasm of a man for whom the Christmas season was the professional and personal highlight of the year and who had been planning his Advent service since approximately the middle of October.
The church was not full in the way it would be on Christmas Eve, but it was well-attended — the families from the valley and the surrounding spreads who made it to town for the Advent service, which had a reputation for the hymn-singing being particularly good, which was due partly to the acoustics of the old church and partly to the fact that Reverend Hobart believed that hymns should be sung as though you meant them and had said so, with sufficient directness, to his congregation over a period of years.
Mercy went because she was in Pinecrest and it was Sunday and she was a woman who went to church on Sunday as a matter of practice rather than obligation — because she wanted to, because the hour of collective attention directed toward something larger than the collective was not a thing she could replicate alone.
She sat in the middle of the congregation, in a pew near the Caldwells — Clara and Elias and Nora, who greeted her with the warmth of people who had decided she belonged — and she waited for the service to begin.
Nathaniel came in late, which she suspected was his custom. He took a seat at the back, in the same position she had been told he always occupied. She did not turn around.
She was aware of him in the way she was always aware of him now, which was with the specific awareness of someone whose presence had become a fact of the room. She could track him without looking, the way you tracked weather.
Reverend Hobart was in full form. He preached about the waiting quality of Advent — about what it meant to be the people who had been told something was coming and who were holding themselves in the particular posture of expectation, neither passive nor frantic but ready.
The active readiness of someone who believed the thing was actually coming and was preparing accordingly.
"This is the hardest posture," Hobart said. "Not to have arrived and not to be in despair. To be waiting with your hands open. To believe that what is coming is worth the posture of reception rather than the posture of self-protection."
Mercy listened to this and felt it land in a way that things only landed when they said what was already true.
Then the hymns.
The congregation sang with the wholehearted quality that Hobart had been cultivating for fifteen years, the sound of people who had been told they should mean it and who, mostly, did.
O Come O Come Emmanuel, first, with the minor key longing of it doing what that hymn always did, which was to make the waiting feel both heavy and full.
Then Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, which was about the same waiting from a different angle, the angle of someone who was running out of patience but had not yet run out.
Mercy sang and thought about waiting and patience and the particular posture of hands held open.
She thought about a man at the back of the church who had been waiting — not for the right thing, not consciously, but in the way that sealed-off people were always waiting even when they had decided not to — for twenty years, and who had been, for thirteen days, in the process of opening his hands.
At the end of the service, the congregation turned to leave, and she turned with them, and in the aisle she and Nathaniel arrived at approximately the same point at approximately the same moment, which was either chance or the natural outcome of their respective positions in the church, and they walked out together.
Outside, in the cold, the congregation dispersed in the slow way of people who knew each other well and found the doorstep conversation as valuable as the service. Mercy stood in the pale December sun and waited for whatever came next.
"The hymns were good," Nathaniel said.
"They were," she said. "Did you sing?"
He looked at her. Something in his face was different from the street-face — less the professional, more the man who had been standing in the back of a church listening to hymns about waiting and had been reached by them.
"I haven't sung in church in twenty years," he said.
"Did you tonight?" she said.
A pause. "The last one," he said. "Quietly."
She looked at him with the full attention. He was looking at the mountains, which he always looked at when he had said something that cost him something.
"Come Thou Long Expected Jesus?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
She breathed. She thought: Thomas Ely would have said told you so, Nat, in the most affectionate way possible. She thought this and said nothing about it, because some things were better witnessed than narrated.
"Lunch," she said, instead. "Mrs. Connelly is making something that smells like the best decision I've encountered all week. You should come."
He turned from the mountains and looked at her. The thing was in his face still — the thing from the church, from the hymn, from the standing in the back and singing quietly after twenty years. She did not manage it or deflect it. She just let it be there.
"Yes," he said. "I'd like that."
They walked to Mrs. Connelly's, and the winter sun was pale and specific on the snow, and the mountains were themselves in the December light, and in the church behind them Reverend Hobart was blowing out the candles with his characteristic caution, and inside one of them something was continuing to open that had been closed for a very long time.