OK, story time.

Once, while interning for an English-language newspaper in Mexico during tail-end of the Bush years, I went with my office to Hard Rock Cafe-Guadalajara, for the CD-release party of a local Anglo band whose members had apparently moved there with their parents sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, as that’s about when their musical influences seemed to end. This band’s sound, fashion sense, and overall get-up could best be described as an overly-earnest combo of Skidrow, Bon Jovi, and Pearl Jam. This time warp was perhaps best exemplified by the utterly un-ironic sleeveless shirt that came in the press kit:

Not so in Mormondom. About a decade ago, my friend Jake Clayson–founder and proprietor of this very site–invited me to accompany to him to something called “Fork Fest,” a nascent music festival in American Fork for local Utah Valley bands. My buddy was especially keen on seeing the headliner Joshua James, an NPR-reviewed up-and-comer in the indie-folk scene, as well as a Provo, UT native and LDS Church member. My friend described Jame’s music as religiously-themed without being maudlin, intense in a way that would “never make an EFY CD,” in short, just the sort of LDS art he was looking for.

But when Joshua James finally took the stage after a full day of waiting, my friend left after only a couple songs, dejected and heart-broken. Why? Joshua James was wearing a sleeveless shirt.

Because we have a separate system of semiotics here in the LDS Church–and while in, say, central Mexico, a sleeveless shirt merely says “Look at my arms,” or “Hey, I still think it’s 1992,” in Mormondom a sleeveless shirt is an unmistakable statement about your attitude towards the church’s most sacred rituals. Not once during his set did James ever have to say into the microphone “I’ve lost my faith” or “I’m currently having serious doubts about my religion”–he merely had to wear a sleeveless shirt, one that made clear he had no undershirt on, and every Mormon there could read it clearly, wordlessly.

We talk sometimes about “Mormon culture” as a punchline, as though culture were some sort of monolithic bloc, or as though hoary-old insults like “Molly Mormon” or “Peter Priesthood” weren’t fictionalized constructs we merely apply to any overly-earnest member of the Church we don’t like. I almost want to dismiss the entire category of “Mormon culture” as a fiction itself, since no Mormon I actually know seems to conform to this elusive, ethereal beast. But, I do confess we have our own semiotics, our own system of codes and symbols, that can speak as forcefully as any words on a page.

This is all on my mind only because the same autumn I was in Mexico, Joshua James released his 2007 Christmas EP Fields and Floods, which opens with his sole Holiday original, “Winter Storm.”

Given the way he pleads for “Faith, don’t grow,” it perhaps should not be a surprise what the trajectory of his faith would be within only a few short years. Yet the song also seems to hint as to where the source of his disaffection would lie: “Pain, don’t go/You remind me of a winter storm.” As we’ve discussed in previous Sunday morning entries, your faith can be as much the source of pain as its resolution. Only each of us individually can say where our breaking point is, when the pain becomes more than the consolation.

Christmas is a great metonym for the Sunday morning feeling, come to think of it: the season really can be a great source of magic, warmth, togetherness and joy; it can also be one of immense heartbreak, stress, melancholy, and loneliness. Often it can feel like both at the same time. As with our faith, only each of us individually can say when the Holiday season tips over from joyous to oppressive. Sometimes it can shift from one side to the other day to day, or even hour to hour, all December long.

To be clear: deep down, most of us obviously want the Christmas season to be a joyful one. But whether it actually is or not is a different question. Sometimes singing “Joy to the World” is as much a plea as an exclamation–we beg to feel joy, because we just don’t at the moment. Certainly that’s how James chooses to perform the hymn on the EP’s center-piece, from which Fields and Floods derives its title:

At this deliberately slower tempo, Joshua James is able to better highlight how the “Joy” of the title is something we are still waiting for, not something we have access to at present. He tweaks the lyrics, subtly shifting everything from a present to future tense: “Let every heart prepare Him room,” “Rejoice, rejoice when Jesus reigns,” “No more let sin, and sorrow it won’t grow,” “He’ll come and make the blessings flow,” all of which emphasizes that these things have not happened yet. He even makes the choice to end on verse 3, “Far as the curse was found,” to emphasize that said curse has not been broken yet. He holds off the resolution of the fourth verse, because the consummation decreed has not come yet.

I attended a local Mexican ward during my internship in Guadalajara, Mexico; and although I informed the Bishop I would only be there 3 months, he still put me right to work as the ward pianist as soon as he learned I could play piano. (There is a chronic lack of qualified pianists in Latin America–due to the obvious fact that most folks can’t afford a piano–a shortcoming which the Church with its immense wealth still needs to rectify, but that must be a discussion for a different day). Perhaps it’s just because I was interning at a newspaper and so had been saturated with the news for the first real time in my life, but for whatever reason, I was weighed down more that December by the cares and sins of the world than I had any other Christmas season before.

As I played the Navidad prelude hymns–“Joy to the World,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Silent Night,” “I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day”, etc.–I couldn’t help but feel it all a farce. Here it was 2007, the war in Iraq was still raging out of control, the U.S. was violating the Geneva Convention in Guantanamo Bay (and even more dispiritingly, it was a Latter-day Saint lawyer who wrote the memo to rationalize it!), Iran was developing nuclear weapons, anti-immigrant bigotry was spiking across the U.S./Mexican border, hurricanes were devastating the state of Tabasco, the Great Recession was starting, there were famines, plagues, wars and rumors of wars, and so forth. Suddenly singing “Joy to the World” felt very facile indeed.

But it was while playing the hymns in Spanish in that Mexican ward that I likewise became aware of that is why we need the Christmas season so badly in the first place–or more precisely, why we need Christ so badly in the first place. Only an infinite and eternal Atonement can possibly clean up the mess we’re in, of which even our best solutions are but bandages to staunch the bleeding. It is a redemption of the world which has not yet come to pass, but which we still look forward to. That’s not to say we ever stop trying to fix the world while we live in it, on the contrary: having that “hope for a better world” is what “maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works,” according to our own Ether 12:4. Having that hope for the fulfillment of all things to come is what gives us the strength and wherewithal to keep fighting to make this world a better place.

We shine our brightest lights at the darkest time of the year, and it’s been dark times indeed. But we shine those Christmas light during the winter solstice in anticipation of the much brighter light to come.