Standing Ovations and the Convergence of the Twain 19 comments

By Kelly Foster

Several years ago while standing in a grocery store cheese section, my mother (who is a staggeringly empathetic, beautiful person—a much better person than I am, in fact) asked me, with all the heavily accented French of your average NPR Host, if I would consider it “effete” if she served a wheel of Brie and some Water Crackers before a dinner party.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I responded a bit snidely. “Are you planning on saying ‘effete’ while you serve the cheese? Because in that case: yes, I do think it would probably be effete.”

Smart remarks aside, I am very much my mother’s daughter.

That is to say I, too, am a bit effete. But I’m far from OK with that.

I frequently pull out my Mississippi “card.” I use “ya’ll” in everyday speech. As my friend Melissa pointed out to me last fall, I preface my occasional ad hominem attacks on people who frustrate me with a folksy “Let me tell you somethin.’” I step on the brakes just a couple inches before I arrive in “Kiss my grits!” territory.

Once I waited on a lady at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ Bravo restaurant. I secretly nicknamed her the Narcoleptic Aristocrat because I overheard her chastising her husband (whose name she pronounced “Chaaahles”) for his base “middle-class thinking.” After dinner, she threw a heavy-lidded glance my way, the ice in her single-malt rocks glass clinking, and asked me, “You seem terribly smart. Did you go to Bryn Mawr?”

And I giddily responded, “No ma’am. I’m from Mississippi!”

In all seriousness, my identity crisis extends far beyond some kind of vastly over-simplified internal culture war. I feel split between many ideological poles—High Church/Low Church, Urban/Rural, Hipster/Unhipster, Gourmet/Fast Food, Liberal/Conservative, Independent/Mass-Produced. Maybe it’s the entire concept of picking a side that’s fallacious and problematic. Or maybe I’m philosophically commitment phobic. OR maybe I just move around too much.

The worst of it is not just the resulting feeling of estrangement within myself, but depending upon whom I’m talking to, I can find myself arguing angrily on the side of any one of these extremes—often contradicting myself from one conversation to the next. In fact, I often rehearse these arguments in the middle of the night, subjecting imaginary enemies to my shadowboxing pontifications.

The religion issue, in particular, comes to mind. I am fiercely protective of my Evangelical past when those around me dismiss it offhand, but I am just as fiercely defensive of my new liturgical High Church home to those who would criticize it.

As I contemplate this divide, I do not often share Whitman’s triumphal “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large—I contain multitudes.” Instead, I feel scattered, conflicted, and sometimes de-centered.

Recently, I attended my first Roman Catholic Nuptial Mass in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Three Rivers, California. During the lovely service, I was thunderstruck by a plea that I find echoed in the Anglican Marriage Litany of my Book of Common Prayer: “Make their life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.”

This is the bone deep desire of us all, I think—married or not—an abeyance of our dividedness. We ache for unity in our estrangement, forgiveness for our guilt, and joy for our despair.

I have been too cool for Max Lucado since I was in eighth grade (or so I have sometimes thought), but I vividly remember the image with which he closes The Applause of Heaven—that of a loving Christ welcoming the estranged Prodigal home, clapping.

As a rule, I don’t keep up with American Idol or Britain’s Got Talent (yes, I also think I’m too cool for most “reality” TV—eavesdrop at my apartment sometime around 3 am to hear me enumerate all the reasons why). But when I was home in Yazoo City several weeks ago, my parents played me a YouTube clip of the audition of recent Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts, a mobile phone dealer/self-taught opera singer.

In the first clip, we see Potts—shy, awkward, self-effacing, slightly overweight, deeply insecure—discussing how difficult self-confidence is for him. I found myself just wanting to give him a big hug and tell him it was all going to be OK. In the next clip, he is taken before the judges and he looks as though he is about to cry. But he doesn’t falter. He sings “Nessun Dorma” beautifully and the audience is won over. By the end, they have jumped to their feet, applauding vigorously and wiping tears from their eyes, Puccini’s sweeping string section fading in the background.

I wept watching this. It’s not that I’m unaware when someone’s trying to manipulate my emotions. It’s not that I don’t appreciate subtlety. But I realized as I watched that regardless of how educated we are, how worldly, how discerning—whether cynical or naïve or sentimental—High Church or Low Church—we are united in this: we want the underdog in us to win, we want the exiles in us to find home, we want the wounded in us to be healed. We want applause.

Maybe it’s all much more complicated than that. But maybe it’s not.

Several years ago, my friend Shelly left a card on my desk with this verse from the prophet Isaiah: “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

I keep this card with me pressed in a book, because that’s the hope of this self-estranging Prodigal—the heart-mending welcome of Earth, the freedom-ringing applause of Heaven.