The Sound of Him

05 | merry christmas, or whatever you celebrate

Chapter Five | Merry Christmas, or Whatever You Celebrate

My family had never been religious, to say the least.

We never said grace.

We never went to church on Sunday's.

We never celebrated Easter.

We never did anything remotely Christian.

It never bothered me, really. Of course, I knew who Jesus was and all that, but by the time I was twelve, I was convinced that if you loved religion, you were some Jesus-loving freak.

I guess the one person who made me rethink the whole Jesus-freak thing was Dallas, who invited me to the midnight Christmas mass with him and his family.

He had a younger sister, Phoebe, who was just a few years away from going to Vanderbilt. His mother and father were dressed perfectly for mass, modest.

I was dressed in jeans and a red, silky cami, covered up by my winter coat. It had been snowing in Virginia for the past few days, a sight I always enjoyed.

"I hope you don't feel forced to go with me," Dallas told me the day he invited me.

"Of course not," I told him.

"Warner usually tags along with me. I mean, he has for years now, but some family stuff happened," he said.

My smile faded from my lips and was replaced by a frown. Was Warner okay? I wasn't sure, and I definitely wasn't going to swallow my pride and be the first to reach out to him.

It had been weeks since I had spoken to him. The last time was the panty accident, which was definitely not my proudest moment, and my most embarrassing.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of bells, which I guess meant that the mass was starting, since everyone stood up.

Religion wasn't new to me.

It was something so complex yet so simple, like literature. The thing about literature is that many people can interpret it in different ways. No one is going to have the same interpretation as someone else.

I guess, in a way, religion was like that. Except, in this case, no one group is going to have the same interpretation as the other—Buddhists, Catholics, Protestants, they were all different, each of them unable to live in harmony, always causing strife over who had the right answers.

If there was a God, I was sure he wouldn't want people debating on who was right and who was wrong.

Dallas's family was Catholic, and they took pride in it. His mother's Facebook posts of them Kensington family celebrating Christmas and Easter together were a constant reminder of it. In fact, a lot of the families who were involved at Vanderbilt were religious. I felt like the odd man out.

I felt as if with religion, people had a sense of belonging somewhere. It was like how the moment I put on some running shoes, I knew that was where I belonged. In a sense, religious people felt like they had a place in the world simply by being involved in their own form of Church.

I realized something, though, while I was sitting in the Christmas mass—that you can't just go to Church and call yourself a Christian. At the same time, though, you could not go to Church and call yourself a Christian by the works you do.

It's the same way in how you can't expect to be Valedictorian by simply attending all of your classes. That takes commitment towards your grades and extra curricular activities.

Before I noticed, the service was over, and I found myself laughing in the passenger seat of Dallas's car. "Nothing's open right now, but I'm starving."