Music and Memory, Part 26: Heroin

About fifteen years ago I began the transition from pursuing a standard career as an opera singer to pursuing a recital career based mostly on the fruits my own research, a transition that would become final when I left my opera management the day before September 11, 2001. This change was precipitated by my meeting F., a wonderful Italian collaborative pianist and musicologist, on Saint Patrick's Day, 1996. Before long, we were researching and performing together, and he was my exclusive recital partner until he took a teaching job in Europe in 2005.

One day we were on our way to a gig in one of the mid-Atlantic states. We had walked from our late lamented neighborhood across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to rent a used car, had driven back to get our stuff, and now were on our way. On that drive, my colleague F. said two things that astonished me. The first was in response to my putting a Joni Mitchell CD in the car's player: he ejected it, saying, "Life is too short for bad music," and replaced it with a live recording that he had pirated himself at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy (I continue to disagree with his assessment of bad music in this case). The second happened a little further down the road, as he told me about the sunsets, mountains, and animals he'd seen while on a concert tour in Brazil. "Really, Pentimento," he asserted, "all of that is far more beautiful and important than music."

I was speechless. How could that be? Music was my elixir; no, my medicine. Thinking more about it, I wondered if it might not, more specifically, be a sort of chemo drug, a life-saving medicine that carried the risk of certain potent side effects. Nothing was more important to me. It came before, preempted, and supplanted what should have been my most important relationships. My early life had been so tenuously established, my adult life so undisciplined; music was the only constant, and sometimes I felt it was a thing even more essential to my existence than a chemo drug would be: it was oxygen itself, the most basic ingredient for my survival from one day to the next. I clung to it like a vine that heliotropes its maundering way around a trellis to get to a patch of sun. Or maybe music was my heroin, the jab that could deliver a few hours of beauty and a sense of agency into an otherwise bleak life.

Performing -- even rehearsing -- with F. has been one of the high points of my life. Our musicalities complemented one another in a way I'd never experienced before. We had plenty of conflicts in our working relationship, but working with him was one of the essential steps in my maturation as a singer and musician. We performed together just once after he moved abroad, when my first son was one year old and I was pregnant again, though I didn't yet know it. Having a baby meant that I could no longer practice obsessively, as I'd always done before, and, as we rehearsed before the gig -- the only time we had -- F. stopped and said, "How is it that you're finally singing the way you always should have sung?" I suppose it had to do with lowered expectations, with not predicating a hundred other things upon my success in that one particular performance, and with having my single-minded focus distracted and dissipated by the needs of another person.

Now F. is far, far away, and so am I. And I wonder if there is some way to convert the heroin of my former life as a singer into some kind of methadone, to ease off my addiction to that intense inner world with a duller, less devastating version of it. It's been said that pop music anchors the listener to the place and time that he heard it -- that particular summer, that one party, that boy or girl -- and that, as such, it's a mnemonically static form, whereas classical music is redolent with all kinds of associative possibilities. I'm not sure I buy that; hearing any of dozens of classical pieces evokes for me the time and place when that piece entered my life, directed my thoughts, dominated the world of my senses. It's very difficult for me, for instance, to hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 without seeing a hundred moments from the years of my childhood to the years of my doctoral study; sometimes I cry when I think that Beethoven has to be dead, but I wonder if I'm not really crying for the past in general.

But the past is receding like a world seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I must remind myself every minute to be here now, in post-industrial America, in crumbling northern Appalachia, a wife and mother, in the land where my own mother is dying and where my family members are wandering desultorily or struggling desolately, and where I seem to have lost the power and agency I once had when I was a young singer who lived for and through music.

(Above: Dame Maggie Teyte sings "Oft in the Stilly Night," which is not a folk song, as the announcer states, but rather one of the Irish Ballads of Thomas Moore, set to music by John Sullivan in the early years of the nineteenth century).

Crime and Communion

Speaking of old stomping grounds, my favorite crossing-guard is a black woman who hails from my old neck of the woods. She was born and raised in Yonkers, and later lived in Newburgh in upstate New York, a very tough town which, from what I gather, was the site of her near-total destruction from drug addiction. She got clean, found God, and moved here years ago to start a new life. In addition to being a well-loved school crossing-guard, she has a night job as the female warden at the county jail, and occasionally as we stand at the corner chatting after school drop-off she tells me about the women who are brought to jail in the middle of the night and their crimes (which are mainly robberies and drug offenses). She has a bad hip and a shunt in her heart, but she says she'll be standing on the corner with her stop sign in her hand as long as she "can still hop along."

Though I don't remember it all that well, I'm told that I was almost barred from receiving my first Holy Communion, so poorly did I acquit myself in the pre-sacrament interview with the priest. I apparently didn't know any of the answers to the catechetical questions. And yet I loved CCD, and I especially loved my First Communion prep class teacher, Mrs. B. I used to stay after class to help her clean the classroom. I remember being very excited the day that she took us into the church and showed us how to bless ourselves with holy water, and I wondered, as I erased the blackboard after class, if the proximity to the blackboard of my hand dipped in holy water would somehow bless it and all the words that would be written upon it in times to come.

Mrs. B. had ten children, and, though I didn't know this at the time, she was married to a bookie. Evidently there were as many telephone lines in her apartment as there were children, and her husband was in and out of jail. I found this out only recently, when my father mentioned seeing his name in the paper now and then on the occasions of his arrests.

I had occasion this fall to attend Mass at the parish in which I grew up, and, when I went up to receive Communion, there was Mrs. B., proffering the Most Precious Blood. I couldn't help smiling broadly when I saw her. It seemed truly good and right that we were both there together.

Guerilla Librarianship

I love books so much that sometimes this love feels dangerous. I get a rush whenever I enter a library, especially an academic library. I often have twenty or thirty books checked out at a time, which is where it threatens to become a sickness.  If I run across a reference somewhere to a book that seems like something I'd want -- I'd need -- to read, I immediately request it at the library; there's a sense of urgency, of immediacy, there, the fear that, if I let time pass -- the amount of time, for instance, that it would take to read the books I've already checked out -- I will forget that very important book, that new reference, and never request it, and, hence, never read it. And then there are the six full bookcases I own, pared down by a couple of bookcases over the course of several moves, and the books piled high on my desk, research materials for my book project (on a topic in academic musicology).  And an overflowing basket of finds I've gleaned from BookMooch, and my finds from thrift stores, yard sales, and the library discard table.  I spend way too much money on books, often rationalizing it to myself that eighty percent or so of what I buy is second-hand. Nonetheless, as Betty Duffy has noted elsewhere, this doesn't make it a virtue.

I often feel as if I've missed my calling, and should have done my degree in library science instead of in voice performance. And, had I become a librarian, I have the suspicion that I would have become a guerrilla librarian.

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York has a great post up detailing the short history of guerrilla librarianship at the People's Library at Zuccotti Park. An excerpt:

Librarians gassed and jailed. Heroes strapping books of poetry to their bodies. Here's something: Nobody's doing that for a Kindle.

And the acclaimed young adult novel The Book Thief (a moving, luminous read, though it has some problems, among them the facts that it's just too long and too relentless) is essentially about guerrilla librarianship as redemptive act.

Jeremiah posits:

[W]hat if bibliophiles became, again, radical revolutionaries in the collective imagination? What if the borrowing, lending, buying, selling, and reading of real books became a renegade act?

. . . . It's time to start burning the Kindles and get back to the real thing.

Meth and Mercy

Read Calah's recent post at Barefoot and Pregnant.  I have no words.

The Tattooed Mothers You Will Have Always With You

My father, whose illiterate grandparents came to America about a hundred years ago (on the run from personal tragedy, as well as from crushing poverty and from the hated Camorra who terrorized Naples and its environs), used to urge his children to look their best at all times, saying that only the rich could afford to dress badly, because, for the rich, a sloppy appearance had no consequences. 

I was thinking about his exhortation the other day while I waited in the pick-up line for my son outside the neighborhood elementary school.  A disturbing -- disturbing to me, anyway -- number of the other mothers sport visible tattoos: not just things like hearts and flowers on their ankles, but things like large pairs of bat's wings across their shoulder girdles.   Now, there are plenty of tattooed mothers of young children in New York City, too (including some in my own family), but most of those mothers self-consciously partake in a sort of countercultural-outsider ethos, and tend to be employed in various creative professions, in which their appearance doesn't matter as much as it would if they were working for the man; their life goals, they presume, will be unaffected by the in-some-ways-shocking state of their skin, because they have put themselves outside the mainstream.  But there are two ways to be outside the mainstream.  The self-conscious, creative-class, New York City tattooed moms generally possess a level of education, or of family money, or, for want of a better term, of cultural capital, that ensures that they will not suffer major consequences from what would seem to be a willing self-exile from the workaday world enabled by symbolically marking their flesh. The tattooed moms in my community, on the other hand, do not have this luxury, and their marked skin sets another bar between them and meaningful employment.  So I wonder: is their tattoing truly subversive -- subversive in a way that creative-class tattooing is really not -- because it's a gesture of acknowledgement that, in being poor, they are already irrevocably outside the mainstream? Is it a self-marking of despair?

For the record, I have no tattoos, and I find them unappealing on men as well as women, which I suppose makes me a sort of oddity in my cohort (even up-and-coming opera singers I knew back in New York had tattoos).  And I wonder how the subculture of tattooing and body modification made its way from the edges of Bohemia in large urban areas to half-forgotten, post-industrial backwaters like the place I live now, a place that suffers from the worrisome combination of entrenched and widespread poverty and a dearth of meaningful and well-paid jobs, and how its meaning changed en route.  Sometimes I want to say to the other mothers in the pick-up line, "Why did you deface yourself like this? What does this mean to you, and what does it mean, socially, here, in this place?"  It seems to me that the poor and disenfranchised cannot afford to get tattoos, and I don't just mean that the hundreds of dollars each tattoo costs could be better spent.  I mean that there are certain consequences that come with putting yourself outside the mainstream, and that those consequences are particularly harsh if you don't have a cushion of money or education to soften them.

The public library in my new town -- there is only one -- is my absolute favorite place here. I get a rush when I walk through the front doors.  You could fit four of my branch libraries back in the Bronx into the Children's Room alone.  It is clean and beautiful, and they let me take out all kinds of books on interlibrary loan, and they call me on the phone to let me know when my ILL loans have come in.  I take the bus there once a week, and, as I descend the bus steps, I feel the eyes of those waiting to board linger upon me, because people who look like me don't ride the bus here.  By people who look like me, I mean people who aren't overweight and in their pajamas though there is also a certain ethnic sameness to the people here which I don't share, a sameness which I suppose comes from centuries of intermarriage among the Europeans who first settled in these hills.  People who ride the bus are poor, very poor indeed, too poor for even a few-hundred-dollars' beater car. Another non-tattooed mother in the pick-up line, who teaches remedial reading at the community college, told me that when her students have spent their financial aid grants on textbooks, they're generally strapped for ways to buy food and bus passes for the rest of the semester.  In the end, it's very expensive to be poor.

I walk from the bus stop to the library past small, decrepit apartment buildings with "No Loitering" signs affixed to the front doors, past empty storefronts, past a boarded-up old tavern whose walls are choked with climbing weeds.  One room of my massive library has been turned into a FEMA disaster assistance site, as have several churches downtown, including the parish where we attend Mass.  As I collected my books at the checkout desk the other day, I overheard one of the front-desk workers on a personal phone call.  She was broke, she was telling her friend on the phone, not sure when a child-support check was going to come, and lacking even in milk and bread.  When I left, I passed a family with young children waiting on the church steps across the street for the FEMA center to open.  They all waited patiently, with suitcases piled on the sidewalk around them. 

All of this makes me wonder, and wonder again, about the calling I've always strongly felt:  to show other people, to teach other people, to guide other people to the sublime beauty of the western classical music tradition. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis about the essential humanity of man's natural "nostalgia for the beautiful," and noted that this "creative restlessness" is part of our longing for God.  But what good is it to tell my tattooed cohort about how uplifting,  how deepening, how connecting, how humanizing, how healing is the stuff with which I usually deal? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht in Threepenny Opera, "First food, then aesthetics."

And, too, all of this brings me face-to-face with my own hard lack of charity.  I do not love these poor; I fear them. They seem so shaky, so unstable, to me; they are so different from me. Though surely not all of these poor are addicts, they remind me of the junkies I used to see around New York, who you could tell were junkies because they were rail-thin, were young but looked old, walked really fast and crookedly, and, when they had fixed, moved in strange, jerky ways, as if they were marionettes.  I found them terrifying and repellent even as an adult.

Last week, Mark Gordon wrote a hard-hitting and moving piece for Vox Nova about helping the poor. "[Am] I responsible for helping poor people that I know personally?" he asks himself, then answers:

Yes. Am I personally responsible for helping the poor in my community? Yes. Am I responsible for working toward a just social and political order in which poverty itself is eventually eradicated? Yes. Am I responsible for helping the poor in foreign lands? Yes. The poor who are in this country illegally? Yes. The poor with substance abuse problems or criminal backgrounds? Yes. The poor who don’t appreciate my help? Yes. The poor who disgust me in their helplessness? Yes. All the poor? Yes.

OK, I thought, I'm good with a lot of this.  We continue to support N., who's desperately poor and illegal (though I admit to grumbling as I stand at the sink and wash dishes because we just sent the money that was supposed to have gone to a new dishwasher to her when she was in danger of being evicted). I have no problem helping the illegal poor; the fact is, I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the tattooed moms in my community.  The reason the illegal poor are here is that they're strivers, adventurers, risk-takers, and extremely brave; they work their asses off; and most of them share my religion.  The poor in my community, on the other hand, frighten me. They are not like me. They reject the things I hold dear.

Nonetheless, as Sister Mary Martha wrote in response to a reader who voiced his objections to Appalachian culture more strongly than I have (yes, I know she's not a real nun, but that doesn't make her wrong):

Jesus never had a job and just lived off of other people who put Him up in their houses and fed Him AND all his friends. He actually told His friends to STOP WORKING and hang out with Him. His final words to them was a commandment to never even try to earn money and have any money or nice clothes or even shoes. Lazy slobs. No wonder they were all killed.

Jesus loved sinners. Remember? We never have to condone sin to love a sinner. God does it every single minute. It makes me extremely sad to think that we can not let go of calling people some kind of name and that we insist it is just fine and dandy to do so.

Can you imagine if Father stood in the pulpit said "white trash" and meant it? Why is it not okay for Father to say that, but okay for you?

Maybe it's time to bring back the ruler.

Food writer Mark Bittman (whose recipes I love, but who, as a professional chef friend of mine memorably put it, is prone to a kind of "soapboxing tinged with a**hole") wrote a recent post displaying a similar sort of arrogance and lack of understanding when it comes to the food choices of the poor (yes, similar to my own arrogance and lack of understanding about the poor in my community).  Many people in the combox put him straight, and, as one writer put it in a letter to the Times:

Mark Bittman would persuade poor families that nutritious food prepared at home can be cheaper than the fare available at fast-food outlets. He points out that if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway, but doesn’t mention other realities.

Shopping after work means crowded stores and long wait times, which are likely to interfere with child-care arrangements. Then the meal must be prepared, which with Mr. Bittman’s recipes entails chopping, dicing, shredding, sautéing and cooking. After the meal, the preparer must clean up or persuade someone else to do it.

A trip to McDonald’s allows a family to spend time together having their food brought to them, enjoying the meal and walking away, in less time than is needed for the Safeway option. 

A big selection of healthy foods isn’t available at fast-food prices. Until it is, Mr. Bittman shouldn’t lecture people who are making not-unintelligent tradeoffs.

In the end, there is an appalling lack of love among some of us who are well-fed, well-educated, and even champions of beauty -- of love, that is, for the unbeautiful.  I suffer from this lack, and I pray that God will show me a way to truly love those I would shun.  But I fear this love, too, and its consequences.

Quick Takes: Nostographers' Back-to-School Edition

1. For about two weeks after the first day of school, the route my son and I walk took us past a dead squirrel lying in the street, close to the curb.  It was near someone's driveway, and looked as though it had died in great agony.  "Look!" my son gasped, seeing it before I did that first day.  I tried to conceal my nauseated cringe, and we talked about it.  In fact, we had many opportunities to talk about it, because the squirrel remained, gradually deflating and decomposing, day after day.  In the morning, my son insisted on going up a different street, so as to save the fascinating dead-squirrel nature observations for the way home.  "Don't look up that street," he would caution me as we walked to school, but on the way home he would eagerly examine the squirrel's current state of decay.  I called the city sanitation department two or three times, but the squirrel remained.

Then one day last week, my son, inspired by the wonderful out-of-print Margaret Wise Brown book The Dead Bird, asked me to make a sign to commemorate the squirrel.  One one side, the sign was to read: "Here Lies A Squirrel That Is Dead," and on the other side: "Here Lies A Squirrel Which Is Dead." So I did, on a piece of cardboard with Sharpie marker, and on the way to school the next day we detoured past the dead squirrel and laid the sign in the street alongside it.

A day or two after that, the squirrel was gone, though, if you scan the gutter carefully, you can see a couple of bedraggled tufts of gray fur.  The sign remained for another week, and now it is gone too.

2. The school is about three-quarters of a mile from our house, and the walk takes us down a lovely divided street with stately homes.  Walking home alone one day, I noticed that, in back of one of these houses, a labyrinth had been painted on the driveway blacktop.  I remembered when I worked at a Wall Street law firm for my day job, and how a church down there -- was it Trinity Church? -- installed a similar labyrinth, white lines painted on black canvas stretched out in the church courtyard.  It was a very troubled time in my life, and I thought that walking the labyrinth during my lunch hour would somehow help.  I would walk that flat, painted maze in the church courtyard, car horns blaring outside on the street, without knowing what feelings or insights it was supposed to inspire, and, to my knowledge, it didn't inspire any.

3. I learned recently to my dismay that the accomplished, attractive college-age daughter of a musician colleague whom I greatly respect has developed a serious heroin habit. Instead of taking her daughter back to school, my friend pulled her out of a sordid crack-house and drove her to an out-of-state rehab, and the daughter is now living in an out-of-state halfway house.  My friend has no desire to go and see her.

This made me think about how my friend's music always seemed to come before everything else.  She spends many months of every year on the road, and this family crisis has not slowed her down.  If anything, I imagine that she is barricading herself ever more tightly into the predictable world of practice, rehearsal, and performance.  This is an impulse I fully understand, for, where the world is broken, music is sound and whole, and where I am utterly powerless and ineffectual in my own life and the lives of others, I have always been able to feel a sense of power and agency in my art -- the ability to perform on a relatively high level and, in so doing, to move hearts. And, where the people I knew disappointed me, Brahms and Mozart did not -- could not.

The world is broken, nonetheless, and music cannot fix it.  I wonder how often music becomes a substitute for what it stands for -- real love, true human connection.

"If I would help the weak, I must be fed . . ."

Fellow-former-New-Yorker Fallen Sparrow's moving reminiscences of his life in the days following September 11, 2001.

The Healing of Memory

It is worth noting that Dante places the full healing of memory at the top of Purgatory, long after earthly death and the long process of atonement for one's sins. Setting aside dementia, injury, or some other illness that affects one's mental faculties, it is in man's nature to remember, to carry with him through his life memories of events both good and bad. Why would that be? How does one reconcile God's love with the burden of painful memories?
 
God doesn't erase our memories because they help to constitute us as individuals, and His creatures whom He loves. Rather than blot out our memories of injuries, heartbreaks, and sins we've endured and committed, God forgives us our offenses and preserves the memory so that we might recall the love He has for us.

Fallen Sparrow is back, and I'm so glad.

Real Men

[UPDATE 7/31/11:  It has come to my attention that this post has angered some men who identify as Traditionalist, or who may be sympathetic to Traditionalism.  Readers who are new here should know that in this post, and on this blog in general, I speak solely of my own experience.  I mean no harm to anyone, Trad or otherwise, and my intention with this post was certainly not to sow further division among Catholic men and women, but to acknowledge that we are all deeply wounded, and to pray for the healing of all, both as individuals and as members of the Mystical Body.]

When, after a lackadaisical childhood catechesis, years spent doing my own thing, and a dramatic conversion experience, I came back to the Catholic Church in 2002, I found that there was a New York City subculture I had never known existed: the subculture of young orthodox and Traditionalist Catholics.  Many of this subculture’s adherents were actively looking for a mate, and I dated a few of them, which was an experience unlike anything I was familiar with from my own long romantic struggles. 

Many of the men in this subculture were what I can only call essentially wounded in their masculinity.  It was as if their self-identification as men had been haphazardly constructed out of subersive images of masculinity refracted to them from the culture; as if, finding certain norms of masculinity repellent (not without reason, it must be said), and not having had male role models to demonstrate for them any ontological qualities of manhood, these young men had skirted around the edges of male behavior, and had finished by taking affect for essence.  Their own masculinity seemed to have been forged in opposition and negation, cobbled together out of strong, oppositional attitudes to what repelled them culturally, rather than out of any positive attitudes, such as the wish to take on essential male roles -- engaging, for instance, in meaningful ways in the existential struggle to fight real enemies, and providing for and protecting the vulnerable, including women and children.  In addition, some of these men seemed to have self-consciously adopted certain styles, tastes, hobbies, and mannerisms associated with other times and places than twenty-first-century New York, identifying themselves more with, say, Europe before World War I, or fin-de-siècle Paris, or the New York of the Gilded Age.  One man from this set whom I dated asked me seriously once whether I considered myself American (he didn’t, in spite of the fact that, like me, he was).

I do not mean to suggest that these men were homosexual.  As far as their actual sexual problems and proclivities went, I did not get close enough to any of them to be able to speak with any authority.  However, I began to believe that the one I got closest to had a problem with pornography based on one or two little hints he let drop, and also on the fact that, after we’d decided to be “just friends” and I got engaged to someone else, he emailed me some disturbing soft-porn images of an Eastern European dominatrix whom, he said, I resembled.  This man was employed in a field related to Catholic apologetics, and I'm not saying that to be a successful, or even a sincere, apologist, one must be free of dark sexual neuroses and addictions.  Only God knows what is in the hearts of any of us, including, as we have seen lately in the case of the disgraced Fr. Corapi, in the heart of the priest who is saying Mass, and in the hearts of those who appear to be the most holy.  Only God knows what snares they must outrun each and every day of their lives in order to escape falling into the hells that are peculiarly painful and horrible and familiar just to them.  But I am saying that the combination of qualities that I saw in this man -- a shrinking from true, essential masculinity, a way of being a man that in fact seemed gerry-built upon opposition to cultural standards of masculinity, a self-professed orthodox Catholicism veering towards Traditionalism, and some deep-seated sexual problems -- struck me as disturbingly emblematic of a certain kind of orthodox Catholic man.

In other parts of  what someone has called "Catholic Blogistan,"  the “sola skirtura” debate rages on.  This debate couldn’t be more preposterous, or a less compelling use of mental energy, to me personally, but my background is different from that of most of the people who frequent these particular Catholic areas of the interwebs. For some of the skirts-only enthusiasts, it's ostensibly a question of femininity.  For others, it's a question of women in pants committing some kind of sin against God and man by allowing the outline of their lower body to be seen, rather than inferred.  While these arguments are not interesting to me, however, the evidently torrid atmosphere from which they arise is.  I can't help but thinking that men who get hot and bothered about whether women wear pants are coming from a place that I can only call sexually troubled, and it reminds me of the sexual woundedness I encountered in the men of the orthodox Catholic subculture into which I ventured after my reversion.

I do not mean to suggest that I am not sexually wounded myself.  I am.  And, as I mentioned earlier, neither am I suggesting that sexually-wounded men cannot be effective apologists.  They can.  It is when they write or speak out of a poorly-hidden crisis in their own masculinity, which I believe is a reflection of a cultural crisis of essential masculinity, that I get worried for women.  Some orthodox Catholic men, on the one hand, appear to be trying to regain an impossible Edenic ideal of manhood and fatherhood that they may never have seen or experienced in their own lives.  Others, though perhaps unconsciously, appear to do everything possible to avoid the self-sacrifice called for in marriage and fatherhood by attempting to disassociate themselves from any accepted cultural norms of masculinity, and, in so doing, fail to present themselves to eligible women as viable potential husbands and fathers.

The same man who sent me the dominatrix pictures before my marriage confided in me his great fear -- a phobia, really -- of one day having a child with Down syndrome.  His revulsion for children with Down syndrome was so unusual that I wondered if it was, like his apparent attraction to S&M pornography, another part of his wounded masculinity, as if being unable to love the obviously disabled were somehow connected to preferring exaggerated images of unbalanced sexual power to the vulnerability (and, one could say, the shame) of a sexual relationship between normal, fallen, imperfect, broken husbands and wives.  (It has occurred to me that, as much as I may or may not resemble an Eastern European dominatrix, he would have been terribly disappointed and unhappy being married to me.  And if we had been married, and had happened to have disabled children, as I do with the man whom I did marry, I doubt he would have stuck around too long).

I have no answers to the problems of wounded masculinity and femininity in the Church.  We are all essentially broken, after all.  Nonetheless, when one of us is wounded in this fundamental way, and acts out of his woundedness, and does damage to others as a result of it, the entire Mystical Body of Christ suffers.  I hope and pray that priests and laypeople may work together to heal the wounded -- i.e., our brothers and sisters and ourselves -- which I think would go a long way towards healing relationships between Catholic men and women.

"We belong to a Communion of Sinners"

What kind of man would choose alcohol over family, work, and even his own health?  What kind of man is willing to admit that, at the very core of who he is, there is something profoundly distasteful and unnatural? . . . . A person exactly like you and me—not with some passing, analogous resemblance, when squinted at through a pious lens—but exactly like you and me.

I'm on light posting this month because of an intense level of busyness, but I wanted to make sure to link to Simcha Fisher's column at the National Catholic Register today.  It hits hard in exactly the right place.

Music and Memory, Part 17: Old Wine in New Wineskins

Does anyone really believe T.S. Eliot about April being the cruelest month, "mixing memory with desire"?  The very presence of desire in the mix would seem to me to add a dash of hope to April's ethos.  But in the early autumn, no such hope -- of rebirth, resurrection, renewal -- is reflected to us in nature; just desuetude, dénouement, and fading away.  Schumann wrote a stirring setting of a poem called "Herbstlied" -- song of autumn -- which goes, in translation:  "The tender summer leaves fall from the trees;/Life with its dreams decomposes into dust and ashes . . . " (If you would like to hear a sample of this marvelous duet, go here and search for "Herbstlied," where you will find the redoubtable Peter Schreier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at it for a few seconds; unfortunately, I couldn't find a free download).

I am preparing for a gig in Boston at the end of the year which will require me to sing the kind of virtuosic repertoire in which I used to specialize, but which I haven't sung in almost ten years.  In the past, I used to use an elaborate, time-consuming methodology to learn florid music and work it into my voice and kinesthetic memory, and I will have to drag it again out of my body, mind, and memory.  But ten years ago my life was so very different from what it is today, and I wonder if I will be able to discover a new methodology, one that allows the singer to integrate old music into the new person.

This repertoire meant something different to me back then; it was my tool, and my ability to sing it well was my secret charm, my magic weapon, my mojo.  If other girls seemed to have lives so much better and easier than mine, or better apartments, or prettier clothes, or fantastic boyfriends, or happy marriages, I would console myself by reminding myself that they couldn't do what I did.  In my heart of hearts, I believed that my ability to sing was the only thing I possessed, and that my way in the world would be carved out through its use.  I would protect myself, keep myself safe and warm and afloat, by my abilities as a singer.  I believed this so strongly that, during my first marriage, my singing, that totem, always held its shining place first in my heart, and I considered my voice teacher a fractionally more important person in my life than my husband.

But then again, everything had become associated in my mind at that time with everything else.  My singing was my mojo, it was all that I had; I felt that with particular keenness after my abortion, which was also the time I began studying with the very influential teacher who was the most important person to me.  I remember how, right after the abortion, I realized that everything in my life had gone too far, and that it now had to stop.  It was a sunny Sunday two days later, and I left my then-just-barely-sort-of-boyfriend's apartment wearing my pajamas, feeling like I had to get out of there or die.  But I was so tired that I didn't make it to the subway, only to the park about a block away, where I fell asleep on a bench for a couple of hours, before heading for home as the sun was just beginning to set.

If my life in all its excess had hit the wall then and there, I would have to chisel my way out.  The only tool for that, as I had always believed, was my singing.  I began studying with the master teacher A.B., just at this time of year, and things began to appear to have more coherence.  He understood what I was trying to do as an artist, and he saw that I didn't have the technique in hand to do it.  He gave me that technique, and he showed me how to release the stream of artistic ideas -- musical phrases, sentences, whole conversations; creativity in collaboration with the composer -- through my voice, my intellect, and my body.

Then M. asked me to come back and live with him.  I did.  It was all I'd ever really wanted, anyway.  We got married a year later, and, as I see it now, that marriage was doomed from the start.  I never forgave him for sending me for the abortion, and we never, ever discussed it.  As Leonard Cohen sang, "Should rumour of a shabby ending reach you/It was half my fault and half the atmosphere."

Around the time I was last performing the music I'm going to perform in Boston, my marriage to M. had recently ended.  I was desperately trying to make someone else love me and stay:  the kind but pathetic Stoner Carpenter, the well-intentioned but ultimately weak sober alcoholic.  And I was having the busiest few seasons that I've ever had in my career before or since; I had management, some small recognition, a lot of gigs, and the belief that more would come.

Since my life in the ensuing ten years has turned out so completely differently for so many reasons, I am wondering how to relearn my old music.  We know from the Gospel that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins, lest the latter burst.  But what happens when you put old wine into new skins?

Prayer and Memory: A Turtle in the Hole

A long time ago, when I walked across the street one lunch hour from my day job to Saint Peter's Church in lower Manhattan and sought absolution for my abortion (the anniversary of which was, incidentally, yesterday), the kindly priest in the confessional said to me, among other things, that you never have to say a formal prayer in your life.  This crossed my mind as I thought about how I would respond to Tertium Quid's meme, which is an invitation to discuss your three favorite prayers.  I am not an obvious person for this meme, since my prayers are generally overly-emotional and guided by the pathos and desperation which are so commonplace to me that they could very well be dodges (which thought makes me recall with some longing my Buddhist sister's cool injunction to me to "Tame your mind"; if only things could be that easy).

In fact, I keep a sort of random, rolling devotional practice going throughout the year.  I strike up novenas at odd times to whichever saint has caught my fancy at the moment, which may or may not be related to the proximity of that saint's feast day.  I'm currently saying the profoundly powerful novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (St. Edith Stein) suggested here.

But there are three prayers I say every day, or almost every day.  They are the prayer of Saint Francis, the prayer of Saint Ignatius Loyola, and the Divine Mercy chaplet.  The first two I say in the morning and also at night, if I remember, and the chaplet I try to say at three o'clock each day, though occasionally I will skip a day if I have an appointment that requires me to be with people outside of my family.  The days I do say it, it's usually on the fly.  Today, for instance, I said it while walking two miles in ninety-degree heat while pushing the stroller.

1. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
    where there is hatred, let me sow love;
    where there is injury, pardon:
    where there is doubt, faith ;
    where there is despair, hope
    where there is darkness, light
    where there is sadness, joy.

    O divine Master,
    grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
    to be understood, as to understand;
    to be loved, as to love;
    for it is in giving that we receive,
    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
    and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

I'm sorry if I've just tune-virused that saccharine hymn "Make Me A Channel of Your Peace" into your ear for the rest of the day ("To be loved as to love with all my sou-ou-oul . . . "  Okay!  Sorry!).  It's not clear whether this prayer actually was written by Saint Francis, but it's long been attributed to him.  And the saccharine hymn, which I have sung as a cantor countless times -- in French as well as in English! --  has militated somewhat against a more contemplative delving into the words.  But I turned to the prayer in earnest after reading Mary Karr's conversion-and-recovery memoir Lit (which some of us are reading and discussing over here).  Karr describes memorizing the prayer while still essentially an atheist, after a year of white-knuckling her recovery from alcoholism, and repeating it with her young son at bedtime each night. 

Saint Francis is himself treated with a sort of saccharine pseudo-reverence in our age, and not only by Catholics, but it's meet to recall that he was a penitent, and the founder of an order of explicitly-named penitents.  What Mary Karr, in recovery from alcoholism, found salutary about his prayer is that it is about dying to self, which is perhaps the hardest thing for an alcoholic to do, as well as a crucial component in his recovery.  I say this prayer daily now because my inclination is to grab all of the good stuff for myself and run away, and, though I pray for the Holy Spirit to transform my selfishness, arrogance, and self-regard into humility and charity, I need a mnemonic to help me think and act differently in order to prepare myself for that hoped-for transformation.

But the prayer describes what, in my better moments, I really do want for my life:  to bring joy to those who are sad, light to those in darkness, through the tools I have at hand -- the disciplined practice of beauty.  The prayer of Saint Francis is even a kind of boddhisattva vow -- my sister would be proud -- asking that others are given peace, love, and happiness before the supplicant himself.

2.  Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will.  All that I have and possess you have given to me; to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it entirely according to your will.  Give me your love and your grace, because these are enough for me.

This prayer is from Saint Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.  The particular hook for me is that the supplicant surrenders his memory to God.  Baudelaire wrote, "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans" -- I have more memories than if I had lived for a thousand years -- and I often feel this way myself.  Sometimes it seems that nostalgia is my drug of choice, and that, like all addictions, it creates a soft, padded place around me that cushions me from the jagged edges, the boredom, the loneliness, and the frustrations of everyday life.  Memory compels me, entrains me, and sometimes torments me, and I frequently ask myself, and God, what to do about it.  If something good can come out of these memories, I have bargained with the Almighty, then let me keep them; and, if nothing good can come of them, if their retention only causes me, and others, pain -- which I fear is often the case -- then please take them from me.

Memory, nonetheless, is the driving force of this blog, and I hope and pray that soemthing good will come from the storehouse of my memory, through this medium, for someone else.  The notion of giving one's memory to God and allowing Him to inform it, to infuse it, to direct it, brings with it the promise of release from memory's chains on the one hand, and service to the healing potential of memory on the other.  So I say these words each morning and night, even when to say them is essentially a lie.  Like the recovering addict, I keep "acting as if," as I wait for the transformation that can come only from the Holy Spirit.

3.  The Chaplet of Divine Mercy
On one of the coldest mornings I've ever lived through, in January of 2004, I took four subways to the ass-end of the Bronx to attend a "Day of Prayer and Healing"given by the Sisters of Life at the Convent of Our Lady of New York.  In the chapel, where we convened, was a huge image of the Divine Mercy, which I had never seen before, and I was wondering what the rays were doing emerging from that saccharine old image of Jesus from my grandmother's picture of the Sacred Heart.

I learned the Divine Mercy chaplet that day, and I made my confession to a wonderful CFR (Friars of the Franciscan Renewal) priest, Father Joseph Mary, who had been a restaurant chef and a major sinner before his own reversion to the Catholic faith.  He gave a talk in which he described how he had used to love rambling through the woods looking for snakes and turtles.  One day before his conversion, he told us penitent women, when he was pretty well in the grip of serious sin, he had the opportunity to go to a rural area for a holiday, and he went hiking through the fields.  He saw a hole in the ground of the kind that's used to drive a fence-post, and the goofy thought crossed his mind, "I wonder if there's a turtle in that hole?"  He looked down, and there was a turtle in that hole.  He scooped it out, and as he did so, an inner voice said to him, you are that turtle, and I AM lifting you out of your own hole.

I had a great time at confession, if that can seriously be said, because I so respected and felt such a fellow-feeling for Fr. Joseph Mary's sensibility.  For my penance, he gave me the Divine Mercy chaplet.  I had never said it before, and I said it at home that night. I thought it would take a long time, like the rosary, and was surprised when it was over so soon.

Am I supposed to say here that the prayer and my daily practice of it have changed my life?  They have, though not in ways that I can quantify.  But reminding yourself of the truth on a daily basis, even at times when lies surround you (and even at times when lies seem more comforting and appealing) has got to change you down to your very molecules.  The truth is that His mercy is God's greatest attribute, and, if my memory truly serves, may it serve to reveal to others, including to you, my readers, this truth.

I am tagging Melanie at The Wine-Dark Sea, Sally at Castle in the Sea, and Maclin at Light on Dark Water to continue this meme, should they wish to (hmmm, I see the recurrent water metaphor here -- must have to do with the ocean of mercy).

There and Back, Part 10: Four-Armed Gods and One-Eared Rabbits

Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my reversion to the Catholic faith, and I've always demurred, because the story is long, complicated, both mystical and prosaic, and, actually, probably kind of boring.  What is more, while most conversions share certain narrative elements -- I was going along one way, when something set me on a wholly different path; I was one man, and now I am another --  the thread that we follow in that transformation seems to be woven by God out of the material unique to the convert's psyche, so, while conversion is a potentially universal experience, it is also a highly individualistic one.  For these reasons -- the boredom factor, and the fact that my conversion was specific to me in all my neuroses and failures -- for a long time I thought it best not to discuss mine too extensively.  But it's been on my mind lately, and I have never written it out, so I will begin to do so here.

Because God uses us in all our weakness to accomplish His will, it should not be surprising that my conversion was set againt the backdrop of a romantic relationship.  Shortly after 9/11 and the end of my relationship with the Stoner-Carpenter Guy, I got a call from an old friend whom I hadn't seen for years; he wanted to take me out to lunch.  I began seeing more of him, and, though we'd never been romantically involved in the past, we slowly began dating.  This was, logically, too soon after the end of a previous relationship -- in fact, if I'm remembering it correctly, he phoned me within a day or two after Stoner-Carpenter was out of the picture.  But, as an inveterate non-planner, I've always been a take-what-comes kind of person, and I supposed that dating C. was the next thing on my agenda.

Besides that, I was extremely fond of him.  Although I was a non-planner, I secretly hoped that that our relationship would grow, and would end in marriage (secretly, because those in my set labored under Bohemian values, or at least under their aftermath, and feared that any talk of traditional things would send the men we loved packing; it usually did).  One night, however, C. seemed to dash my hopes, when he told me that he "didn't think" he wanted marriage and children, but he begged me not to end our relationship, suggesting that he might change his mind.

So I went on, non-planning but hoping, until one night when he phoned me from Las Vegas (I realize this sounds like a punchline), where he had gone for a bachelor party.  Suddenly his tone had changed.  We wanted different things, he asserted.  This should not have been very surprising to me; after all, if I were a man in Las Vegas for a bachelor party, I would probably find myself wanting things entirely different from a non-planning but hoping Bohemian girl in a shabby apartment in Washington Heights.  But he went further, and sought to explain himself by revealing that he was an alcoholic in early recovery.  I had already guessed this, since, in our earlier friendship, he had been a regular drinker, and now he no longer drank, and he now used language that was familiar to me as an alumna of Al-Anon.  Still, he told me, in the years that we were out of touch, he had been such a low-bottom alcoholic, and he was now so new in his recovery (about a year at that time) -- and, after all, though he didn't emphasize this point he was in LAS VEGAS at a BACHELOR PARTY -- that he apparently felt completely unequipped to continue in our relationship.

As someone used to crushing disappointment, I remained calm and collected, and suggested a moratorium on our relationship that we could revisit and re-examine after about six weeks' time.  But when I hung up the phone, I was fell apart.  By revealing his brokenness, C. had become a full-fledged one-eared rabbit to me.  I imagined that he needed me, a lover and defender of one-eared rabbits, to stand by his side; and, besides, by this time, I loved him quite deeply.

But it wasn't just the expected breakup desolation I was feeling after the phone call.  Many post-abortive women talk about "abortion triggers," events, symbols, or sensory phenomena that bring the traumatic memories of their abortions flooding back.  Someone wise once told me that, while a man's greatest fear is that his wife (or his Bohemian girl, or whoever else happens to be nearby) will wake up one day and realize that he's the fraud he secretly believes himself to be, a woman's greatest fear is abandonment.  For some reason, the abandonment by C., undertaken long-distance via phone call from Vegas, brought the horror and grief of my abortion flooding back.  I sat in the chair in my bedroom and cried for two hours.  Then I called my mother, to whom I had almost never turned for emotional support, even during my divorce, and told her that, in spite of the fact that I'd been to confession and been absolved for the sin of abortion, I didn't feel absolved.  She told me simply to ask God to forgive me in Jesus' name.  So, when I got off the phone, I knelt down on the floor in tears and did.  And I felt as though the weight of that sin were being lifted from me in a physical, tangible way; I could almost see this process happening.  That was it.  That was the moment of my conversion.

I'd spent the previous few years hammering together my own syncretic religion out of various elements that were in vogue around me -- mantras, gurus, tarot cards, meditation -- and I had a long, narrow table I'd gotten at an apartment sale that I used as a meditation altar of sorts.  I had set all kinds of little statues and images upon it -- not only the Sacred Heart and Our Lady, but also statuettes of the Hindu gods Shiva and Kali; my mother used to come over and say, accusingly, "I see a lot of strange gods here."  In the moments after my conversion, it occurred to me that, because Christ had given me the gift of forgiveness, it was up to me to meet him halfway by pledging my allegiance to Him.  So I gathered up all my pagan paraphernalia and dumped it in Fort Tryon Park (I did not yet have the faith or the discipline to just toss it in the garbage chute, and I felt a little sentimental about those little statues).  I went to see a priest in my parish for absolution -- it had been years since my last confession -- and told him, among many other things, about the "strange gods."  He was a saintly Franciscan missionary, and he said, in his gentle way, "The eastern religions have much in the way of beauty to offer, and even some truth; but they don't" -- indicating the crucifix on the wall -- "have this."  I enrolled in RCIA classes to prepare for Confirmation (a sacrament I hadn't received in adolescence, because a priest in my family's parish had said it was "a sacrament in search of a meaning," and my parents went with that).

Ironically, C. and I resumed our relationship after the self-imposed post-Vegas moratorium had expired.  I started in my doctoral program that fall, and would spend my days walking from work to the university and back again, then going home on the subway in the evenings and buying a solitary lamb chop or chicken breast at the neighborhood market for my supper.  On Wednesday nights, I would walk in the dark to the church in a particularly drug-scarred section of my neighborhood where Confirmation preparation classes took place.  They were taught by a nun, who informed us, among other things, that the miracle of the loaves and fishes had been brought about by everyone having something in his pocket and sharing all around, which was the "real" miracle.  My classmates were all young Dominicans in their teens and twenties, most of whom spent the class texting on their cell phones or with their heads down on their desks -- a blessing when you think of it, because their ears were closed to heresy.  Then I would see C. on the weekends.  We would go to Mass together.  I went to an A.A. meeting with him on the anniversary of his sobriety.  I loved him more and more.

It was not to last, however.  He moved across the country to take a new job, and didn't think he had it in him to pursue a long-distance relationship.  As a non-planner but an inveterate hoper, I was devastated afresh.  I'd been knitting him a sweater that was half-finished, and now I worked on it furiously, thinking on the one hand that I needed to complete it and get it out of my life, and on the other that in those thousands of stitches, there might be a mystical knot that would tie him to me (the real absurdity lay in the fact that he had moved to a warm climate where he would never need to wear it, but perhaps that was a metaphor for our whole relationship).  In my graduate seminars, I would keep my head bent over my notebooks so that no one else sitting around the table would see that I was crying.  I would go to the little Adoration chapel at my parish church and cry, praying that C. would come back, or that at least God would show me what He wanted me to do and where He wanted me to go.  At the same time, I was busier than I'd ever been as a performer, and my scholarly work was also starting to attract some attention; I'd begun giving papers and lecture-recitals at important international conferences.   I was a non-planner but a hoper, and I knew that, in the face of bitter failure and cruel disappointment, there was nothing else to do but to keep going.

I was confirmed that fall, taking the name Cecilia, and I met my husband the following week.

In the beginning of my conversion, I received a great deal of consolation.  God is generous to those who come running -- or, more accurately, crawling -- back to Him, and gives them many graces.  Now, however, I'm just like anyone else -- lazy, proud, grumbling, prone to discouragement and despair, slogging through the trenches of faith and mostly falling.

When I think of my conversion, it seems to me that it could only have happened in New York, in that shabby apartment in Washington Heights; so imbued was it with the ethos of the life that I'd cobbled together there.  But then, it could probably have happened in Vegas, too, or anywhere else, since God shows us His love for us, in all our falling and failing, wherever we are, and in fact is doing it all the time, even if we can't see it in places that have none of the beauty and charm of my old home town.  But we can't live forever in the beautiful moment of conversion.  We have to keep going, wherever we are.  As Richard Wilbur wrote, love calls us to the things of this world, and that holds true wherever in our exile we might be -- even in Vegas.

Brother of the Stranger

Back in New York, I was a graduate student mom, and my husband was an Irish guy who would go down the corner to the pub, which happened also to have been the site of both our wedding reception and our son's baptism party.  In the small city in northern Appalachia where we now live, my husband is a man in a visible position, and I am . . . the wife of a man in a visible position.  It took us a while to figure this out.  It's hard to overestimate the anonymity of New York City, where you could have easily found ten thousand people almost exactly like each of us (but that anonymity is the reason that so many people decamp for New York from depressed post-industrial towns just like this one, anyway).

When we arrived here, my husband sought in vain for a pub like any of the couple of dozen back in our old neighborhood, but none appeared.  As for me, coming to a place that required driving skills when I had none gave me a unique perspective into our town, one that I have come to believe the town's boosters have missed entirely.  I walked everywhere, just like in New York, and also took buses and cabs; but it was nothing like walking and taking buses and cabs in New York, which are done by everybody.  In a place like this, cabs (as well as buses and hoofing it) are for those who are too poor to own cars, which, in a place like this, means very poor indeed.  So, in spite of the fact that I am something I never dreamt of being -- a prominent man's small-town wife -- I have come to see some things in our new town from the perspective of the local poor, and what I see has been disturbing to me.

New York is full of poor people, too, but -- or at least so it now seems to me -- the poverty in other places in America, if this place is any gauge, is its own special misery.  Here, there is isolation, alienation, and a tremendous divide between the haves and have-nots in ways that just don't exist in New York, because in New York, whatever people may think, there is a high level of equity in transportation access -- though the price of subway fare recently went up to $2.25, you can still traverse the entire length of the city, going the thirty or so miles from the northern Bronx to Coney Island, or from the Hudson River piers out to Kennedy Airport, for one swipe of a Metrocard, any time of the night or day -- which allows you to literally rub shoulders with everyone else in the city.  Here, on the other hand, those who have cars are in them all the time, and don't have to walk to the supermarket with a folding push-cart or take cabs home from Wal-Mart; in fact, they don't shop at Wal-Mart at all.  In New York, there is a sense of energy, ambition, and life surging all around, wherever you are.  In New York, there are the bad schools you've heard about, and they are in poor neighborhods; but under No Child Left Behind, the most motivated parents in poor neighborhoods can and do transfer their children to the better schools out-of-district.  In New York, everyone who can works; even welfare recipients work in the black market economy, and New York is full of illegal immigrants who live in poverty and squalor and yet work a hundred hours a week and send huge sums of money home.  My friend N., for example, would certainly qualify as poor by any American standard.  She came from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic father and a developmentally disabled mother, didn't make it through the equivalent of the eighth grade, settled in New York illegally, is a single, unwed mother, and lives in a shelter; but she works hard at her illegal job in the salon, and has the ambition, drive, and intelligence to survive through situation after situation that would have made many a lesser person (myself included) crumble in despair.

Here, on the other hand, in my perambulations through the post-industrial landscape, I see the empty husks of many souls who seem to have been felled by despair, and by the kind of multi-generational poverty, out-of-wedlock childbearing, drugs, violence (domestic and otherwise), and welfare dependency that are supposed to be the hallmarks of the ethnic urban underclass, but seem even more entrenched in white semi-rural areas like this one.  And so I walk around; I go swimming in summer at the public park where the poor, the drug-dependent, and the tattooed take their children; I take the bus to the library, a beautiful structure in the midst of crumbling tenements and abandoned shopfronts, where a little black girl once asked me, incredulous, "Don't you have a car?" when she saw me getting my son into his stroller for the walk back to the bus stop; and occasionally I even take a cab home from Wal-Mart.  I see very young women with many children by different fathers, judging at least by the children's varying skin shades, and mouths full of stumps instead of teeth, which I suppose is a symptom of meth addiction.  I see little boys at the playground with neck tattoos just like their fathers'.  I see many people who stare at me with the same mixture of suspicion and hostility I met thousands of times when riding the subway through the South Bronx or through pre-gentrification Bedford-Stuyvesant.  I suppose I'm as strange to my fellow citizens as they are to me, though I hope I'm not as unsettling to them as they are to me.

However, we are now in the process of adopting a child from our community.  The child will, most likely, come from one of the broken families of the very poor among whom I have walked like a strange, observing shadow during the past year.  As the small-town wife of a prominent man and the prominent man himself, we are in a rather unique position -- a position we never dreamt of being in back when we were a grad-student mom and an Irish guy who went down to the pub in the Bronx -- to open our home and our hearts to children who might be called the children of despair, and we very much want to do so (and after our string of miscarriages, it's not at all certain that we will be able to have more children on the natch).

While my family of origin has long been committed -- some in thought, some in action -- to ameliorating the lives of the poor, if not to overthrowing the structures that they believed made people poor to begin with -- the adoption will connect us in a mysterious way to the lives of the poor in our community, the lives that I find so unsettling.  We feel called to parenting through adoption, and to welcoming the stranger in this way, and recognize that the threads of grace that bind us to one another, not only as parents and children, but also as neighbors, brothers, and fellow citizens, can be impossible for the human mind to entangle.  Please pray for us.

As Rabindranath Tagore wrote:

Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.

(Above:  my town.)

Franny, Zooey, Being, and Nakedness

Before my sister became a committed Buddhist, she was an actress.  In fact, not unlike the eponymous heroine in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, she was an exceptionally gifted actress, who nonetheless, like Franny, felt a searing spiritual lack at the heart of her life and craft.  In Salinger's novel, Franny is dissuaded by the ministrations of her wised-up brother from "wandering off into some goddam desert with a burning cross in her hands"; Zooey convinces her that she need not integrate her heartbeat with hesychasm in order to live an authentic life, but will better serve God and her fellow man, in whom she is to see Christ Himself, by returning to college and her artistic discipline.  My sister, on the other hand, in her own painful search for authenticity, alighted on an austere Tibetan Buddhist practice, abandoned her profession because, she claimed, she had only entered it to "get attention," and began moving all over the country with the man she would marry and working in various jobs to support him while he "took time off" to meditate.  She now teaches meditation to beginning practitioners in her Buddhist sect (in this sect, one has to shell out a lot of money to receive the higher, apparently secret teachings that enable one to work as a meditation instructor), and has gained some attention for her articles on using the everyday frustrations of parenting as tools toward enlightenment.

Back when my sister was a struggling actress, there was a period during which she, along with many other actors I knew working Off-Off-Broadway, got a string of parts in plays that featured a guy getting totally naked.  Apparently there was some sort of trend in early-millenial theater theory that a guy getting naked onsage was a good way to further a play's dramatic action or to salvage a foundering plot.  I went to a number of diverse plays by various playwrights in which a guy got naked, and would sit in the darkened house in a strange state of conflicting emotions that included both admiration for the naked actors' courage and heartfelt, head-hanging empathy for all those who had to share the stage with them.

To one of these cringeworthy naked-guy spectacles I once brought a boyfriend of recent vintage, and after the show we went out to eat at a nearby diner with my sister and a childhood friend.  My sister, our friend W., and I were giddy in the rush that follows any performance, even an embarrassing one.  We all ordered grilled-cheese sandwiches.  When it came time for Stoner-Carpenter Guy to order, however, he handed the menu back to the waitress with an air of noble renunciation, and said loftily, "Nothing for me."  Knowing he was a vegetarian, I helpfully suggested dishes like quiche or salad that would not be cooked, as our grilled-cheese sandwiches would, on a grill tainted with runoff from bacon cheeseburgers.  But as Stoner-Carpenter's demurrals became more insistent and began to take on an air of condescension, it occurred to me that he regarded us grilled-cheese eaters as persons to be pitied.  We thought nothing of the ethical contamination of our foodstuffs; indeed, we were happily munching away on cheese -- made with rennet, the lining of a cow's stomach -- pressed between packaged slices of non-whole-grain bread, all cooked together in animal fat.  While Stoner-Carpenter sipped his water, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and cried.  It seemed to me that Stoner-Carpenter saw through me to the deep, dark truth within:  I was morally deformed, a lesser human, a fraud.  I had lost his love through my unethical eating, and this loss, as well as the fiasco the night was turning into, was clearly my own fault.  Our relationship would go on like this for two more years.

I thought of these things today, while buying coffee at a gas station during a road trip with my husband.  The gas station-convenience store milieu suddenly called up from my memory another road trip, taken with Stoner-Carpenter Guy one winter long ago, during which, when we got out at a truck stop somewhere in Pennsylvania, he ordered soup to go and requested, to the bemusement of the cashier, that it be packaged in a soda cup rather than in a styrofoam bowl (styrofoam being, of course, lethally toxic).  And then, from these memories on to the essential questions:  How do we live?  How do we hew to, and honor, the truth?  How are we to be authentic?

The practice of hesychasm, though it suggests a gradual winnowing away of everything in the seeker that is false and not conformed to Christ, turned out not to be the appropriate path for Salinger's Franny; as to my sister, I have my doubts that an esoteric spiritual practice rooted in a foreign culture can possibly lead to the capital-T truth (and, of course, as a Catholic I believe Buddhism is, if not a false path, at least an incomplete one).  As for Stoner-Carpenter Guy, not long after the grilled-cheese incident I came upon him, for all his public show of eating only bread at a dinner party I was giving, surreptitiously wolfing down bowls of bouillabaisse in a corner of the kitchen.  But it's a tricky thing to make food your god, and especially so if you believe that eating confers moral status upon the eater, or, conversely, strips it from him (and that illicit drug-taking has no similar effect upon the user).

I remain filled with a kind of awed respect for all those actors who gamely got completely naked in those Off-Off-Broadway shows years ago.  If only it were as easy for the rest of us to humble ourselves right down to nothingness like that, to strip off all that is non-essential, and to open ourselves completely, in the terrifying vulnerability of our pitiful nakedness, to God.

There and Back, Part 7: I Got a Rock

Back when I was perpetually confused and miserable from dealing with the capricious vagaries of a primary relationship with a drug addict, a friend suggested I start attending Al-Anon meetings, which I did with great fervor up until my reversion back to the Catholic faith. After that, for some reason, "the rooms," as devotees call the church basements and community centers where Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are generally held, lost their allure for me. I made some friends in Al-Anon, but those friendships fell casualty to the enormous changes in my life through my conversion and my marriage three years later. I broke off with my closest Al-Anon friend during my most recent miscarriage, but that's a more complicated story that I'll tell another time.

In retrospect, I know that what I was searching for in those rooms was some formula or magic spell to make my boyfriend want to stay with me, love me, and marry me, but I believed at the time that I was treading a spiritual path towards the masterful ability to love people with detachment. No one came out and mentioned that you have to detach when you love an addict, or your heart will be broken over and over in a way that can only be described as abusive. The best advice anyone could have given me at the time, of course, would have been to break up with A., but no one did, and if anyone had, I probably would have ignored it. I was desperately afraid to be alone. My first marriage had just ended, and I was consumed by grief and guilt, but I thought one had to simply make the best of things and move on, and I assumed that, because A. was a sort of latter-day hippie, he would simply become my husband by default if not by intention, as I imagined was the way with hippies. And that was good enough for me.

One day, at my favorite meeting, which was held on Saturdays in an Episcopalian Church on the Upper West Side and was attended by lots of writers, artists, and actors, it occurred to me that all the talk of God in "the rooms" was just a consolation prize for me. I didn't really want God. I wanted a man. I wanted true, mad, deep, everlasting love. Since I couldn't have that at the moment, I was turning with a huge sigh of resignation to "the God of my understanding." My Al-Anon friends had their "God boxes," in which they placed scraps of paper on which they'd written their supplications, and I tried this too, but, when I read them over, I saw that the few requests that were not for A. to stay were all for God's forgiveness for my many sins. I began to realize that no matter how sympathetic my Al-Anon friends were to my plight, and however much they suffered in ther own bad circumstances, they neither sought to change their own nor advised their friends and those they sponsored to change theirs. There was an awful sense sameness, and sadness, about the enterprise of learning to "detach with love" from those with whom one's life and future were intertwined.

I have to admit that I still often think of God as a consolation prize. Quite often I want something else -- something easier, sweeter, more apparently beautiful, and certainly more fun -- and I get God instead. I feel like Charlie Brown on Halloween, in his disastrous costume, reaching into his trick-or-treat bag and realizing, with both exasperated resignation and recognition, that he got a rock.

But a Turkish woman I met once shared a Turkish proverb with me: "God takes the sugar, but leaves the honey." And God has, after all, promised that He will give us honey out of that rock.

There and Back, Part 4: Reading the Entrails

For many years in New York City, I lived in a neighborhood that was chockablock with classical musicians. There were four opera singers, for instance, in my building alone (one was my upstairs neighbor, with whom I tried to coordinate our practice schedules), and scores more lived up and down the street and on the surrounding blocks. There were also many instrumentalists, composers, and conductors around. Another neighbor, two flights up in my building, was a violinist who was also a colleague in my doctoral program; and to rehearse for the many concert gigs I had in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I simply walked around the corner to my recital pianist's apartment. It wasn't until later that the neighborhood became hip; a high density of classical musicians living in an area for cheap rent and proximity to the music schools, concert venues, and teachers of the West Side does decidedly little for a neighborhood's hipness, since classical musicians are themselves mostly not hip at all. But there was a palpable sense of artistic comradeship and shared purpose in the community. At rush hour, one squeezed into seats next to fellow-travelers studying Schirmer opera scores as they listened to Discmans on their way to temporary office jobs, and it wasn't unusual, when walking down the street on warm days, to hear the sounds of many voices and instruments practicing through the open windows of apartment buildings.

I became close friends with one of my singer neighbors, N., a beautiful and gifted soprano who lived in my building. Also a wind player, she had earned degrees in both opera and oboe at prestigious conservatories. We were constantly in and out of each other's apartments. She would drop in on Sunday nights, and I would make us tea while we had deep heart-to-heart talks, mostly about men and heartbreak, which were as constant in our conversation as they were inevitable in our lives. In spite of her beauty, intelligence, and tremendous drive, N. had no better luck than I at holding onto romantic relationships. This phenomenon was an accepted hazard among young women of our set, class, and time. Although we longed for what we hardly dared admit were husbands, we were close to giving up. The men of our set simply had few compelling reasons to marry, and many compelling reasons not to.

N.'s father had been a rage-filled alcoholic, as well as a professional pornographer. Like me, she dabbled in occult practices -- astrology for her, tarot cards for me -- that were passed off as innocent, and that gave us some sense that we could understand and control our lives. I remember the last time I read tarot cards, a practice I had vowed to discontinue after being confirmed in 2003, was for N. I reluctantly agreed on this occasion, shortly after Confirmantion, as she was deeply troubled and believed that seeing tarot pictures laid out might give her some sort of road map through her sorrow. I felt a physical chill while peering at her cards, and had to put on a sweater.

In 1989, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation. This document warns that, while some practices, even Christian ones, "automatically produce a feeling of quiet . . . [and] perhaps even phenomena of light and warmth, which resemble spiritual well-being [to] take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life." Cardinal Ratzinger goes further to warn:

Giving [these phenomena] a symbolic significance typical of the mystical experience, when the moral condition of the person concerned does not correspond to such an experience, would represent a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead ot psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations.

This was the problem for N. and me. We sincerely wanted to know God better, to know His will for us, to know His love for us, and to do the right thing. But we simply didn't know how. We thought we could draw down His wisdom into our own lives by the practice of gnosis, special knowledge. We tried to read the entrails, but we had no faith. In fact, it was very hard for us to have faith in the midst of lives that were chaotic at best (by the grace of God, I was able, eventually, to find my faith).

In the months before I moved out of the building to get married, N. was in a crash-and-burn relationship of a whole new dimension. She had fallen in love with M., a construction worker and part-time model, a devastatingly handsome man who was also a hopeless drug addict and alcoholic. She tried to keep him sober, but both N. and M. (who was also attracted to gnosticism) held themselves aloof from the poor souls who were forced through hitting rock-bottom to go to twelve-step meetings with non-gorgeous losers in moldy church basements. In a last-ditch effort, they went on a trip to South America, where, under the supervision of a tribal shaman, they ingested hallucinogenic herbs and had visionary experiences that they hoped would not only cure him of his addiction, but would also reveal the paths that they were to take in the future.

When they got back to New York, they were full of purpose. But soon M. was using again and N. was in despair. The final straw was when he called her to his side while he sat up all night freebasing cocaine, and then sent her out for beer in the morning when the bodegas opened so he could come down. After that horrible night she didn't see him for weeks, but then ran into him on the street one day, where he revelaed that he was getting married to a single mother of his acquaintance. They were expecting a child.

I wonder now if occult practices, even if undertaken innocently, inevitably result in tremendous moral disorder in the lives of the practitioners.

There and Back, Part 3: If I Were A Carpenter

I have never been the kind of person I've always found myself surrounded by, that is, the kind of person who has the assurance of certainty, whether it be in faith, order, justice, morality, or anything else. Those assured types who've surrounded me have not, I later discovered, always been right about what they believed, but their certainty was often enough to make me want to cling to them and follow them around in a chaotic world that made little sense to me. In this way, I stumbled and fell.

A marriage ending is often a tragedy. Although I'm married to a great man now, I will always feel marked by the failure of my first marriage. My grief over that loss, like my grief over other losses I've suffered, will not be resolved in this world. Like many people, I simply have to shoulder up my heart (to mix metaphors rather egregiously), even though it be battered by now into a completely unrecognizable shape, and go on giving thanks to God. The strangeness of my life, which is a sort of post-something-or-other kind of life that I am guessing is particular to converts or reverts, has nothing to do with the certainty of the people who surround me. It's nagging, haunted, mysterious, and wholly uncertain, and sometimes I feel like I speak a different language from those around me.

After my first marriage ended, I had a few relationships about which I was deeply serious and which I hoped would culminate in marriage, but which for various reasons did not. One was with a man who was a gifted crafstman, a carpenter who customized antique bars gleaned from old hotels and restaurants for private and business customers. He was sweet, shy and boyish, and not at all forthcoming about his life, so it took me a long time of piecing things together to get to know him well. By the time I had done so, I realized that he was hopelessly addicted to pot, and that he might have fathered the youngest child of a married couple with whom he was close friends. By that time, though, I was like one of the hapless, well-intentioned Jewish supporters of Bill Clinton that Jackie Mason once joked about. If Clinton came into this hall and shot a man dead right in front of you, he said to his Broadway audience, you would just shrug and say, "Everyone has to die sometime."

But A. had certainty. He was a committed vegan, as I found out the only time I gave a dinner party during our relationship, when I made bouillabaisse and he proudly declined to eat anything but bread (after the guests left, however, he furtively wolfed down a couple of bowls, which stymied me about his commitment to veganism, and should have stymied me even more, by inference, about his commitment to anything). He railed against the internal combustion engine, and yet he owned a vintage car that he reluctantly loved. His craftsmanship was of a very high order, and yet he ended up abandoning his business because of his certainty that making custom bars for rich people was immoral, his repulsion having to do both with wealth and with alcohol. And yet, after leaving his business, he went on to work sixteen-hour days at a pedicab stand in lower Manhattan without pay. I couldn't understand it, until I figured out that they were paying him in pot.

He pursued me relentlessly at first, and, after I succumbed, spent two years trying to convince me that he didn't want a relationship. He told me his fantasy was of making a rough journey on foot through the wintry countryside at night and finding a little house with a light on and me inside, but it took me a while to understand that my function in this fantasy was to provide temporary respite before he lit out again. His family pressured him to marry me. I was miserable. I tried to become the hippie chick that I thought he wanted me to be. Around this time I ran into an acquaintance who asked bluntly, "What happened to you? You used to be so pretty."

Once a month, A. would come over to my apartment and spend the night transferring his money around via various automated telephone calls in order to avoid complete financial ruin. I later found out he'd applied for a credit card using my address (though not my identity, luckily) and soon maxed it out. After we broke up, he told me that his roommate had been putting off the IRS, who were looking for A., at the door. He also abandoned his beloved vintage car, taking the plates off and leaving it in a parking lot, because he couldn't afford the insurance; the last I heard, a homeless man was sleeping in it.

The last time I saw A. was in 2005, several years after our relationship ended. I was looking out the window of a bus going up Madison Avenue, and there he was right below me, gesturing dramatically in a right-hand turn signal from the seat of his pedicab as he made off down a side street. I was newly married and pregnant. I felt like I had dodged a particularly scary bullet.