A Short Testament

Whatever harm I may have done

In all my life in all your wide creation

 If I cannot repair it

I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded

The poor the deaf the lonely and the old

Whom I have roughly dismissed

As if I were not one of them.

Where I have wronged them by it

And cannot make amends

I ask you

To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,

Or lives of strangers far or near

That I've destroyed in blind complicity,

And if I cannot find them

Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over

And all your unimaginable promises

Burst into song on death's bare branches.

"A Short Testament" by Anne Porter, from Living Things. © Zoland Books.

(H/T:  Karen Edmisten)

Ash Wednesday: "Deeply Bowed Down and Full of Remorse"

The aria "Tief gebückt und voller Reue," from Bach's Cantata BWV 199, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (My Heart Swims in Blood), sung by mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.

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).

If I Forget Thee Jerusalem

By the rivers of Babylon
there we sat and wept,
remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there
we hung up our harps.

For it was there that they asked us,
our captors, for songs,
our oppressors, for joy.
"Sing to us," they said,
"one of Zion's songs."

O how could we sing
the song of the Lord
on alien soil?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!

O let my tongue
cleave to my mouth
if I remember you not,
if I prize not Jerusalem
above all my joys!*

*Alternately translated as:  "May I never be able to play the harp again if forget you, Jerusalem!/May I never be able to sing again if I do not remember you,/if I do not think of you as my greatest joy!"

One of the Gayest at Montmartre

Eugénia Fenoglio was born in 1866 in Toulon, France.  Her father, an alcoholic tailor, battered his wife, who often fled with the children to seek shelter with relatives.   The day came that her mother left her abusive husband for good, but not long after, he sought the family at their new residence and killed his wife and then himself in front of their daughter.

As a child, Eugénia had loved theatrics, and had written, directed, acted in, and even designed the sets for plays she staged with her friends.  Not long after her parents' murder-suicide, she made her way to the capitol, where, encouraged by a lover, she tried her luck on the stage and met with phenomenal success there.  She took the name Ève Lavallière, after a mistress of Louis XIV who, incidentally, had become a penitent and had died a Carmelite nun.

According to CatholicIreland.net:

"The sudden death of one of the leading actresses of the theatre became the opportunity for Ève and she did not disappoint. Her voice was exceptional and she was able to use it to convey every sort of emotion - from silence to violence, from authority to disgust.

"Listening to Ève conveyed the audience into the very heart of the tragedy or comedy . . . she was playing. Even the great contemporary actress, Sarah Bernhardt, told her, 'What you do is innate: you create - you do not copy the characters. You give birth to them from within yourself. It is very beautiful.'"

La Lavallière became the most popular and successful actress-singer of the Belle Époque.  She was fabulously wealthy and a critical success.  At the same time, her personal life grew more and more chaotic and disorderly.  Before achieving fame onstage, Ève had supported herself as a Parisian courtesan; after, she was the mistress at one time or another of an assortment of prominent men, and bore a child out of wedlock -- a daughter, who would cause her mother great despair as an adult by living openly in a lesbian relationship.

During the First World War, on holiday in a small village while preparing for a tour of the United States with the Théatre des Variétés, Lavallière experienced a dramatic conversion after meeting a local priest and mentioning to him lightly that she had sold her soul to the devil in order to maintain her youth.  The priest, at first outraged, lent her a book about St. Mary Magdalene, which she read in a state of gradual awakening to the reality of her life of sin, and in a spirit of deepening penitence.  She cancelled her participation in the American tour and retreated to the countryside with her dresser from the theater, Leona, who accompanied her conversion with every step.  Lavallière applied for entrance as a Carmelite postulant, but was denied on account of her poor health (and perhaps too because her fame both as an actress and as a libertine had penetrated even into the cloister of the Carmel).  Instead she became a Franciscan tertiary, and after an attempt at missionary work in Tunisia, spent the rest of her life in solitary prayer and penance.

Some years after Lavallière's abrupt renunciation of the stage, a French reporter managed to track her down.  The New York Times published a story about this encounter in 1921:  "Once talk of Paris, Actress is Recluse," proclaimed the headline. "One of the Gayest in Montmartre . . . Lives Apart from the World Except for Village Poor."  The article, which can be downloaded here, mentions that the reporter asked Lavallière's maid if the former actress "ever [thought] or [talked] about the past." 

"Never," was the maid's answer.  "When she gets letters from her old friends she sometimes smiles, for she has no bitterness about the past, but she doesn't think about it.  She thinks only of the present and the future." 

I first learned of Ève Lavallière five years ago, while doing my dissertation research on music and penitence.  Raïssa Maritain had written of her friend that, after her conversion, Lavallière's eyes were always wet with the tears of contrition.  I remember reading at the time that Pope John Paul II had beatified her, but have not been able to confirm this on the web.  Nonetheless, I have decided to start a home-made novena to her in advance of the anniversary of her death, July 10.  I am closing each day with a prayer written by Lavallière herself: 

Oh my beloved Master, by Thy hands nailed to the Cross, I beseech Thee to wipe away all of the sins committed by my criminal hands.  My sweet Jesus, by the painful fatigue endured by Thy blessed feet, by the divine wounds They suffered when They were pierced, wipe away the filth left by my guilty feet.  Finally, Oh my Master, Oh my Creator, Oh my Savior, by the dignity and innocence of Thy life, by the holiness and purity which characterized it, wash away all of the stains of my impure life.  May that abominable life exist no more in me, may the ardor of Thy love hold me entirely, for Thou art, Oh my King, the sole refuge of my soul; grant that I may be unceasingly consumed with the ardor of Thy charity.  Give me, my Redeemer, above all, Holy Humility. 

For more on Lavallière, go here. 

Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago, right around this time, I became pregnant with my first, lost child.

My whole world was M. then; all I wanted was for him to love me; I suppose that I believed somehow that the pregnancy would force his hand, would compel his love.  What I did not know was that the sacrifice of our child -- and his regret, and the way that we were now inexricably linked to each other because of that grim martyrdom -- was the thing that would finally inspire his love.

By then, however, it was too late.  I still loved him, but I had become bitter and cynical.  I married him because I felt -- we both felt, I'm sure -- that this was the one way to set right what we had made so wrong (though I can't really know for sure what he felt, because, after the abortion, we never spoke of it).  So I married M.  And I threw myself into my singing.  I have never met anyone who worked as hard as I did to become a good artist, who studied his craft from as many aspects, who strove to become an authority on the history and practice of his discipline the way I did.  (And I now know that, later on, when I taught college, I was much too demanding of my students; since this kind of striving, I believed, was the only thing that could save me, it was surely the only thing that could save them, all of whom were from humble backgrounds, all of whom were searching for the divine spark of beauty in their own hardscrabble lives, too).

I loved what I was doing as a singer -- all I ever wanted was to create something beautiful that would move people -- but, more importantly, it gave order to my life, it kept me from flying off into oblivion;  in short, it kept me from hitting bottom.  I trusted nothing and no one; I believed that all I had to hold onto in my life was my singing; I truly believed that singing would create a new, alternate reality for me, a realm in which the emptiness was filled, and in which I not only had power and agency, but also in which I became essentially good by virtue of the qualities I had developed as a musician.

I suppose it is no coincidence that I walked away from my opera career at the same time that I jettisoned my first marriage.  Too much had been predicated upon my first poor, lost child.

In the ensuing years, I have sometimes sought, sometimes resisted, the contraction of my life into a shape and a form more constrained than the expansive life I once imagined for myself, and which I have pursued at great cost.  I am both an accustomed and a reluctant penitent; as much as penitence has become a habitual stance -- to the bemusement of those who know me -- I would so much rather have all the nice, easy, kind, fun, pretty things in life instead.

My only prayer, as always, is that God will use the rest of my life for something good; that He will bring beauty and healing for others out of the abyss of my crimes and my despair.  Once, when I was very ill, I had a feverish hallucination of the Blessed Virgin standing at the foot of my bed; she showed me scenes from my life, little lozenge-shaped dioramas in her hands in which I relived all my misdeeds.  Then, as I lay there and watched, she turned each of the lozenges around, and they became roses, which she scattered from her hands.  Readers and friends, please pray for me too.

Penitence and "Pushkin"

\

 Today would have been the eightieth birthday of Jacques Fesch, the last man in France to be put to death by the guillotine, for the murder of a police officer.  His conversion while in prison awaiting his sentence was so complete that his cause for beatification was officially opened in 1993.  It seems fitting to remember him on Holy Saturday, the day after the Good Thief, Saint Dismas, arrived at his own place in paradise.  May Jacques Fesch pray for us sinners, and may he be numbered among the saints of the Church.

On another note, I absolutely loved this poem on today's Writer's Almanac. which reminded me of a beloved old cat I used to have:

Pushkin
The old cat sleeps
in the newly arrived sun. One more spring
has come his way
dropping a solar bath
on failing kidneys, old cat bones.
I check for the rise and fall of breath.

Once he stalked hares
across the yard, tracked down
chicken hearts with split-lentil eyes.
Fearless, disinterested, a poseur, a demideity.
He and the dog are strangers still
after years of eating side by side.

I remember times of wailing
into my couch, alone
and utterly baffled by life,
when suddenly a cat
would be sitting on my head.

Last week I pulled him snarling
from under a chair in Dr. Bacon's office,
held him while she examined his dull coat,
felt his ribs. Pressed where it hurt.
Eight pounds of fur and bone and mad as hell
but "He's certainly less anxious in your lap,"
she murmured, astonishing me.
I had no idea. Old cat, old friend,
have I reached some place inside,
added to your life
as you have to mine?

-- Marjorie Kowalski Cole 

Apostola Apostolorum

 From the blog Laodicea:  a compelling argument for the Western conflation of four figures -- the sinful woman who washes Jesus' feet with her tears in a dramatic act of penitence in Luke 7:37-50; another unnamed woman who commits a similar gesture of anointing, pouring perfumed oil on His head, in Matthew 26:6-16; Mary of Bethany; and Mary of Magdala -- into one, the great Saint Mary Magdalene (called, by Saint Catherine of Siena, the greatest saint after Our Lady, and known in the Middle Ages as "Our Lady Magdalene").

May Saint Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles and the protectress of penitents, pray for us as we approach the Paschal Triduum.

(Above:  Mary Magdalene, by Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1521.)

The Uses of Memory (re-post from April 10, 2009)

My recent trip to New York has moved me to re-post this entry from almost a year ago, since, having returned, I am struck all over again by the fact that

New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

So far, after a year and a half in a very, very different place, however, I still feel as if I'm in exile, and it's become no easier. Ironically, I've found that one can become a new person in New York City simply by moving to a different neighborhood, far more easily than one can by taking on the trappings of a very different way of life in a small town.  And the snares of memory are tighter now than ever after a visit back.  I miss my friends; I miss the beautiful people of the city of New York.  And I miss the end of summer, when the bark of the plane trees in playgrounds from the Bronx to the Lower East Side becomes mottled, and the acrid stench of summer has started to give way to the clear skies and the faint smell of burning in the air that presage autumn.  And spring in New York, when people pour out of tenements to sit on their stoops and play radios, and children dance on the sidewalks out in front.  And the hum of quiet that descends over even the noisiest streets once or twice today, like a passage of angels.  And being able just to go down to the corner and have a drink or a cup of halfway-decent coffee.  And many, many other things.

So here's the re-post:
 
The Uses of Memory


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

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.

I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?

The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:

The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!

And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:

It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).

What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?

I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.

Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.

My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.

Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.

So Much for the "Chouchou de Paris"

From Richard Cross's wonderful article about the conversion of pianist and composer Hermann Cohen.  I love that one of the monkeys on his back as a novice was . . .  coffee (I'm down with the malicious wit part, too).

When Hermann presented himself at the Carmelite convent in Agen he brought a great deal of emotional baggage with him. Here was a young man who only a short while ago had been a dandy and dilettante. He had bad habits to overcome: a malicious wit, a tendency to backbite and gossip. He was addicted to gambling, he smoked, he took snuff, he loved coffee. What he faced was bare feet in the winter, rising in the middle of the night for prayer, total abstinence from meat, fasting throughout the year, sleeping on a board without a mattress, long periods of silence in a small cell, and no keyboard during his novitiate. So much for the "chouchou de Paris."

Naked

In the 1990s, my first husband, M., had the type of day job that was much coveted among struggling New York artists.  He worked in the word processing center of a global investment bank, using the most arcane and esoteric features of Microsoft Office to create marketing materials that helped bankers pitch high-level investments to potential clients.  The work was highly skilled and well paid, and, best of all, the word processors didn't have to deal with the bankers themselves, for whom, it must be admitted, they had little respect.  That was the job of the word processing center supervisor, who was the liaison between the center workers -- all of them highly-educated, underemployed artists, or doctoral candidates who would probably never finish their dissertations -- and the bankers, who were generally first- and second-year analysts just out of college, living four or five to an apartment (but always in doorman buildings in tony neighborhoods) and working a hundred hours a week in expectation of Christmas bonuses that often far exceeded their annual salaries.

M. was very good at his job (he was good at everything he did), and he and his supervisor, a young black grandmother named Margaret, held one another in affection and esteem.  But his temper was such that, in those pre-iPod days, after he threw his Discman at his typing stand in response to a banker's unreasonable request and told Margaret to tell the banker to do the effing job himself, she said to him, "M., I love you, but I can't have you on my shift no more" (my friend Soprannie, who worked with M., was an eyewitness to this event).  After that, M. worked the evening shift.

Margaret was a born-again Christian who used to reminisce, not entirely without nostalgia, about her pre-conversion days of nightclubbing, promiscuity, and recreational drug use.  "Thank God for Jesus," she used to say.  " 'Cause if it wasn't for Jesus, I'd be bad."  We used to laugh at this, as if it were Margaret's standard shtick, but today at Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I realized how starkly honest she had been.  The priest noted that the Bible begins with the story of a woman -- Eve -- and ends with the story of another woman, the New Eve, the woman in Apocalypse who is clothed with the sun and has the moon and stars at her feet.  I thought about the fact that the Bible opens in paradise, where the man and woman are naked before one another and are not ashamed, and how, by page three, it's all over:  the angel drives our first parents weeping from the valley of joy and delight with a flaming sword, and now we eat our bread mixed with ashes.

The old joke is that, if you look hard enough, you can find your own phone number in the Bible.  Well, I know mine is in there.  Like our first parents, I have been tempted with the Ur-temptation, the one that has us believing we can have power equal to God's, which is certainly the root of all the nightclubbing, promiscuity, recreational drug use, and so forth.  But the education in evil I received before my conversion was nothing compared to what I've learned about it since.  I suppose it takes an egregious sinner to sneak up in among the righteous and see how very, very many of them take the stance of the Pharisee in the temple, and yet do not see themselves reflected in that parable.  (This is true in a special way in the pro-life movement, which is full of post-abortive women who hesitate to speak openly the joyful news that they have been forgiven, for fear of the poorly-concealed horror in which they are held by some of their less-egregiously-sinful comrades.)  I myself have incurred scorn in the comboxes on this blog from virtuous Catholics, who appear to believe that I don't deserve to call myself a penitent, penitence being reserved, perhaps, for those who sin but lightly.  Well, wake up, people: man is fallen, and we're all naked under our clothes, and not in a pretty, Renoir sort of way, either.  In this season of penitence, it's best to admit that, if it weren't for Jesus, you'd be bad. Maybe you'd be bad like Margaret, maybe you'd be bad like me, or maybe you'd just find your own particular level of badness.  But there are few transgressions of which that the human heart is not capable, no matter how virtuous the mind that believes it controls that heart; and to the good people who say to themselves and each other, "I would never do that" (an assertion I've often heard made, for instance, about abortion, from those on both the pro- and anti- sides), I say, "How do you know?"  We should pray in all humility that we'll never be tempted to see that (or any other sin) as a good option.  As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  That means yours.

Which is why this feast day is so great.  Our last chance, our true medicine, our only hope, was born to a young girl not, perhaps, unlike the one pictured above, in John Collier's startling painting of the Annunciation, who was just like us, except for the fact that God honored her by removing from her the indelible bruise and brokenness resulting from our first parents' devastating fall.  O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us egregious sinners, who are the happiest of all people because we have recourse to you and your powerful intercession.

Now is a good time to revisit this stark, powerful performance of the old carol "Remember, O Thou Man."

Forgiveness for Miles

Back in New York, I taught a writing class for undergraduate music majors at my university. Most of them were jazz players who had come to New York, as artists in all disciplines do, from far and wide. They were full of ambition, and dreamt of making lives as musicians in the city that calls to jazz players like Mecca calls to Muslims; New York is, after all, the storied Jazz City whose legendary players, clubs, and myths are no less mystical than those of the cosmology of that other city. (It is even harder, unfortunately, to make a living in jazz than it is in classical music; all my students worked "bread gigs" in addition to playing in clubs and attending college full-time.)

I tried to tailor my teaching I gave to the needs and interests of this special set of students. For instance, when teaching about footnotes and citations, I told my class that, during the time he was married to actress Cicely Tyson, Miles Davis was reputed to have abused her physically. I offered this rumor as an example of something for which a writer would need to cite solid sources, lest he commit a gross breach of ethics, or even an act of slander; for rumor, as tempting as it is to believe, is not fact.

In actual fact, I had first heard this unfortunate rumor from an old boyfriend, a jazz musician who knew someone who knew Miles (always the way, of course). I have no idea if it's true, though everyone knows that Miles Davis was not a nice man. And so I was moved and delighted today to read the following poem, by Philip Bryant, on The Writer's Almanac; it's called "Miles: Prince of Darkness."

I remember my father's stories
about him being cold, fitful,
reproachful, surly, rude, cruel,
unbearable, spiteful, arrogant, hateful.
But then he'd play
Some Day My Prince Will Come
in a swirl of bright spring colors
that come after a heavy rain
making the world anew again
and like the sometimes-tyrannical king
who is truly repentant of his transgressions
steps out onto the balcony
to greet his subjects
and they find it in their hearts
to forgive him for his sins
yet once again.

I loved that poem. And I loved that class and those students.

The last assignment I gave each semester was a record review; they could write about any CD in their collections. Every semester someone would write about Kind of Blue, and I recall with particular fondness how one of them -- a Hasidic jazz drummer whose goal was to fuse nigunim, the devotional songs of the Lubavitcher, with jazz -- explained with marvelous skill why it was such a great album by playing snippets of the solos from "So What," the album's first track. The reason Kind of Blue was great (and that Miles was great, and that Coltrane was great, etc.) was the remarkable succinctness and simplicity of their playing.

I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I pray that we'll all be truly repentant and truly forgiven like Miles in the poem, and that, in spite of our own personal darkness, we'll all give something beautiful to the world, like Miles in real life.

(Above: John Coltrane and Miles Davis during the recording of Kind of Blue, 1959.)

Magdalene virginis

This is a re-post from earlier this year, in honor of the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, patroness of penitents.

The sinful woman who, in a dramatic gesture of penitence, washes Christ’s feet with her tears in Luke 7:36-50 is never identified as Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman from whom Christ drove out seven devils (Luke 8:2-3), but Pope Saint Gregory the Great, in his thirty-third homily, conflated the two women, also declaring Mary of Bethany (mentioned in Luke 10:38-42 and John 11) to be one and the same.

The Vatican reversed Gregory’s conflation in 1969, but it has always seemed to me, as it has to millions of believers from the seventh century on, that he knew what he was about: his conflation gave the Church a powerful figure of repentance and spiritual renewal, at once a reformed prostitute, a watcher at the Crucifixion, the first contemplative (in her identification with Mary of Bethany), and, finally, as the first witness to the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum -- the Apostle to the Apostles. In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene also came to be identified with with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11), and with the Samaritan woman living, without benefit of marriage, with her sixth “husband” (John 4:1-42).

If we read the Gospels as a linear narrative, then the incident in which the penitent sinner anoints Christ's feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee precedes the similar incident described in John 12:1-11, in which Mary of Bethany anoints His feet at another dinner, six days before the Passover seder that precedes His arrest. It seems to me that these are meant to be two separate incidents, not two different retellings of the same one. We recognize Mary as the penitent sinner because she has performed once again her unique and beautiful act of penitence and reverence.

Devotion to the Magdalene was strong in the Middle Ages, when popuar belief held that, after her conversion, she had been miraculously restored to the state of virinity. A thirteenth-century calendarium refers to her as “Magdalene virginis,” and a sermon by a Syrian monk from the eleventh century calls her “Our Lady Magdalene." Saint Godric, a twelfth-century English hermit, received a vision in which the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene appeared to him together and taught him a song, a striking example of two saints who seem in our time to possess distinctly different, almost opposing, ethoi, mystically joined together in the practice of music.

I used to wonder about the passage in Luke in which Christ declares to Simon: "Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much." Did He mean, I wondered, that He forgave her because she showed her love for and faith in Him so dramatically? However, I believe now that somehow she knew, in a motion of the heart, that she was already forgiven; and that therefore she gathered up her ointment and rushed off to Simon's house in an outpouring of love.

The Uses of Memory

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

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know certain things about me, its anonymous author: for instance, that I had a dramatic conversion several years ago, which led to gradual changes in my life and reasoning process from one way to its near-complete opposite; and that I consider myself a penitent. Having gone from espousing and living a self-absorbed, promiscuous, bohemian ethos that caused a great deal of harm to myself and others, to striving to espouse and live a Christian life, has been no easy transition. I struggle daily with the discipline and humility needed to shoulder the cross of my mundane responsibilities, and the past is always beckoning to me over that shoulder -- not so much the events of the past, which mostly ended in heartbreak and failure, but the sensations that accompanied and illustrated them.

I recall the way the light rallied bravely on a post-industrial street in early March in my old city; the taste of the coffee at a Puerto Rican lunch counter by the subway; the green glass bottles arranged on the window sill in a friend's apartment. The lime-green haze of the new leaves, like a diaphanous scarf caught in the black branches of the trees on Riverside Drive. The impossibly warm, nostalgic sound of my voice teacher's Bechstein. The buzzing haze of the city in summer, and the marvelously strange way that a hush would descend at certain moments over even the busiest street. The weeds that heliotroped and bloomed through chicken-wire fencing on a strip of auto-body repair shops in the Bronx. The playing cards I would often find on the street (I found a tarot card, "The Lovers," once). And the many, many goodbyes. While Rome is a city that is layered over with the history of Western civilization, New York is a city that is layered over and over again with the personal histories of its denizens. Certain corners are redolent, even overripe, with memory; certain neighborhoods become forbidden zones because of the heartbreaks to which they played host. And when one has tried to change one's life in a place that was the site of so much crash-and-burn, one occasionally feels as if it might be easier to do it elsewhere, and is tempted to take flight from the snares of memory.

Now I am elsewhere, with none of the sensations of my beloved city around me. And sometimes I mourn for the sights, sounds, and smells of the past, the beautiful fragments of a mostly unlovely life that shimmer even more in the refracted light of memory. And I wonder what God wants me to do with my memory. Must I ask Him to sever it from me? I suppose I would be happier and better-adjusted if I could forget the past. And these sense memories inevitably incur regret, because they suggest the past, which, since I cannot change it, leads to grief, and even depression. If God has forgotten my sins, must I remember them?

The quandary of conversion is that it must always be rooted in penitence. Can one be penitent and not mourn constantly? Saint Peter, according to legend, had furrows in his cheeks, gouged there by his incessant weeping for having denied Christ. And, according to Raïssa Maritain, the eyes of Blessed Ève Lavallière, a French actress and convert, were, after her conversion, always wet with tears of contrition for her past sins. Saint Ephrem the Syrian is said to have written:

The soul is dead through sin. It requires sadness, weeping, tears, mourning and bitter moaning over the iniquity which has cast it down . . . Howl, weep and moan, and bring it back to God. . . . Your soul is dead through vice; shed tears and raise it up again!

And yet, as Brother Roger of Taizé has noted:

It may be impossible to repent without feeling some regret. But the difference between the two is enormous. Repentance is a gift from God, a hidden activity of the Holy Spirit that draws a person to God. I do not need God to regret my mistakes; I can do that by myself. Regret keeps us focused on ourselves. When I repent, however, I turn towards God, forgetting myself and surrendering myself to him. Regret makes no amends for the wrong done, but God, when I come to him in repentance, "dispels my sins like the morning mist" (Isaiah 44:22).

What, then, is the place of memory in the penitential consciousness? Is it possible to mine the memory for beauty, and to use the beauty as a palliative for others? Is it the responsibility of those who are conscious of beauty to nurture it, wherever it is found, even in ugliness? Or must that beauty be left behind, even buried?

I recently had the opportunity to go back to New York to see the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (the image above, "Work Table," is the poster for the show). Retrospectives of Bonnard's work are rare -- the last one in New York was in 1998 -- and I enthusiastically recommend this show, which closes on April 19, to anyone who can go. It is wonderful. Bonnard is an artist who has always been important to me personally, and in fact, in his late paintings, there is an apparent attempt to come to terms with painful memory. He paints mundane domestic objects with luminous, even joyful, intensity, and yet the shadowy human figures who cling to the edges of his canvases hint at a tragic personal situation that caused great damage in his life and the lives of those around him in the mid-1920s, several years before he began producing this prodigious later corpus.

Were the dreadful events in Bonnard's life, then, somehow salutary for the rest of us? The beauty of his late paintings give the viewer great joy.

My fondest hope is that, out of the dreadful turmoil of my own past, some small healing for others might also be brought forth.

Happy Easter (and Passover) and many blessings to all my readers.

The Patches Make the Goodbye Harder Still

When I was dating the Stoner Carpenter Guy, I fantasized that we would get married and have children. (In fact, we broke up shortly after September 11, which seems to have been a huge crucible for New York relationships, separating the ore from the dross.) One day, as we were walking down West 14th Street, we saw a tiny glove lying in the middle of the sidewalk where it had fallen from a child's stroller. "Do you see that?" SC Guy pointed at it with uncharacteristic, near-histrionic despair. "If you have children, you have to deal with that EVERY DAY." I knew that he didn't mean the annoyance of children losing things, but rather the dreadfulness of life's quotidian losses and separations, the casual sunderings that time and carelessness bring and that remove us inch by inch from those we love, until they're so far away that we can only wave to them from the horizon and hope they recognize us. As Holden Caulfield noted, growing up means that you have to carry suitcases in elevators and miss people.

My hardest Lenten sacrifice this year, and in previous years, is striving to become aware of all the goodbyes that we say to those we love, especially the goodbyes we must say on a daily basis. Here is a song I've always loved, "Oh Very Young" by Cat Stevens (above), that describes those goodbyes.

(My dissertation is about an iconography of penitence in the Western art-historical tradition that employs music imagery, and thus I'm interested in penitent musicians, like Hermann Cohen, who's appeared on this page more than once. Cat Stevens might fit into the penitent musician category too, since he seems to have almost completely jettisoned music after converting to Islam. He was also, I'll admit it, the object of my first crush.)

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Pro-Life Movement

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas and also of the unborn. The pro-life movement has taken her as its own patroness for this latter reason.

I have no wish to delve into the politics of the pro-life movement here. To do so would be to duplicate the content of countless other blogs, but would do nothing to advance the cause. My fellow blogger Kyle Cupp, who has written extensively about pro-life politics from surprising and provocative angles befitting his background as a philosopher, is a good place to go for commentary that advances the dialogue toward the ideal state of healing.

All I have is my witness as a penitent post-abortive woman. This witness has been condemned by some commenters on this blog, who have suggested that, because I continue to speak of and to mourn my sin in spite of having had much else restored to me, I provide a destructive example to other post-abortive women. Although I do not know these commenters personally, I do know this: they are not post-abortive. And they do not read blogs written by other post-abortive women. If they did, they might find this one downright cheerful in comparison.

As my beloved Father Hermann Cohen, a fellow penitent and a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin, once said in a sermon, "We have been nailed as signposts before the Gates of Hell, warning others, 'Do not go this way!'"

My prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe today is that she might move the hearts of the virtuous members of the pro-life movement to accept and embrace the fervent witness and participation of women like me. For there are many of us in the movement, including many who are not open about their penitence and its cause. Their reticence is the result of the reality that many others in the movement -- like many faithful Catholics, sad to say -- have an attitude toward penitence not unlike that of the Prodigal's older brother. It would do us all well to ponder the great mystery inherent in the fact that God forgives even great sin, and remembers it no more. Moreover, He rejoices more over the return of the penitent than over those who have no need for forgiveness.

I suspect that women like me could be the future of the pro-life movement, especially as the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens become more and more complacent about the sanctity of life. Indeed, it's not impossible that penitent post-abortive women could even in some way revitalize the Catholic Church in America.

H/T for the quote from Father Hermann: Fallen Sparrow

The Courtship of the Lost

In times when the Catholic world is healthy, God woos most of us through the institutional channels of family, Church, and culture. But even today, when . . . the object of His love is apt to spurn Him for worldly pleasures, still His quest continues, until either He wins the heart of His beloved or death intervenes. When His courtship is successful and His love returned, He forgives past neglect and pours out His grace unstintingly; repentant sinners are as likely as anyone to become saints. Blessed Josemaría Escrivá . . . urging his followers to welcome a penitent, once advised, "Remember that he may yet become an Augustine, while you remain mere mediocrities."

-- Donna Steichen, Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church

The Gospel reading for today was Matthew 18:12-14, the parable of the lost sheep, in which, as Donna Steichen notes, "Jesus describes the purpose of His life . . . [by comparing] God to a devoted shepherd who leaves the main body of His flock to search out a single lost sheep." As Christ emphasizes in the Gospel text, the shepherd, upon finding the lone straggler, will rejoice more over it than over the ninety-nine who did not stray. This is a salutary reminder of one of the great paradoxes of Christianity: that God's longing to pour out His mercy on his beloved is far above our own thirst for justice. How fortunate then are those of us who, in Isaiah's words, "like sheep have gone astray" (Isaiah 53:6) to be thus wooed.

Saint Mary Magdalene, Penitent

Today is the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene, apostle and penitent. She is mentioned by name in all the gospels, and is identified as the woman from whom Christ cast seven demons. In the sixth century, however, Pope Saint Gregory the Great conflated Mary of Magdala with the nameless woman who washed Christ's feet with her tears (Luke 7:36-50), and with Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:38-42 and John 11), giving the Church a powerful figure of repentance and spiritual renewal: at once a reformed prostitute; one of the very few who stayed with Christ at the Crucifixion; in her identification with Mary of Bethany, the first contemplative; and, as the first witness to the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum, the Apostle to the Apostles. In the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene came to be identified also with the Samaritan woman, living in sin with her sixth "husband," who Christ asks for a drink of water (John 4:1-42), and with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11).

Nonetheless, on today, her feast day, the Common of Virgins is read. It was believed in the Middle Ages, when there was a strong popluar devotion to the Magdalene, that after her conversion her virginity had been restored; indeed, she was even called "Our Lady Magdalene." Mary Magdalene's ethos is reversal: she embodies not only the miraculous transit from great sin to great sanctity, but also the mysterious paradox of Christianity itself, whereby one state can be transformed by the grace of God into its complete opposite. As Christ says in John 16:20, "Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy."

May Saint Mary Magdalene intercede for us all.

Mourning Into Joy

A few years ago, in the first week of my doctoral studies, I came across a fleeting reference in a footnote to the book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia by Thomas H. Connolly. I immediately knew that I had to read it. I was preparing for Confirmation at the same time (although a cradle Catholic, that sacrament had gone missing during the time of my family's first heady, later sad and sodden, experiments with aggiornamento), and considered taking Saint Cecilia's name as my Confirmation name, for the obvious reason that she is the patroness of music and musicians. But that seemed a little corny to me, and I was unsure. When I read Connolly's book, however, my mind was made up: Cecilia would be my name -- not just because of her association with music, but also because of her much more ancient association with the profoundly Christian concept of mourning turned to joy, and, thus, with radical spiritual conversion. Connolly links the history of Saint Cecilia's portrayal with musical instruments to the history of the iconography of King David: the image of David-in-Penitence, with his crown and harp cast down in mourning for his adultery with Bathsheba and his de facto ordering of her husband Uriah's murder, was a popular one in the Middle Ages, and even Henry VIII had himself painted as David-in-Penitence to advertise his humility. David's life and words, through the Psalter, made up the meat of the early and medieval Church: seven times a day, monastics prayed (and still pray) the Psalms, thus identifying themselves and the Church with a man whose ethos was not only penitence, but even the paradox of complete reversal: David was a shepherd and a king, a "man after God's own heart" who was also a grievous sinner, an unarmed boy who slew a giant, the great musician and poet who sang and danced before the Lord, and the penitent who cast down his harp and crown in grief and recognition. That mysterious paradox of reversal, it seems to me, is essential to the Christian message: the words of Christ in John 16:20 -- "Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy" -- exemplify this paradox.

While searching for something else, as always seems to be the way, I came upon a lovely post about living the Psalms of David on a blog evocatively called Cloud by Day, Fire by Night, referring the guises under which God led Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt. The blog's author, Kirsten, beautifully emphasizes David's iconography of holy paradox as she writes:

I do not know whether we need to experience the infinity of grief in order to know its counterpart in joy, but I do know this: David’s heart held the breadth of it and did not seek to contain it, this heart that was said to be like God’s own.

And that is truth I can grab onto.

(P.S. Kirsten has images of some of the female Roman martyrs named in the canon of the Mass along the right side of her blog, including Saint Cecilia.)

"Oh! Shrive Me, Father"

I'm just back from giving a concert at a very unsual place, a land trust operated by a lay Benedictine organization. Their concert hall is in a building called Saint Cecilia, which also houses a tiny chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. The program was one that I have done often, a selection of Victorian salon music with one of the foremost performers on the English concertina. One of our pieces is the Londonderry Air, sung not with the familiar text ("Danny Boy," by Fred Weatherley), but with the earliest known lyrics, published as "The Confession of Devorgilla" in 1814.

Devorgilla was a twelfth-century Irish princess, the wife of Tiernan O'Rourke, prince of Breffni. At the age of forty-four she eloped with a rival chieftain, Dermot MacMurrough, and a war ensued between the two factions. Dermot invited Henry II of England, known as Strongbow, to come to his defense, thus paving the way for the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. In the end, Devorgilla returned to her husband, and spent the rest of her life in good works, one of which was the establishment of the abbey at Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, pictured above. James Joyce is referring to Devorgilla in Chapter 2 of Ulysses when Deasy remarks to Stephen Dedalus: "A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni" (he mixes up the identities of the two men, however).

The song pictures the penitent Devorgilla in the confessional, seeking shriving -- absolution -- from the priest:

'Oh! shrive me, father - haste, haste, and shrive me,
'Ere sets yon dread and flaring sun;
'Its beams of peace, - nay, of sense, deprive me,
'Since yet the holy work's undone.'
The sage, the wand'rer's anguish balming,
Soothed her heart to rest once more;
And pardon's promise torture calming,
The Pilgrim told her sorrows o'er.

The charms that caus'd in life's young morning,
The woes the sad one had deplor'd,
Were now, alas! no more adorning,
The lips that pardon sweet implor'd:-
But oh! those eyes, so mildly beaming,
Once seen, not Saints could e'er forget! -
And soon the Father's tears were streaming,
When Devorgilla's gaze he met!

Gone, gone, was all the pride of beauty,
That scorn'd and broke the bridal vow,
And gave to passion all the duty
So bold a heart would e'er allow;
Yet all so humbly, all so mildly,
The weeping fair her fault confess'd,
Tho' youth had viewed her wand'ring wildly,
That age could ne'er deny her rest.

The tale of woe full sadly ended,
The word of peace the Father said,
While balmy tear-drops fast descended,
And droop'd the suppliant sinner's head.
The rose in gloom long drear and mourning,
Not welcomes more the sun's mild ray,
Than Breffni's Princess hail'd returning
The gleam of rest that shriving-day.

Two of the lay Benedictines told me separately after the concert that they believed my performance of the piece showed too much fixation on my own penitence. "God loves you," one of them said simply, an amazing thing to be told after a performance, and a good thing to hear.