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.

There and Back, Part 9: Born into Trouble

Occasionally when reminiscing here about my semi-glamorous past, I mention the time when I used to be a soprano. This was rather a long time, starting in college and continuing for most of the period that I sang opera. I was a small-ish sort of person, especially in contrast to the operatic norm of big bodies, and I could sing rapid passagework with ease, so teachers, coaches, and adjudicators listened with their eyes, so to speak, and most agreed that I was a coloratura soprano, in spite of the facts that I had a voice that was dark in color and that I could not really sing the notes above high C (on a good day I could reach a high D, but I lived in fear of ever having to sing one in performance).

The truth is, though, that although I worked as hard as I could (and entirely fruitlessly) on developing facility in my upper register, and also jumped (with more success) with both feet into the ball-breaking ethos of prima donna-hood, I never sat well as a coloratura. Coloraturas are not altogether untruthfully stereotyped as perky, flighty, beauty-pageant types (and there are more than a few opera singers who started their careers in pageants). There are all sorts of jokes about singers, and among singers these are subdivided into jokes about voice types, or fächer, as they are called in the business. One old saw concerns the various proscriptions against sexual activity prior to performance: basses, it goes, should forego sex for a month before performing, baritones for a week before, tenors for three days before, and mezzos one day before. Sopranos, the joke continues, shouldn't have sex the day of a performance . . . and coloraturas shouldn't have sex during the performance.

I started to come to grief in the coloratura fach around the time that I had signed with management and begun getting better and more important auditions. For the level at which I was supposed to be singing, I needed six audition arias in contrasting languages and styles, and I discovered that there were not six arias in the same fach that I could sing. None of the French lyric-coloratura repertoire -- Lakmé, Olympia -- worked for me, and the heavier French repertoire was just unwieldy in my voice. Likewise for German. In fact, there was basically only one subset of soprano repertoire that I could sing well -- Italian bel canto music from the early nineteenth century up to the period ending in the 1840s, the major composers of which were Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. This repertoire suited my vocal color, my technical abilities, and my emotional range extremely well, as I was often told at auditions, but an American opera singer could not specialize in one style of music only (especially a style that's rarely performed) and expect to have a career, and once, when I sang Bellini in a master class for Licia Albanese, she expressed displeasure with my dark tone in repertoire that had long been associated with a lighter vocal timbre.

In the meantime, I had begun performing steadily in the U.S. and abroad in recitals of Italian chamber music that I had uncovered through my own research. About the same time I was starting to have a little bit of success, my first marriage was starting to go very wrong. This was partly due to my overweening ambition, and partly due to the fact that, in my heart of hearts, I was consumed with a toxic anger bordering on hatred for M., who, prior to our marriage, had taken me to get an abortion. I was going to throw our marriage under the bus in the service of my muse, and felt justified in doing so, because I believed that it was the sheerest folly to trust anyone, and that to admit this was not cynical, but merely responsible. Since I could rely on no one else, I was going to do what I felt I was called to do.

As the marriage began unraveling, my voice began changing, or perhaps settling into its true position. I started studying with a new teacher who, to my initial resistance, suggested that I might not be a soprano after all. I asked my manager to come to one of our lessons to hear what I was doing, and my teacher had me sing a bit of "Nacqui all'affanno" (I was born into trouble) from Rossini's Cenerentola, a lyric mezzo-soprano role. As I sang, I sensed everyone in the room relax, and I understood that my teacher was right. I was not a soprano, but I had found my place at last.

But as things went from bad to worse in my personal life, I found that I was like a flight attendant who comes to work one day to find that she can't get on the plane. I had believed that singing was all I had in the world, and that, if I gave all my energies to cultivating my abilities as a singer, it would be not only my shield from danger, but even, somehow, my salvation. As my life crumbled around me, the career that I had worked long and hard for, paradoxically, was on the verge of taking off. My mother, who'd initially been reluctant to encourage me, told me quite honestly one day, "This is your time," and she was right; it was the pivotal moment in my singing career. If I put everything I had into it now, I had a chance at success, and possibly success on a high level. If not, well, then, as a prominent conductor told me at the time, "all you'll be known for is what guys you've hooked up with."

As it happened, I found that I couldn't go through with it. After M. moved out, I asked Hans, my manager, to stop sending me on auditions, in spite of the fact that he was getting me very good ones as a mezzo with conductors who were very interested. Just a few days before September 11, 2001, Hans and I had lunch and decided it would be better for both of us if he dropped me from his roster. I continued to work on and perform with my research-performance project, and eventually I went back to school and got my doctorate in voice in a research- and scholarship-heavy program. I had, to all intents and purposes, dropped out. I had willingly become obscure, and, according to some, thrown it all away. I would never be known for anything now, except perhaps by a handful of connoisseurs.

I am neither happy nor unhappy about the choice I made, though I am relieved, and sometimes I'm a little wistful. The tremendous freedom I knew when I sang at a high level is something I'm not sure I can manage to put into words; it's like nothing else I've ever experienced, and any singers reading this will know what I'm talking about. I don't know for certain if I made the right decision in walking away from my career, but I know that singing would never have saved me from the world or from myself, and that, in some way, my singing was inextricably tangled up with my moral failure, or at least it seemed to be. But my voice teacher told me once that her florist, who used to come and arrange fresh flowers in her studio sometimes during my lessons, asked her about me once when I hadn't been back for a while: "Where is that girl? I need her voice. Her voice is so . . . consoling."

If that is still so, it is my only good reason for singing now.

Above: Spanish mezzo-soprano Conchita Supervia (1895-1936).

There and Back, Part 8: Ruach Elohim

While in my master's degree program, I had the great good fortune to take a seminar in Twentieth-Century Analysis (um, that's post-tonal music, not post-Freudian psychology) with the late Ronald Roseman. Roseman, at one time the acting principal oboe with the New York Philharmonic -- if you want to hear some amazing playing, browse over to the link on his name -- was not only a brilliant musician and a dynamic teacher, but also a tremendously kind and humane man who was loved and admired by his students. He used to give me a lift to my subway line after our class, which finished in the early evening. I had noticed that he wore a tiny lapel pin in the shape of a dove, and one evening as we drove, I asked him, "Professor, are you a Catholic?" A funny thing for a lapsed cradle Catholic to be asking a Jew from Brooklyn, but everything is possible, and, indeed, as he told me, he was.

Professor Roseman explained that in the sixties he'd been searching. He'd gone to the usual sources -- mystical Judaism, Buddhism, eastern gurus -- but none of it seemed like the truth to him. Then one day he went with a friend to the first Mass of a newly-ordained Catholic priest. The priest blessed Roseman and his friend after Mass, and, he told me, he could feel the Holy Spirit descending into and through him, and it was as if he were on fire. He began studying the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, and his catechist was a young Jesuit with whom Professor Roseman would repair to a tavern after class to argue and drink. One night he asked the priest, "How can you expect me to believe all of this -- the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth?" The priest replied, "Don't worry; you will."

"And," Professor Roseman concluded. "I do."

As fortunate as I was to study musical analysis with such a great musician and scholar, I know now that I was even more fortunate to encounter Professor Roseman as a way-shower on my long road back to the truth.

The fact that Ronald Roseman was a brilliant oboist seems fitting to me. The old joke is that the oboe is an ill wind that no one blows good, which, as you can hear, is disproved by Roseman's virtuosity, as well as by his magnificent phrasing and tender lyricism on the instrument. Saint Paul calls the evil one "the prince of the power of the air," and yet, we know that in the beginning, the breath or wind of God -- in Hebrew, the Ruach Elohim -- moved upon the face of the waters. Ronald Roseman's musicianship was a baptism of sorts, a harnessing of the air in the service of beauty, which, Plato tells us, is truth.

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 6: The Desire for Hermitage

Seven years ago, my sister took vows as a Buddhist. She had watched the planes destroy the World Trade Center from her office window. Her friend's fiancé was killed that day; they were able to identify him from a severed arm bearing a distinctive tattoo. Shortly thereafter, she began attending a Buddhist meditation center with a friend, and then with her boyfriend. Though at one point she'd been a daily Mass-goer, she, along with her boyfriend, took Buddhist refuge vows in a public ceremony on Mother's Day, 2002, a clear, cool day. I attended the ceremony, in which she was given a dharma name that translated as "the turquoise light of liberation," which struck me as very beautiful. I remember distinctly that I closed the street door of the building where the ceremony was held on my foot, and that it hurt like hell.

My sister, a brilliant, beautiful, and kind young woman, had a troubled adolescence, during which she had to contend with some truly frightful events and experiences particular to her life. After many years of difficulty and sadness, she found peace and a certain measure of personal transformation in her meditation practice. She and her boyfriend married and moved across the country. She advanced in her Buddhist practice, took more vows, and is now a meditation instructor and a mother.

During the time that she was beginning her Buddhist practice, my sister tried to persuade me to take it up with her (I had not yet come back to the Catholic Church; that would happen later that year). I went to one of the public meditation and lecture sessions at the Buddhist center with her, and was vaguely annoyed to discover, while looking around at the other attendees, that they were a suprisingly homogeneous and self-selected group. All were white, dressed in expensive artsy-casual attire, and were incredibly good-, as well as successful-, looking. I don't remember what the talk was about, beyond that it was generally an exhortation to the acolytes to practice Buddhist meditation because it was the right thing to do.

Despite my cynicism and misgivings about all of this, I thought a lot about my sister's invitation to join her on her path. It really seemed to be working for her; her wild and suffering heart appeared to be almost tamed. And the aesthetic sensibility of Buddhism was extremely attractive to me. I had visions of utter simplicity: a clean-swept bare floor; a room with white walls, interrupted only by a framed print of a single black-inked brushstroke; a window opening onto a maple tree, whose leaves I would contemplate with detached reverence as they changed from green to red to gold and then dropped, reminding me of the transience of all things. But most of all, I was attracted to the feeling of emptiness, the feeling of peace, that seemed to arise from accepting all phenomenona exactly as they were, without attachment, without hope.

Then, at my brother's urging -- he positively raved about it -- I attended the Renaissance Tapestry exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum on the day that it closed. The galleries were quiet and nearly empty that day in the middle of the week, and I walked through the darkened rooms in a slowly awakening sense of astonishment at the beauty and richness of the tapestries, almost of them illustrations of passages fromt the Bible, that almost drove me to my knees. The tapestry that affected me the most was Raphael's "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," above. I felt quite the opposite of emptiness when I looked at it. I felt like I was drinking great drafts of life that were filling me up. It dawned on me then that this was my tradition and the tradition of my forebears, this aesthetic of fullness, of joy in the created world, made possible by the certainty that the world was, after all, created by a God who loves it and us. At that moment, though I had not fully come back into the Catholic Church, I knew I could never definitively leave it. Here was my tradition -- Italian, Catholic, humanist -- and I could not successfully supplant it with another, no matter how attractive.

A priest once told me that it's better to be without peace and with God than to be at peace without God. On this, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb, I am reminded of the different sorts of peace offered by two different cultures, faiths, and traditions. I pray that my sister will find the lasting peace that she seeks. Although I don't want to see her relatively recent peace destroyed, however, I hope even more that she will find the truth in the faith and tradition of her childhood and her heritage.

There is a sensibility shared by both Christianity and Buddhism, however: that of the longing for hermitage, the notion of an encounter with the Truth that can take place only in solitude. Here is a musical example that beautifully expresses this longing, shared across traditions: "The Desire for Hermitage," the last song in Samuel Barber's 1953 song cycle Hermit Songs, written for Leontyne Price. Though I can't vouch for the dance interpretation or the recording quality, the vocal performance is outstanding, and the soprano -- who appears to be quite a fascinating person -- has a quality in her voice that is reminiscent of the great Price. The texts of the Hermit Songs are taken from marginalia scribbled by medieval Irish monks in the corners of the manuscripts they were illuminating; this excerpt was translated by Seán Ó Faoláin.

Ah! To be all alone in a little cell
with nobody near me;
beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to death.
Singing the passing hours to cloudy Heaven;
Feeding upon dry bread and water from the cold spring.
That will be an end to evil when I am alone
in a lovely little corner among tombs
far from the houses of the great.
Ah! To be all alone in a littie cell, to be alone, all alone:
Alone I came into the world
alone I shall go from it.

May God grant us His peace on the anniversary of the tragic bombing of Hiroshima.

There and Back, Part 5: The Sacramental Everyday

The other day, while looking at the catalogue from the recent Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, I read a reference to his friend and colleague Édouard Vuillard's "touching small narratives of the 1890s and their poetic visions of an inward life routinely spent."

I thought that was burnished prose, the kind of phrase I might write in my dreams. But not just that; it also described something that I've been turning over in my mind, dreaming and awake, for as long as I can remember: the meaning of a good life and how it is spent.

When I was an undergraduate studying classical voice, this question prompted me to leave school for a while. I was, like so many undergraduates before me, in search of something more "real," more authentic, than what was all around me (mainly my fellow undergraduates engaged in the various bad behavior and poor choices made by undergraduates, and faculty preoccupied with other things). I had stirring ideas about how things really ought to be. I imagined, for instance, that Schubert's great song "Gretchen am Spinnrade" could be dramatically improved with an avant-garde, Sprechstimme interpretation (though I never sang it this way myself), for how can one describe the sensation of an obsessive love that is driving one mad with a modality as stylized and, let's face it, square, as classical vocal delivery? And, like Meghan Daum in her much-read New Yorker essay "My Misspent Youth," I believed that one's integrity was somehow connected to what one owned, and that if I had the right lamp and the right bowl (though "right," to me, always suggested provenance from a thrift shop), I would somehow have the right life. (I'm happy to say I did not go quite as far in this belief as one of my college classmates, who claimed that you could tell if someone was a really good musician by the clothes he or she wore.) One summer I decided not to return to school. I would have a "real" life. I had fallen in with a bunch of avant-garde theater artists, and I started performing with them and working in restaurants. Notwithstanding the fact that such experiments were thirty years out of date, I began making my own deck of tarot cards that I would use in performance, developing chance-based theater pieces based on an arbitrary lexicon of sounds, words, and gestures that I would assign to each card (fortunately, I never finished my deck). I had to do something more relevant, I thought, than sing. What did classical singing matter?

A couple of years after this extremely disorderly period in my life, I met my first husband. He himself was an artist, and he encouraged me to disengage myself from the self-indulgent silliness that passed, in my mind, for serious work, and to recommit myself to what I truly did well. With him I learned the rigorous discipline that would serve me so well throughout the rest of my life. But part of me still railed against the staid, bourgeois ethos of classical singing, and wondered if such a near-obsolete art form really mattered.

Whether it mattered or not, though, I loved it, and I kept doing it. I had a small career as an opera singer, and a somewhat bigger one as a recitalist; my real love was, and still is, the classical recital repertoire. My recital work began more and more to be based on my research into obscure and forgotten genres of art song, and my growing love for this research eventually led me to my doctoral program.

In the interstices of one's daily work and activities, though, are one's dreams, one's delusions, one's hopes, and one's failings. I always loved that terrible line in "You're So Vain" about "clouds in my coffee," because it rang true for me. There is one's morning coffee, and there are the clouds, the dewdrops, the landscapes and the weather of the imagination that inform it and the act of sitting at the kitchen table and drinking it. I wanted to be mindful of that act, and of every act.

One's mindfulness, though, can itself become an obsession and a delusion. When one is focused on the meaning behind the act and the thing, one is prone to investing the act and the thing with meanings that they do not possess. One can then so easily fall into the trap of self-aggrandizement, the illusive notion that acts and things open their meaning to oneself alone, even the fantasy that life is about reading the true meaning of phenomena, the act behind the act, the breathing soul at the heart of the thing. And this can lead, at best, to neglecting one's unpleasant chores and mundane vows, and, at worst, to madness.

What, then, is a good life well spent? How does one execute one's diurnal responsibilities without neglecting the beauty that somehow infuses everything? How does one honor that beauty without leaving reality behind?

I think the Catholic Church is extremely wise to have given us a sacramental understanding of the world and its phenomena. To acknowledge that the commonest of things can be a vehicle for divine grace is truly revolutionary, out-Buddhas Buddhism, and is a stance I need in order to resist getting sucked up daily into a whirlwind of despair. If only everyone who craved beauty and knowledge could find it in the Sacraments, the world would truly be transformed.

The frustrations of my daily life now, too, make the glimpses of beauty so much more precious. Sometimes God speaks to us in ways that are startlingly direct, but most of the time He is maddeningly silent. The memory of the startling directness can sometimes be just enough to get us through the long periods of lonely silence.

(Image above: Madame Vuillard Refilling a Carafe, 1914.)

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.

There and Back, Part 2: Culture Wars

When Barack Obama made his infamous gaffe on the campaign trail about people in depressed small towns clinging to religion out of "bitterness," I'm sure many in my old circle nodded their heads emphatically. I have neither the means nor the desire to judge Obama's own religious commitment, but his clear subtext was that these bitter folk cling not to religion generically, but to Christianity specifically (we may as well admit that the notion of the small-town Buddhist or Jew clinging to his faith out of bitterness just doesn't make sense to us culturally). In his comment, Obama further conflated this clinging to religion with an apparently similar clinging to guns, as well as to "antipathy to people who aren’t like [the ones who cling] or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I was raised in an ultra-progressive Catholic home, if that's not an oxymoron, and in my life I have known many who grew up in similar circumstances. In our minds, there were species and degrees of religious belief, and our Christianity and that of the bitter, clinging small-towners couldn't have been more un-alike.

In another statement that caused a great deal of consternation on the right, Barack Obama declared that, if one of his daughters became pregnant outside of marriage, he wouldn't want to see her "punished with a baby." That sentiment was nothing new to me, having grown up hearing that the ultimate goal of the Christian right was to punish women for their sexuality by forcing them to face up to its consequences by bearing unwanted children, clearly an outrageous injustice. When I was married the first time, my father disapproved. As he told me, he was afraid I was going to have children and ruin my life. Little did he know that my first husband and I had aborted our only child a year earlier, an event upon which our entire relationship was essentially predicated.

This really is how liberal intellectuals tend to construe it: the right to free sexuality should be an unbridled one. As for the consequences, they can be taken care of, and any threat to the taking care of them is something to be fought against. For all the lip service paid to the interest of the community, liberal ideology, on this point at least, is anticommunitarianism in its essence. It is individualism taken to its most extreme expression, to the point that it makes enemies of a mother and her child.

And yes, liberal believers do look down on conservative believers as anti-intellectuals who parse everything in black and white for fear of the wonderful shades of gray that they, the liberal believers, are brave enough to discern and embrace.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the reason I agreed to that abortion is that I wanted him to love me. Where, I wonder, is the freedom in that?

There and Back, Part 1

While my journey back into the Catholic Church was a relatively swift one, spurred by a tangible experience of Christ's mercy and forgiveness back in 2002, my journey out of it had been long, slow, and meandering. I was never quite severed from my belief (someone once said that being a Catholic is like being from the South, something that marks you for life and that you can never really shake, no matter how you try); rather, I tried to pile a lot of other, strange beliefs on top of it, mostly in order to make the way I was living seem rational and justify it in my own mind. My trip away started in adolescence, when my parents, who were struggling in their marriage, stopped taking the family to Mass. From that point, I started down a path of a kind of casual, flaky neo-paganism to which I later on made more formal commitments, and which I now see allowed a great deal of evil into my life -- not that the doors to evil had not already been wide open, unfortunately, since my childhood.

There's a certain type of intellectual/artistic woman in New York City (and no doubt elsewhere) who rejects traditional religion and social morality in the quest for freedom and self-realization, but at the same time craves the connection and sense of rightness that those more traditional practices convey. She tends to take up non-western spiritual beliefs, or to accrue an amalgam of eastern and occult practices which she undertakes mostly on her own and sometimes with others. These patchwork belief systems are attractive because they seem non-judgmental; most of the time, this woman is getting her heart broken over and over in her search for love, because that's how it is, and, having abandoned traditional mores, she can avoid being indicted for her sexual behavior; the synthetic and syncretic belief systems instead provide means of explaining the heartbreak and jettisoning the notion of sin. While this woman is almost bound not to admit it, she's really searching and hoping for a real love, one that will last, i.e. a traditional husband, but she's not allowed, by the standards of the company she keeps, to come out and say so. The morality of this company accepts that people will partner up and then drift apart, and that women can't expect commitment from most men, even after they've given all of themselves; though they may try to pretend otherwise, this state of affairs is usually devastating for the women in question.

I think that in many ways the accretion of beliefs that these women profess is meant to soothe their troubled souls from so much heartache, and to give them a sense of power in the face of such powerlessness. I've known many of these women; they've been friends, colleagues, family members, and respected teachers. I can see now what I couldn't see then: that moral relativism is a subtle ploy of the enemy, one that has a particular appeal to intellectuals, and that it leads to sin, excuses sin, and then perpetuates the cycle. The first stirrings I had that it might be a load of crap were when I would hear women of this type say about abortion: "Well, I would never have an abortion myself, but I am committed to other women's right to have them." Being post-abortive, hearing this was always like a kick in the stomach to me. You mean you DIDN'T think abortion was okay? At least not for you? And if it's not okay for you, why would it be okay for me, or for anyone else? I assumed that something that people were organizing about, marching for, professing, and demanding must be something, well, in the interest of the common good, but my pro-choice friends clearly thought abortion was a bad thing that other women (subtext: other, less-fortunate, women) should be able to have without questions or restrictions. Believe it or not, I found this shocking.

The disconnect in logic, morality, and compassion in this paradox began to awaken my sense of horror at my own abortion, as well as my acceptance of the need for real forgiveness, not the kind of self-made forgiveness cobbled together from the ideas encountered in books on meditation or the tarot. The shifting definition of the good -- that what would be repellent to me might be swell for you -- was understood by the women in my circle to be the price we paid for liberation, and heartbreak the price for freedom and the journey to self-realization. This was the real world, was the message: no longer the safe, constricted world of our mothers. The real world, real relationships, real love, were categorically NOT safe, and we were brave women, we told ourselves, for venturing out onto those choppy waters. Because there were so few tangible rewards in any of it, the journey itself, or so all the books claimed, was supposed to be its own reward.

I am one of the lucky ones who got out. This has meant a certain distancing, if not a complete break, from many of my old friends. It's also meant that I am forever, in a certain sense, marked by heartbreak. This is not to say that I don't have joy in my life; I do. Joy, however, does not cancel out heartbreak; in fact, real joy can never really be that distant from heartbreak, as we know from the Gospels. Joy and pleasure are not the same thing. Conversion has made me a different person, and yet I'm also the same foolish, misguided, deluded, and desperate woman I always was. Heartbreak has left a permanent mark on me, and I pray that it may be a sign to others not to go the way I went.