NIGHT’S BRIGHT DARKNESS

Sally Read

Night’s Bright
Darkness

A Modern Conversion Story

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Scripture readings are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible,
Second Catholic Edition, © 2006 by the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover image of St. Peter’s and the Tiber River
by Sergey Borozentsev

Cover artwork, design and layout by Milo Persic

© 2016 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-151-3 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-726-6 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016931673
Printed in the United States of America

     Gods silent, searching flight:

     When my Lords head is fill’d with dew, and all

     His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

     His still, soft call;

     His knocking time; The souls dumb watch,

     When Spirits their fair kinred catch.

     *   *   *   *

     There is in God (some say)

     A deep, but dazling darkness; As men here

     Say it is late and dusky, because they

     See not all clear;

     O for that night! where I in him

     Might live invisible and dim.

—“The Night”, Henry Vaughan

CONTENTS

Preface

1 The Father

2 The Spirit

3 The Son

4 The Church

5 The Mother

6 The Mystery

PREFACE

I have changed the names and the details of the patients mentioned in this book to protect their privacy.

The reader will note that this is the story of a conversion, not an entire life. Any people close to me who have not been mentioned here, or who have been mentioned only briefly, should not feel this is indicative of their importance to me. I do not forget the fact that many people supported me during my conversion with their prayers.

It is also worth mentioning that those close to a convert have to undergo a conversion of sorts themselves—change is rarely easy, even if it is for the better. Bearing this in mind, I would like to thank my family for their support, particularly my husband and daughter, my mother and my uncle Kerry Lee Crabbe—especially for his enthusiasm for this book.

I would also like to thank Melanie Mulroy for journeying with me, in the year that she too entered the Church; Marie Cabaud Meaney for her invaluable help in all matters; Penelope Hewett Brown; and Catherine Pepinster, who encouraged me as a Catholic writer from the start. I will always be grateful to Monsignor Charles Morerod for his kind assistance. And to Cardinal Georges Cottier, who passed away this year, for his warmth and generosity. May he rest in peace.

Last, but also first, I would like to thank Father Gregory Hrynkiw for giving me more than we can ever know.

I would also like to acknowledge the rights holders of the following works.

Aquinas, Thomas. Compendium of Theology. Translated by Cyril Vollert. New York: Angelico, 2012.

Curcio, Beata Maria Crocifissa. Ricordi, Biografia e Diario Spirituale. Santa Marinella, Italy: Congregazione della Suore Carmelitarie Missionarie di Teresa del B. Gesu, 2011. Citation translated by Sally Read.

Day, Dorothy. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008. Used with permission.

Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom used with permission of the Liturgical Commission of the Synod of the Ukranian Catholic Church.

Divine Mercy Chaplet used with permission of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the B.V.M.

The Divine Office, vol. 1. London: Collins, 2006. Used with permission of A. P. Watt.

Eliot, T. S. “Animula”, “Burnt Norton”, and “Ash Wednesday” from Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, 1963. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

_____. Collected Poems, 1919-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991. Used with permission of the Washington Province of the Discalced Carmelites.

Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 1990. Used by kind permission of SPCK.

Read, Sally. Broken Sleep. Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2009.

_____. The Point of Splitting. Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2005.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. Vintage Classics edition reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Rout-ledge Classics, 2009. Excerpts from pages 88, 89 used by permission of the publisher, Librairie Plon, and Sylvie Weil.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Used with permission of Penguin Publishing Group.

1

The Father

An Irish nurse taught me how to wash and wrap a corpse. She shut the door of the room and spoke in a low voice as though the man on the bed was asleep. She spoke about “the dignity of the dead”. After months of charts and lectures on blood cells and free radicals, this sounded intangible and mysterious. As I stood, hushed, in the middle of the room she snapped, “Take off his Band-Aids.” Then she rolled her eyes when I gasped at the black blood that leapt out from one I peeled back. She was infinitely gentle with the dead man, though. She called him by his first name, with all the naturalness and polite merriment she used with any living patient. A mermaid tattoo stretched from his elbow to his wrist. It sat there on the wrinkled skin, discolored and faded, like the very old and irrelevant thought that it was. “Sponge him,” she told me, “get off all the blood stains, and dry him well. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you leave him damp. Check his teeth are real; if they’re not, take them out. Take his watch off and bag it.” I was frightened. This was my first dealing with death. I kept expecting him to grab me—so, really, it was life that made me jumpy. The Irish nurse taught me to wrap him in a sheet. We turned him heavily on his side, and as we did so he gave a heartfelt sigh, and I scuttled like an animal or a child. “Ah,” she said, undisturbed, “yes; they fart too.” When we got to wrapping his head I almost could not bear to cover his face, the mouth which had so recently been full of breath and words. He seemed still brimful of life—in the air he expelled, but also in the residue of character and thought that hung in the room. But I drew the sheet loosely over his stubbly face, and sealed it with Sellotape; his heavy head fell against my chest, where I had no option but to cradle it before setting it down, carefully. The Irish nurse tidied the room, and drew open the curtains onto cool and sane daylight. “Now we open the window to let his soul fly,” she told me in just the same tone as she had given all the other instructions. The roar of traffic was mighty, the sun hectic in the shimmering green chestnut leaves. It all made the man smaller; he was no longer dominating the room like an outsized rock. How could this detail of the soul have remained in a modern London hospital, I wondered? There was no God above. The soul was long out of fashion.

* * * * * *

I was brought up an atheist. At ten I could tell you that religion was the opiate of the masses; it was dinned into me never to kneel before anyone or anything. My father taught me that Christians, in particular, were tambourine-bashing intellectual weaklings. As a young woman I could quote Christopher Hitchens and enough of the Bible to scoff at. My father would happily scoff with me. He was a large, powerful man, a fag in one hand, glass of red wine in the other, and was never short of an opinion. His laugh barrelled loudly around his chest and left him gasping, mirthfully, for air. He could shout loud and long too. He enjoyed a good row, he said. He was a man who would boldly cross the road and knock on the door of a house if he heard a fight and children crying inside. He believed in looking after the weak—it was imperative, to himself as well as to me, that he was never numbered among them.

When I worked as a volunteer with learning-disabled adults and then enrolled as a student psychiatric nurse, he mockingly christened me “Saint Sally” for a while. But the altruism I felt surely came from him: his redoubtable instinct to protect the vulnerable.

At the age of twenty-two, I moved into a bleak high-rise nurses’ residence off Holloway Road in North London, where I would spend hours sitting on my desk, staring at the back view of London’s skyline—Saint Paul’s, blurry and grey for those who knew where to look, grubby-looking tower blocks, the red light of Canary Wharf in the far distance, planes crisscrossing the skyline. In the foreground, the old Royal Northern Hospital was becoming its own ghost story. Upturned wheelchairs lay in the gardens; broken glass was shattered over the paths. Doors gaped open and old files and handwritten registers were there for the taking. From my window up high, I wrote, I read. When I laid out the dead I made notes. (The laying out of the man with the Irish nurse would become a poem.) When a seventeen-year-old with a roof tile embedded in her skull was pronounced dead in the emergency room, I wanted words to give form to the frightening swathes of shock that reverberated through the staff room and student flats. I wanted to give the victim what screenwriters call a “back story”; I wanted to own and give form to the chaos of sudden death. When my flatmates organized a boozy party that lasted all night, and screeched with laughter about the dead man they had dragged onto an X-ray machine that day, I felt lonelier than I ever had before. I was green, they mocked. I would soon harden up.

I can only have been in my second or third week as a student on the general wards when I looked after Carlos.

Carlos was a Portuguese man of about fifty-five who had suffered a major stroke and needed total care. He couldn’t move or speak and had no awareness, I was told, of what was going on around him. Shortly before I arrived the medical team had decided that artificial nutrition being given him by an intravenous line should be interrupted—that is, he shouldn’t be fed. When I arrived he had just been put on a simple IV solution, and I was told that within a short time he would be dead. I remember a numerous Portuguese family, but it’s only his wife I can picture clearly now—chubby, the creases and troughs in her face filled with tears that ran in sloping horizontal lines down her cheeks. Carlos had smooth olive skin and black hair, and small intense black eyes. During his managed slide into death, I had to wash him and shave him and change his pajamas each morning. It was those things I liked learning how to do most of all: how to make sure skin—often brittle and shiny as onion peel—didn’t redden and break; how to pull a man’s skin taut as you pulled the razor across so you didn’t nick him. I washed this man’s face and watched his black eyes look hard into my own. I spoke to him, and wished I knew Portuguese. It was hard to know what to say, but I would tell him about the weather outside, how busy London was, and if I had seen his wife. How much he heard and understood I can’t say. I would think: how terrifying it must be to listen to this young English girl make small talk as you slowly starve. I would cover his face with shaving foam and begin the long delicate work of getting at all the black stubble. I began to sing as I did this job, because coming up with the small talk was hard. I sang “Hey Jude” because the Beatles were as universal as I got back then. I would sing it as a lullaby, round and round in the quiet privacy behind the green curtains. He would look very hard into my eyes, straining it seemed. I would hold his hand and tell him not to worry. He gripped me, hard.

“Carlos,” I would whisper, “if you can understand me, squeeze my hand again.” I waited two seconds, three. He never took his eyes from mine. I thought I could feel his effort. He squeezed my hand again.

By the next ward round I had spoken with a junior doctor about this, and the old consultant with his half-moon glasses had been briefed. I waited at Carlos’ bed with his family for the tide of doctors, therapists, and nurses to swarm up to us, with the faintly festive air some ward rounds carry with them. The consultant looked over Carlos and asked me to recount what had happened. He listened to me and flicked over a file as I spoke. I sensed he was humoring me. He was kind, but by something in his manner and the way the medical students were theatrically swallowing smiles, I knew he didn’t have to listen to me. He was showing everyone what a magnanimous man he was. It was a teaching opportunity. “No, no, no,” he said, finally, “the grip is a reflex. Like when a baby grips your finger, you see? It doesn’t mean his brain is meaningfully active. No change here.” He walked off, taking the crowd of doctors, therapists and students with him like a sea swell.

Some of Carlos’ family hadn’t really understood what he said, and the senior house officer lingered to explain. Some turned away from me, enlivened again in their grief. I felt meddling, cruel even. I had gathered up the heavy machinery of their misery and thrown it into the air for a while—for a while it was weightless; anything was possible—and now it had crashed on their shoulders again, heavier than before.

I washed Carlos only two or three times before I was moved to a different ward. When he looked at me, when he squeezed my hand and wouldn’t let it go, I told him I was sorry; I had tried. My words were thin—I only half believed in the conversation I was having; I only half believed he was there. Perhaps this man was simply a collection of skin, bones and impulses. My half belief that he was somehow locked into a medical condition and I could save that strand of being buried in all that flesh had to be naive, didn’t it? And even if he was there, even if he could have been kept alive, what did I believe should happen? Should someone shave that black stubble and anoint the reddened skin for the next however many weeks, months or years? I was embarrassed, somehow, in my part in all this. I don’t think I even said good-bye to him.

Part of what I had been taught since childhood, and what I firmly believed, and was to believe still more firmly, was the right to die, and the right to assisted dying. My father had a horror of being in Carlos’ position. For as long as I could remember he had planned and worried about his own death—for heaven’s sake make sure you slip me a few extra pills or put a pillow over my face if I have a stroke, he would say when I went into nursing. I had no doubt that taking one’s own life was a right—your life was a thing you owned and you could extinguish it when you wished. I also believed that to let someone “be” in a condition like Carlos’ was cruel. What happened through those mornings of care and broken communication? Perhaps I thought that Carlos may have recovered (perhaps the doctors were right: it was impossible). Perhaps I simply saw that life was there, and balked, briefly, at allowing it to die.

But ultimately, as an atheist, I believed that dragging wasted bodies through years of suffering was meaningless and morally wrong. I had seen wounds in the buttocks of the bedbound so deep you could see the cringing acreage of white bone. I would nurse elderly who were so incapacitated and confused their fingernails were caked with excrement, and they didn’t know their own name. I believed in our duty to cancel suffering and in the merciful finality of death. I held strongly to the belief that when Carlos died, that was it. His energy bled out into nothing. I entertained no fanciful notions of afterlife or reincarnation. I was quite clear in my view that man had invented both God and heaven because he could not bear the weight of his own mortality.

Why writing about these truths was so important didn’t elude me. I knew that literature redeemed human experience: it saved it from being forgotten and misunderstood; it ennobled pain through beauty and form. The locus in our consciousness, I was fond of telling people, that houses the knowledge of our own mortality, gives us our tendency to be religious and also our predilection to be creative. The desire to worship a god and the desire to create a poem are interconnected. But where one—art—was true and empowering, the other, I insisted, was false and repressive. I began to write poems on the tube, between shifts, in the freezing staff room at 6:00 A.M. I read Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Sharon Olds. I mimicked their styles and struggled to find my voice. My sole ambition was to write one true poem.

There was much to write about. As a qualified psychiatric nurse, now living in an attic in Belsize Park, I would nurse elderly psychiatric patients with depression, schizophrenia and dementia. “Where is God?” one man bent double in a wheelchair would moan. Olga, with curly white hair and tanned skin, who had lost her family in the Holocaust, would take my hand and ask, reasonably, “Where is God?” But from her, the question was not a lament or a particular demand. She was interested, that was all. The despair would settle on her like a cold hand on her chest, but her resilience was impressive. A course of pills and she would be back to playing bridge and striding furiously through the streets to the hospital. Another patient who had lost his family in the Holocaust would shut himself up in his dark flat lit only by candles, one for each relative or friend killed in the camps. Another survivor would compulsively tear her smart tweed skirt in kriah, the Jewish rite of grieving. Each new skirt would be torn. There was no resolution. She would pick at the fabric as at a scab that could not be left to heal. Another patient would compulsively mimic Hitler, sending an anxious Jewish man into hyperventi-lation. I heard the words “I want to die” many times a week. Sometimes there would be petty fights about who had suffered most. Olga would answer, “I lost them too, all my family I lost. But there’s no such thing as a hierarchy of grief. Sadness is sadness.”

In all that blackness, our high spirits occasionally burst from our sober seams. One of the carers was a Soho drag queen, and some Friday afternoons he would dress up in his long red sequinned frock and heels and holler out Shirley Bassey numbers. We would all join in: ex-Berwick Street flower girls, ex-corporate executives, ex-colonels and ex- refugees, as well as twenty- something therapists, nurses and doctors. “Am I at a hotel?” an elegant ex-dancer would ask me. Then, five minutes later, “Am I at a hotel?” And again, “Am I at a hotel?” One man, Albert, sat like a newborn soul washed up on a PVC settee. He had entirely forgotten his name, what job he had done, his family and history. There was nothing left of him, I would think, but bones for his wife to propel from bed to bathroom and day hospital. His brown head was bald and the brown eyes had a bald look too. It was often easier to nurse men who tried to grab at your breast or thought you were their daughter—then there was banter, crossness; many could share a joke. Even the most demented usually held on to a tag line or two: most had a story, a line preserved from the ravages of illness—“I used to look like Grace Kelly” or “We blasted them from the air! ‘Bloody Nasties’—that’s what we called the Nazis.” There’s usually one line that can’t be eroded away by illness and age. But with Albert, there was nothing left. Not a story, not a line. Even his gait was falling to pieces. Soon he would be another sack of bones in a bed being eased into nothingness.

I joined the crowd of doctors, therapists and ambulance drivers after work in Soho, for globe-sized glasses of wine. Music from bars and the stop-start of traffic beat out a very London impatience. As the stalls in Berwick Street were packing up, men in tight white T-shirts were already coming out to play in the brightening neon, the deepening dusk. Down Old Compton Street, dummies were dressed in black plastic or red lace bras and leopard skin with crotchless knickers. It wasn’t shocking. It was London. Soho was a miniature of hidden entrances. Off certain streets, there would be doors to vertiginous Victorian buildings, almost bricked in by years of development. The lifts were old black grates, and at the top there would be views of more courtyards blocked in. A felt-hatted old lady might be sitting in a top floor flat, gently puzzled, unable to organize herself a cup of tea, as far below her men in suits snuck into bars with blacked out windows.

A night out was not a night out unless we were drunk. Someone would get hit, someone would step on someone else’s glasses, someone would urinate behind a wall, someone would go home with someone and we would wonder, lightly, if they would be okay, someone would kiss someone else, someone would end the night on the curb in tears.

I often noticed the tall red brick church in Soho Square. The door was always open onto darkness and the suggestion of candles burning inside. How odd, I would think. I often felt like going in, for peace alone. Once I did. After an evening with a friend who had already coaxed me into a sex shop, I felt courageous enough to go, too, into the church. I sat down and felt some envy of the people there, who seemed quietly involved and knew what to do. Seeing a man kneeling in prayer was like seeing someone in a ludicrously athletic position—I didn’t think I could ever be capable of doing so, and anyway I didn’t see the point.

At weekends I walked through Highgate Cemetery and Hampstead Heath, and some evenings I would sit on my balcony, which was the size of a surf board, among the outsized chimney pots and aerials of North London. The other attic flats would be lit and showed me couples sitting down to dinner, children coloring at a table, a piano teacher singing her scales. I would drink more French wine, read Mauriac, Jean Rhys or Martin Amis, and wonder why my lover, a Jewish doctor, wouldn’t cross the no-man’s-land with me to settled family life. Like many men of that generation in that city, sex was easy, but the phrase “I love you” tacitly verboten. But he called me. He called me at the hospital, he called me at 3:00 A.M., he called me in the mornings as I dressed. He called me as I left for work and when I got home. He called me out of meetings. He would never spend the night, but he would arrive at 4:00 A.M.; and for those two hours before he left, I would lie on my hard futon on the attic floor and know the barest edge of someone being there. His eyes were a muddy grey and his skin sallowly Russian. He listened; he made me laugh. After he left the phone would ring and I would put the light back on. It would be him, calling from his car. “Come out onto the balcony,” he would say, and I would go out into the dove grey of an icy morning, to watch him drive away.

I worked Monday to Friday then took the train home to my parents’ house in Suffolk. Some stations are like shores: Paddington, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street. Friday evenings the swarming ocean of the city would heave into waves of shuffling, elbowing commuters, making a bid for a departing lifeboat. The 7:00 P.M. out of Liverpool Street would be packed. Students and dogs in the corridor outside the toilet door. The buffet and dining cars stacked with red-faced businessmen, pulling their ties out to a noose. Carpets and seats damp with rain. Girls with drowned Norfolk complexions, jeans and duffle coats would be plugged in to the silvery beat of music as mobile phone calls started up and down the train: “I’m on the 7 P.M.”, “On the 7 P.M.”, “I’m on the train”, “Hello! I made it.” We would heave and sway past the black steel arcs and bridges of the East End, as if really on a rollicking sea.

By 8:30 P.M. the train held almost nothing but its own brightening light, scattered chips and overturned plastic cups. The carriages’ mechanics creaked and suffered slowly, and on the freezing platform the city became a story to be gradually forgotten. Dad had the engine running. He raced the narrow country roads as he pushed the car as far up against the next as he could and overtook—he’d pretend he was in a plane shooting enemy aircraft from the sky as he heard my news and told me his, and asked about my overdraft. There was the silent slide of empty fields outside; the world unspooling.

* * * * * *

One September day, my father, at the age of fifty-six, was given three months to live. It was autumn and we drove the lanes in heavy golden light. He wasn’t a man to give in to weakness or to suffering. In the face of his own mortality, his principles did not change. Nothing appalled him more than the thought of being dependent in any way on others, and he set about planning his own illness and death—within the law, but clawing back as much control as he possibly could.

“What is it like to lose someone as an atheist?” friends would ask me, years later.

When everything is discussed, preempted and programmed as far as possible, there is no room for false hope, or any hope at all. Desperate searches for alternative medicines or miracles were never thought of. The doctor said three months and my father accepted this with gravity, with grace, with the courageous nobility of a soldier going over the top. He quickly gave up work, and soon he preferred not to go out at all. The fire was lit all day and through the evening; my mother made up the bed with clean sheets every day—not because it was necessary, but because my father always loved the scent and texture of clean bed linen. He read steadily, things that would absorb and inspire him—war books, pioneer books. Classical music, which he had loved, became unbearable to him. We sat by the fire and discussed the past, the present, the all-too-clear future. He drew up a plan for his funeral and lectured us over every detail: don’t let the undertakers do anything other than the essentials. No vicars or religious, no ceremony of any kind. Go up to the crematorium and press the button. That’s it. No poem or piece of music, certainly no prayer. His atheism was sincere and profound; once dead he would be utterly extinguished. The rest was expensive sentiment.

He also drew up documents: a living will withheld his consent from certain life-prolonging treatments and gave his full consent to pain relief that might have the double effect of shortening his life. He wanted to go out with his boots on, he said.

I came and went to Suffolk every weekend and worked as a nurse through the week as usual. I passed the days in a peculiar kind of horror, every cell and thought anticipating this entirely planned and accepted death. Not for us the maybe, the unknown, the prayer. No wondering if he would be here next year. No conviction that God would have any kind of hand—even if it was a hand that simply cradled and gave meaning. We were in charge and the weight of it left me reeling.

The Jewish doctor mustered the courage during those weeks to end our piecemeal relationship. I was curiously accepting of his decision, which he took badly. We sat on the floor of my flat and he talked and talked, but I simply had nothing to say. After he left, I came out, unbidden, onto the tiny balcony and watched him walk down the road, his head bent, defeated. He didn’t look up. I felt so weak and abandoned a blast of wind could have knocked me over.

When my father’s end came, I proved myself very much a child still at twenty-six: it was up to him to comfort me as I rushed into the hospice and into his arms. There followed days of gradual sleep, and then unconsciousness. He rallied briefly to swear at a nun who had strayed, foolishly, into his room. Despite our atheism, we sat at the bedside like an Irish or Italian family and kept watch through the incremental signs of death’s advance.

True to the journalist he was, he kept the deadline and died three months to the day following the prognosis. The death was peaceful. He had spent only a few days in bed as an invalid, and he died in his sleep. The December wind outside was viciously cold. It seemed to have its own visible form and whitish color.

I felt as if a god had died. The creator of my world and my protector had gone. When I walked down the street I had a constant sense a roof slate would crash down onto my head as it had into the skull of the seventeen-year-old brought to the hospital a few years before. When I sat in restaurants and bars I felt a cry deep in my belly that I thought would actually escape. I lost weight and my bleach-blonde hair fell out in handfuls. My work, of course, continued. I was cofacilitating a bereavement group; I was listening to people wail that they wanted to die. I was being asked to save people, to give reasons for living. The Jewish doctor would drive alongside me as I walked home, talk to me through the open car window and sometimes come in to visit. He brought me French cakes and champagne and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. He would phone me at 2:00 A.M., when he was called out to a patient, and come upstairs to slip into my bed, clammily cold with the night and silent with his guilt and indecision.

I remember sitting on the floor of my flat in Belsize Park and saying lucidly, “This is hell. I’m in hell.”

There was a cold, dizzy sense of abandonment as though I found myself in a desert devoid of life or signs, and a feeling I had my back to a void into which I could fall and be smashed onto rock at any moment. That feeling of almost-falling stayed with me as I fell asleep, as I slept, as I talked to patients. Walking the streets, among the roar of traffic, the press of red buses and people, it seemed likely I would simply disappear. Or walk in front of a bus. Or fall from a tall building. I even considered, in a desperate and vague way, invoking God. I thought, or spoke aloud that day sitting on the floor, that if I had faith maybe all this would be liveable. But it seemed entirely unfeasible to believe in any God; I thought I could never lower myself to that degree of self-delusion. There was certainly no answering sign to my ruminations, no grace. Instead, random cruelty—teenagers pelting me with eggs as I walked up the tube station stairs. A stranger cackling in my ear and imitating my voice as I looked at a train timetable.

Why he did not come to me when, broken, I almost stretched out my arms to him, I can’t know. I suspect the meat or the substance of my soul was not nearly ready. I also know now that he knew when and how to come to me and that the hell I experienced then was an essential preparation for that future encounter.

Strangely, in the fear of falling into that void, I now see proof of God’s being. His absence was so painfully loud it seems, now, to prove his existence. I seemed almost at risk of being torn to physical pieces—so the fact that I lacked something vital seems, now, obvious and insistent. The rock, of course, is mentioned more than once in the psalms. Whenever I hear it in prayer now, I think of the rock that lay at the limits of that terrifying void and know it as the other side of God—he reaches us wherever we are, even if we are so far from knowing him that we mistake him completely. His infinity always contains our finitude.

Without realizing it, my cry was that of the psalmist: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 13:1).

My cry from the depths—the yell that I thought would escape me in restaurants, in bars, at night—was surely heard. But then, in that hour, in that place, I was never more confirmed in my atheism and my need to write to give value to life and to save.

I wrote more, I wrote better. I wrote as one possessed who thinks she can save herself by her own hand. I knew that when the right words combined in a certain way they touched a nerve of truth as precisely as a surgeon touches the precise nerve or vein in an operation. And when truth was hit, it saved. One morning, I wrote my first real poem. It was about one of those strange and cold night visits by the Jewish doctor. I had written eloquent and impressive things before, but this time the heart kicked in, the thing lived. A bewildering and lonely love had been transformed. And it let me leave the love. I knew I was a poet. Even if I never wrote another thing, I knew I was a poet. A new strength powered me along the street to work. I felt as though I nursed a secret that would nourish me through weakness and sadness and devastation.

* * * * * *

At the age of thirty-four, a few years after that first poem, everything, it seemed, had changed. I was a published poet; I was married to an Italian; and I was living in Sardinia. My atheism was to grow yet more, but this time it would be joy that strengthened it.

My husband, Fabio, was a carabiniere in a rural station in the north of the island—a place of pale sands and emerald pine trees and tall mountains and apparent peace. But I heard bombs going off in the night and saw burnt-out cars in the daytime. Any time I ventured through the town, eyes would fix themselves wordlessly upon me as I walked the full length of the street. If I tried to speak in Italian my words were met with automatic referral to my husband (“What’s she saying?”) or a demand as to why I wasn’t learning Sardinian. On feast days, shepherds, in their brown corduroy trousers, rode bareback through the streets. They donned sinister, expressionless masks, and sang in deep harmonics that reverberated through the skin, through the night. We had no way of knowing who our friends were, if any. We were desperate to transfer to the mainland.

Fabio wasn’t sure he wanted a child just yet—not there, in that place. My husband with the very dark eyes was deeply protective and aware, I think, of the tricky job of transplanting this foreign woman to such a different culture. The winter before we left the island we had no water or electricity for several days. I collected rainwater in buckets for washing and lit the stove from the gas canister for light and warmth. My chilblains were so huge I could hardly move my fingers. Fabio was being called out at all hours, and his friend, a young policeman from the north of Italy, with freckles and an almost comical despair at his exile, would keep us company for dinner, and stay on to chat with me when I found myself alone again. He needed to talk about how much he missed his girlfriend. He was stationed in a tiny nearby village, where sheep outnumbered people and the rule of law was overridden by local feuds and vendettas, where being an outsider often meant that you had no chance of getting a plumber or an electrician or of being served in a shop, where Italian street signs were pocked with bullet holes. He would stick his head out of his window in the morning, he said, and yell how much he hated the villagers. Then he would don his hat and uniform and go about his daily policing. He couldn’t understand my desire to have a child either. It was unthinkable that I would want to bring a baby into a flat so damp that condensation streamed down the glass on pictures, on an island where I had no friends and my in-laws were two hours away, with a husband stressed out of his wits. From this man, I learned about the interminable Italian engagement and the preponderance of Italian only-children. I had had to battle for my wedding, and I would battle again for my child. Later, I would hear from many older Italian mothers about their long wait—ten years or more—for the perfect house, the perfect kitchen, the completion of studies before they would consent to the most fabulous wedding. More than one child was considered reckless—comfort and a faithless prudence were put before everything else.

But then, one day, the call came that we were being transferred to Rome, and we had to leave that night, on a boat to Civitavecchia. As I cleaned our flat and packed, I suspiciously took out the pregnancy test kit I kept in a drawer and tried it. The blue cross appeared with easy inevitability.

My mouth was dry with excitement that night on the boat. Soon, I would be a mother. Soon I would be in Rome, a city I loved beyond all others.

I was wrong about being in Rome. Though Fabio was to work in the city, we moved into a house owned by his parents, in Santa Marinella thirty miles from Saint Peter’s. The house was not in the town itself, but on a modern estate where you needed a car, which I didn’t have, to get anywhere. Fabio was off at his new job most of the day, but he returned to nest-build chaotically—heaving out old furniture, chucking out heirlooms and old linen. Explosive, and dangerously decisive now that he had a wife and child on the way, he was determined to provide in the best possible way, no matter what the casualties. He shipped in white goods and new furniture by the ton. He summoned our neighbor, and the two of them took his mother’s beloved, but rather gloomy, dresser, complete with unused punch glasses and wedding china, and tossed the whole thing cacophonously into a dumpster.

I, Fabio’s foreign wife, was viewed with some suspicion in the neighborhood. I didn’t understand back then just how conformist Italian culture can be. Buy the wrong furniture, wear different clothes, go to an unknown doctor, and you’re a marked woman—you smell wrong, you’re not part of the pack. My husband was proud, in some ways, of my difference. He liked my outspokenness and ability to shock and the pleasure I took in it. But, he was careful never to rock the societal boat himself. When priests came to the door that Lent to bless the house and barged in without being asked, I stayed seated at the table and asked bluntly what on earth they wanted. Fabio jumped to his feet and crossed himself, though he never went to Mass and always seemed convinced by my atheist apologetics. I remember one priest looking at me incredulously and turning to my husband for an explanation, as Italian men often will.

“She’s an Anglican,” Fabio blustered.

“An atheist,” I insisted from my seat.

The priests turned to my husband again. “From England. Anglican.” He tried to turn it into a linguistic misunderstanding.

Through early pregnancy in that new house, I grappled with the obvious yet epic question: What was it I was creating? Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphors” describes pregnancy as a train that you can’t get off. My train had no drinks cart as well as no end. My thoughts, my reading matter, my preoccupations were harnessed, my choices collapsed down to the bean-sized creature growing in my pelvis.

Those early weeks, in his frantic nest-building, my husband bought a gigantic print of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and hammered it above my desk. It fascinated me: God at that vigorous moment after the creation of Adam, before he was left as tortured witness. Through the stutter of my nausea, Adam was made again and again. I had never felt so much like that God.

The baby grew until she became big enough to let me feel her flicker inside me. I had the sense of her swimming alone in a dark sea in a universe that was me. I knew that although my voice was all-encompassing and palpably close, I was in another world from her—very much like a god. I wondered if she felt alone; I wondered if she longed to be touched. As she became yet bigger, I read to her and felt her reactions. When Fabio yelled or slammed doors, she lay quite still until I coaxed her back into play with my own voice. When I prodded her with a finger, I could sense her surprise and hesitation before she kicked me back in firm slow motion.

I wasn’t an easy pregnant woman—in my new house, cut off from company, I had nothing else to occupy me but her and my writing (which was all about her). At dinner, I couldn’t blithely pretend that someone’s back wasn’t wriggling against my diaphragm. In the post office, I couldn’t help gasping as she stamped on my bladder. I scrutinized blood results and scans and astrological charts, catalogues for nursery furniture and lists of infections and diseases. I was acutely aware of myself as the locus of her existence.

Here then, I thought, is the mold for man’s idea of and need for God. We were all, once, tethered to a godlike being who created, protected and fed us. This god was close and intricately part of our every cell, yet utterly distant. How great is that loss as we form, are born and move away from her? I anticipated the moment that my daughter would leave the black sea of my womb and the all-encompassing acoustic of my voice. When I saw her big black eyes appraise me through the glass hospital bassinet, it seemed as if she was thinking: “Is this small woman the god I knew?”

By the time Florenzia was six weeks old I had a car, and when spring came we discovered Santa Marinella together. I wheeled the red pram around streets arched with emerald pines so vivid they blurred against the blue sky, and up and down coast roads, piazzas and promenades. Santa Marinella was full of Liberty villas in terracotta, yellow or pink. The blue sea loomed at the end of every viale and piazza, and flowers bloomed everywhere. I would lift my little girl out of her seat to let her sniff the mock orange that lined the lanes. We would sit on the sand under the promenade and watch the waves and collect stones and shells. We named the lizards, geckos, cats and crickets that came our way, or that we heard rustling through the tall iron gates of shady gardens. She clung to me as though I was a kind of harbor, and she an unsteady sailor. Our adventures were so new and colorful, it felt as though we were out hunting lions or watching mermaids on the sand. It was hard to hear myself tell Fabio, “We went to town for coffee today, that’s all”, when our days were so exotic. I was introducing my little Eve into her world.

As Flo grew, I felt surer than I ever had that the creed of my childhood was right: there was no God. Man’s need for God, his innate sense of God, had to stem from this magical pull to the mother. I don’t remember why, at around this time, I asked Mel, my best friend in England, if she believed in God. Mel and I had spent hours as teenagers hanging out on the old church wall in Tavistock. On holiday together in Ireland we had gone to a church service together out of curiosity, and we were appalled by the sermon. But I knew she didn’t share my absolute rejection of religion. I remember my gentle incredulity and disappointment when she replied to my question, “Yes, definitely.”

“I don’t,” I remember answering, “not in the slightest. I wish I did. I wish I could, but I don’t.”

The conversation moved on, and I remember nothing else about it. But I remember I was standing at the glass front door in Santa Marinella, looking at the pine trees and the sea. My eyes fell on the light switch by the front door as I made my nonconfession, and it was a courageous bleakness I felt. I knew there was no God above. It was as if I had looked into an empty dish and simply declared it to be empty. “Truth is hard,” I would have said, and quoting T. S. Eliot, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

* * * * * *

Three years after the birth of my daughter, I was wondering about a new project. I had published my second book of poetry, which was mostly about motherhood, but I wanted to write something dazzlingly different. I had written a lot of poems about sex, many about motherhood, and a lot of poems about death. They were physical in their use of language: pared down, gutsy, visceral. They looked closely and offered no consolation—in the milieu of English contemporary poetry, sentiment was verboten, quite rightly, but so was recourse to anything transcendent unless it was so loose and allusive it applied to anything and nothing. I had always thought language itself was redemptive—but I was doubtful, suddenly, that it was. Suddenly it seemed as though contemporary poems—my own included—couldn’t ask the big questions, let alone begin to answer them. Or perhaps the questions had already all been answered and there was nothing left to say. The songs of Yeats, like the sound of Gregorian chants through England, had withered away on our lips. As my little girl started nursery school, I wanted a different kind of writing. I wanted truth, research, facts.

I started to think hard about a project hatched by a doctor and me many years before in London. Both she and I had long histories of gynecological complaints that general practitioners seemed quite unable to deal with, and we had both finished up with the same private gynecologist at the Royal Free Hospital. If we, as doctor and nurse, had suffered so much from lack of understanding about basic female reproductive health, we reckoned it didn’t bode well for the average woman. I had suffered debilitating physical and psychological effects while taking oral contraceptives—but for a long while no doctor ever suggested I stop taking them. Quite the contrary, they insisted that whatever I did, I carry on with the pill. Whatever happened, I mustn’t become pregnant and ruin my chances, my career, my life. I was twenty-five before a doctor had the courage to tell me, “You’re poisoning yourself. Stop taking those pills.” I did, and my problems were largely solved. I wanted to look hard at the pill and its effects (e.g., its little- talked-of capacity to destroy a woman’s libido). I wanted to investigate abortion and its effects on women, too. But even more, I wanted to tell women about their structure, their design, their pH levels, their secretions, their discharges, their cycle. I had gone through life finding out simple facts about my own physiology quite by chance. Tea tree oil in the bath is good for candida, one psychologist told me (she had suffered for years before discovering this). Ordinary soap will, of course, irritate the vulva, I realized after far too many years.

When I emailed my doctor friend, now a general practitioner and a specialist in sexual health, and suggested the time was right to start the project, she was thrilled. “The Vagina: An Owner’s Handbook” was the working title we gave the book. She was to write the physiology and the biology; I was to write the social-historical facts and to talk to women about their experiences. We wanted it to be a book for our daughters, a book every woman should have. It would cover everything in a nonjudgmental, fact-based style. We wanted to hear from all women—gay, straight, liberal, religious, promiscuous, celibate.

“Never trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die”—I headlined my first chapter with this, my favorite misogynistic joke. I wrote about menstruating Muslim women being prohibited from touching the Koran. I mentioned that Christianity has shed every prohibition and suspicion regarding menstruation (though it remains an issue in the Orthodox Church). “Jesus,” I wrote, “famously touched a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years (dysfunctional uterine bleeding).” I always had respect for Jesus as a man.

The book met with enthusiasm wherever I discussed it. Women wanted to talk about their experiences. They wanted to tell me that society wouldn’t believe in premenstrual syndrome and the very real depression, anxiety and anger it can bring. They wanted to talk about their heavy periods, that they loved their periods, that they hated them. They wanted to say they never wanted children or that being a mother defined them. Gay women were up for being interviewed. So too were my nonreligious friends. I got my first refusal when I asked a devout American Catholic woman of my age who was living in Santa Marinella if I could ask her a few questions about her vagina. I got my next no when asking the next devout American Catholic woman.

I knew six or seven of these women: their husbands were studying at pontifical universities in Rome. They said things like “God bless” and ploughed the narrow streets of Santa Marinella with outsized double or triple buggies, with more small children hanging on the handle. They were always marching off to Mass. I had approached them, when Flo was only one, because we were quite isolated. I was trying to rustle up playmates for her, and these Catholic families were an abundant source of playmates. One of the mothers, Cristina, who had a quick Texan warmth and, I sensed, a gale-force obstinacy, had a daughter the same age as mine and was pregnant. She knew all these other mothers with small children, and her door was always open.

When, over coffee and renditions of “The Wheels on the Bus”, I became aware of their views and beliefs on contraception and abortion, I was appalled. When one mother said that abortion was wrong even in rape cases, my jaw swung down. I couldn’t even think of an argument, faced with such illogical implacability. Instead, I gathered up my toddler and went home to call Mel in England with my dilemma: Should I let my daughter mix with a crowd of religious nuts so she could socialize? Or should I show her, right away, that we picked our company carefully and didn’t ever compromise our moral views? I chose to let my daughter have her playmates: she was so delighted to play with people her size. I had to swallow my scorn when Sesame Street books got mixed up with God Created the World hardboard baby books. I had to gnaw on my tongue when I was given a book called Holiness for Housewives and was invited to a meeting to discuss it. The God of these women was a close God. He entered into every sore throat, full diaper, sleepless night and burnt dinner. Their belief that this deity had a hand in a plane being on time or a child doing as it was told, sickened me. The linear connection of prayer and effect made God seem a puppet master in the sky, dispensing favor and punishment. It concretized my atheism. They believed that God would miraculously make the town bus late so they could catch it. Often, theirs was a simplistic God; the bearded face in the sky.

None of these women would talk to me for my book. It wasn’t that they were prudish: I had heard them discussing vaginal lubricants and secretions. Our book will not be biased, I told them. I wanted to write about Natural Family Planning—having suffered the pill, the diaphragm and the condom, I thought it was something every woman should know about. But they wouldn’t talk.

Their immovable refusal gave me the idea of pushing the envelope to the limits and interviewing a nun. And, as a counterbalance, a prostitute. I already knew of a prostitute I could talk to. But, despite living in a town where nuns were everywhere walking the streets in twos or threes, their white habits like sails against the blue sea, I didn’t know how to approach a sister. I didn’t want to spook the nuns who were taking care of my daughter in the mornings at preschool.

The only other link I had with the Catholic Church was tenuous—a friend of friends, a Canadian Byzantine-rite priest. He was about my age, with black, merry eyes, and seemed approachable. Perhaps he could introduce me to a nun. One day, ticking off chores on my work list, I fired off an email:

     Dear Father, I’m writing a book about the vagina.

Father Gregory, exiled from Ukraine because of death threats, and staying alone in a large white house on a high hill overlooking the town, was not fazed. He seemed ready to talk. He wasn’t shocked at my question and even said he would consider asking a nun friend of his if she would be interviewed by me.

But, suddenly—having swallowed the acid of anti-Catholic opinion for the sake of my daughter—there were other things I wanted to say. It was 2010, and sex abuse scandals were crawling, then galloping, out of the Church. The Irish stories were being broadcast: unspeakable cruelty to children. Nuns beating three-year-olds for wetting the bed. Priests sexually abusing boys. My own daughter was very happy in a convent-run school, but I was considering removing her. I couldn’t understand how the Filipina nun taking care of her could smile at me so unperturbedly when I dropped her off in the mornings. My days mooching around the artistic glory of churches in Rome were ruined. The smooth plaster faces of Mary and Jesus that adorned them were the same flat faces those children would have seen through those cruel and gruelling years. I couldn’t get over that juxtaposition of pain and an invented God who couldn’t console or rescue those in such need.

I thought I understood art, Rome, the confounding of God with beauty. At the age of eighteen, on my first visit to Saint Peter’s, the size of the statues, the dimensions of the dome and the susurration of silence and whispers stunned me. I felt like a first-time visitor to Africa, whose own country seems bonsai compared with the vastness of the savannah; who feels he has never seen color till now in the face of these deep and sun-baked shades; who knows the smell hitting him as he steps onto the tarmac will bind his heart, almost sickeningly, to the country forever. The anatomical precision of the saints, the sweep of the basilica’s gaze to death and beyond had this kind of impact on me. If man could make God, it was here.

Eighteen years after that first visit, with my baby daughter in my arms, I attended the baptism of Cristina’s second daughter, Sophia, early in the morning at Saint Peter’s. The basilica was quite empty; the crowds were locked out, amassing in the piazza for some Mass or audience. I tiptoed to the main doors and peaked through a crack to see thousands gathering outside with cheers and whistles. Inside, nothing moved but dust in a trunk of sunlight from a high window. The baptism was performed at a side altar, and afterward I moved across the nave to Michelangelo’s Pieta and looked as one is supposed to look, without the tourists and their cameras jostling for position. Alone, I felt the full drop of Christ into her lap. I saw her long, elegant fingers. I saw her great acceptance. It stunned me, her capacity for pain.

“Not ‘look what you’ve done’ but ‘this is what I have’ ” I wrote in a poem that compared Christ to Icarus, that other boy who tumbled from the sky.

The scandals oozing from the Church robbed me of that consoling beauty. I could hardly imagine how Catholics must feel.

Suddenly, I wanted this exiled priest with the merry eyes over a barrel. I wanted answers. I wanted, more than anything else, to know how someone intelligent, someone moral, could belong to such a church. He agreed to answer my questions:

     If your bank were known to have connections to the Mafia, wouldn’t you change banks? So, now that you know your own church abuses children, why not change churches?

     How, in the modern world, can you exclude women from the priesthood?

     If Jesus teaches love, why do you hate and refuse to accept gay people?

     If Jesus was poor and loved the poor, why are churches in Rome dripping with gold and fine art?

     Mary is hardly in the Bible. Isn’t your Mary just an incarnation of the old pagan goddess, used to harness the cretinous adoration of the masses? Don’t you use her passive femininity to keep women in their place?

It didn’t take long for me to realize that he was angry too—with me, with my way of thinking. We sparred by email many times, but what he wrote had no effect on my beliefs. Something else was happening.

The fields sang that early spring with yellow flowers so impossibly bright they were almost tinged with intensely lit green. The Roman spring broke through damp streets, lined walls with purple-blue morning glories and sidewalks with fuchsia ice plant. White almond blossoms broke the stark wet black of branches, and mock orange blossoms once again poured their sweet scent down the streets.

Weeks into our fight, I half realized that I wanted Father Gregory to say that we shared some common ground. That, yes, he hated his church. Or that my god, the god of some biological imperative and poetry and art, was actually his god too. I began to have trouble sleeping. I was crying, though I wasn’t sure why. Though my daughter was in nursery school all morning, my work and research were grinding slowly and not well.

I invited Father Gregory for cake and tea, and while my daughter played and he ate my Victoria sponge, I quoted Primo Levi, who wrote of a man in Auschwitz he had witnessed fervently thanking God for saving him from the gas chamber—while other men were condemned.

“Perhaps,” Father Gregory said, “that was not a good prayer.”

I told him about the women in Santa Marinella and their belief in the God of late buses, the puppet master in the sky.

“It’s a mistake to reduce God to our thoughts,” he said slowly.

But I was left with a restlessness that wouldn’t abate. Those weeks, the house creaked as I crept out of bed and went downstairs to nurse my insomnia. Fabio cursed and rolled over. My daughter coughed through the nights as she fought viruses coupled with incipient asthma. My mind was open as a fish’s eye. Rain descended on the town without letup. It flooded the garden and forced up drain covers and sewage in the town. I couldn’t sleep or work. At the very limits of my conviction as an atheist, at the acme of my scorn and loathing of believers and the Church, I was creatively paralyzed.

For comfort I began to read, as I did almost every spring, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, a book far beyond its intended audience in its wisdom about life, art, and the agonies of unrequited love. It, too, is all about the spring—the English spring of chill air softening, and snowdrops and crocuses spearing the mud. Cassandra, the protagonist, had just trudged through rain, in the clutches of grief, to pay a visit to the vicar. I had read the encounter so many times and had always recognized her atheism and the vicar’s comedy. This time I put the book down when I read the vicar’s assessment of religion: “(Religion) is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.” The conversation goes on, by the fire, over Madeira, the rain beating down outside. God, says the vicar, is “merely shorthand for where we come from, where we’re going, and what it’s all about.”

Why, after so many years of reading, thinking, arguing, would this truth penetrate me now? It was as if the tin roof of the sky peeled away. My desperate yearning to write the line, to make the poem, to nail the truth was illuminated. It wasn’t for editors, prizes, readers or myself that I sought so earnestly to harness reality. It was for communion with God, who knows already, who has the metaphor, the poem, already in hand, who is already writing, has already written, the ultimate poem. It was to try to touch that poem.

That night, I barely apprehended this. What I thought was just one word: possibility, and the sibilance of that word seemed like the distant yet all-encompassing black sea that I perceived God to be. A sound like the amniotic roar of traffic in London or the simmer of sea in Santa Marinella that natives unlearn how to hear. I had begun to learn how to listen.

This amorphous feeling of God was the “inconceivable, invisible” God of the Byzantine Liturgy and his ineffable love. But I still did not know what liturgy was, and I had not apprehended that love. I only knew that reality extended far beyond what I had ever known or expected.

This God, the God that I sensed that night, was faceless and without attribute. I had no real way of knowing if there was love, if there was goodness—whether I was intuiting the Christian God, the God of Islam or a God divorced from any religion. I only knew it as one God. I hazarded that it was not evil—I knew that from the intimation of peace and joy I felt straining inside me. I was raw and purified as the newest soul. Looking for consolation, communication or answers did not occur to me. Only the fact of God penetrated me like the fact of my own existence.

For this rawness and utter lack of expectation, I thank my father. He prepared me to know God. In his atheism, he stripped me of all pretense and selfishness and false worship and rights with regard to God. He taught me to kneel to nothing false, to have no false master. For a long while it would not occur to me to ask God for anything at all. I was only at the point of invocation, like an infant’s first cry.

Yes, we have to cooperate with grace. For me, it was if I had been blindly riffling a thick black backdrop before I unexpectedly put a hand through where the two halves of the fabric met. It was only a moment, sitting on the edge of the bed. It was a thought in my mind—not yet even in my heart, that locus of being. I cradled the thought tentatively.

I picked up my daughter from nursery school, I made dinner, I had coffee with my devout Catholic friends. I wondered whether this new reality showed in my face. When I wrote to Father Gregory to say that I was not, after all, an atheist, he was unsurprised (“You’re not dumb”). It was time, he told me, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “to care and not to care”, to attempt to “sit still”. It was only to him I confided my ever-growing insomnia that was leaving me nauseous and unable to think or work. The writing of the women’s sexuality book had slowed to nothing, and, instinctively, I turned back to poems. For years I had been trying to write monologues in the voices of those old psychiatric patients. I was hearing Olga’s “Where is God?” I was grappling with how to give Albert, the bald man of the lost life and identity, a voice. Where was he, in the ravages of brain disease? What could be left but the moot point of the soul? Their voices had been coming to me as my own could not. But now even that writing had slowed to silence.

The explosion of my tentative belief made my mind feel like a permanently shaken snow globe. “I need things to settle down,” I told Father Gregory over coffee in town.

“Perhaps they never will,” he said with a smile.

But I knew they had to. “What will I be?” I asked him, “Christian, Hindu, Muslim?” And “How can I know God is good?”

He laughed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses with the balls of his thumbs, but he did not answer the question. He never told me what I should do or think. We talked about suffering. We argued about homosexuality—I was entirely pro-gay marriage.

“I can’t write,” I finished up, putting my face in my hands. I feared I would never write again. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God (Ps 69:3).

“What you need is a hit of grace,” Father Gregory said. I considered this so unlikely that it wasn’t even worth wishing for. A poet who had analyzed and wondered and opened up her mind, I had never had even the remotest supernatural experience. I very much doubted such experiences existed, except perhaps in the minds of the deluded.

Fabio was angry when I told him. There was much storming off with car keys. For him too, things were changing that he had considered unchangeable. My threadbare confession threatened the fabric of my character and even, it seemed for a time, our marriage. For Fabio my new belief augured a breakdown or some other destructive change. Flo, my three-year-old, was still parroting that the nuns didn’t know what they were talking about and that some people believed in God; they couldn’t help it. One day that spring the three of us took a trip into Rome and I made a familiar visit to the Church of Saint Anne. I loved the frescoes of Anne teaching Mary to read. It was, I thought, yet more evidence of the pagan nature of the Catholic Church: Anne, a nonbiblical character, giving the power of words to Mary—though I couldn’t quite square this message with the idea I had of the Church as a patriarchal, misogynistic organization. I had the vague idea that the cardinals somehow hadn’t noticed the little church just outside Saint Peter’s Square. As it happened, there was a Mass in progress when we arrived, but I snuck in with my daughter on my hip just as the Creed was being recited. I didn’t know what it was but understood the first words. The sound of more than a hundred voices speaking together stilled us. As we walked back out into the blazing sunshine I told my daughter, “All those people believe in God.” Her mouth opened wordlessly; she hadn’t thought there were so many.

2

The Spirit

My suspension in half knowledge of a still faceless God, plus the weight of a change within me that I could not easily disclose to others, brought on yet more insomnia. Mel, in England, was simply glad I believed. Things would be easier in the long run, she said. My mother was disbelieving and dismissive; I changed the conversation quickly. My husband continued to eye me with simmering rage as though I had a drinking problem or a lover. What was it that had unseated something so intrinsic to my being?

“So there is a God,” my little girl said interestedly.

I told only one other family member: my uncle, a fellow writer whom I was closer to than almost anyone. We had shared a decade of drunken dinners, arguing the merits of Chekhov and Dostoevsky; battling over who was the greater poet, Eliot or Yeats. We would be so immersed in our talk that food would go untouched; waiters brought and took away plates, my uncle not even noticing. He smoked in a hungry, absorbed chain from the moment he woke to the moment he slept, and he spoke in a voice so quiet you had to bend your ear almost to his mouth to hear. But he listened too, bent his shaggy white-haired head and wanted to know what your heart was thinking, what book you were reading, what was tormenting you, what you thought, dreamed, desired. Women were crazy for him. There was a time he couldn’t choose between all the women—younger, older, from every corner of the globe—who rolled up to his flat to be listened to. “How do you pick?” he would muse, emptying out the wine. Sometimes we fought—over censorship or politics. There was a conservative streak in me at odds with the sometimes graphic poetry I wrote. When I told him about my outrage and disgust at a video of bestiality I had seen at some arty exhibition, he hissed: “If that’s her thing, if horses are her thing and if the horse likes it, why not? Don’t be such a Nazi.” He was one of the very few men I knew who didn’t look at pornography, however. “No,” he would inhale between clenched teeth and sink his head low between his shoulders. “What if I saw something odd and discovered that was my thing? What if I saw a porn site about chickens and found out that was what turned me on? Life’s hard enough.”

When I first told him I believed in God his attitude was phlegmatic, if not positive. The only caution he gave: “Just don’t become a Catholic. Been done: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. Old hat.” At that point, being a Catholic was entirely out of the question for me.

There was one other person I told, blushingly, tentatively. Texan Cristina, devout American Catholic mother of Santa Marinella, and I had become unlikely friends. There had been spats, some major, in our friendship. When Obama had been elected as president of the United States two years before, I had written to the group of American mammas to say we were having an “Obama party” and had had a reply from one of their number, asking that I never mention that name to them again—for them he was “like Hitler”. Incensed, I had written back to them asking how many times in their company they thought I had had to swallow my contempt for the pope and all he stood for. Cristina telephoned me directly, and we had the predictable bam-splat of pro-life on her end, and liberal indignation at the Church’s veto of condom use in Africa on mine—plus an inspired rant from me regarding American use of depleted uranium in Iraq and what I saw as religious indifference to the birth defects it was causing, in favor of campaigning against the far less pressing (as I saw it) problem of fetal destruction through abortion. The call was unpleasant. I wrote off that group of mammas and set about taking Flo to Rome to an English-speaking playgroup. To get there, however, involved an arduous trip on public transport with a stroller. Our first trip in, I was pickpocketed on the train by a woman who robbed me while she pretended to help put the baby’s jacket on, and we were left stranded in Piazza Venezia with no way of getting home. A few days after that, Cristina, who had heard the story from someone, called me and invited me over for coffee. We went, Flo and I. I remember another Catholic mother in the group was there, and she had trouble looking me in the eye. But Cristina was steady and hospitable and open, though occasionally her eyelid twitched with the recollection, I supposed, of the fight. Even then, I had to hand it to her, though. There was no points-scoring, no hostility, no desire to argue. It was something new to me.

Their family apartment near the railway station had become a place I stopped by almost daily so that my daughter could play with their eldest. We agreed, after the Obama incident, never to discuss religion or politics. Cristina had a deep caramel voice and long, thick black hair and a loud, deep laugh. Her love of God was evident.

By this time she had three children under four. She could always be found standing at the stove in her kitchen, making a meal or a snack for her kids, who would troop in and out regularly like ducklings. She would slam a tacky print of the Sacred Heart on the kitchen table and point at it with a wooden spoon, saying, “I swear, Lord, without you—” Our girls would play dress-up and squabble and stick too much toilet paper down the toilet and tease Sophia, the younger sister whose baptism I had attended at Saint Peter’s. I would hold the new baby, who would bring up milk on my sweater. The girls would watch Sesame Street. I would change diaper after diaper. Cristina would fold washing or peel potatoes. I would sit at the kitchen table and eat her guacamole and wipe a child’s mouth or go and keep order in the family room. There was never a time to come or a time to go—life went on continuously in the apartment and anyone could pop in any time. It still unnerved me, slightly, to hear her invoke our Blessed Mother or talk casually to Jesus as she stirred the salsa.

So I went to Cristina with my burning secret. That week, I was dry-mouthed, elated but catastrophically tired. I was still getting up at 3:00 A.M., alive to something I couldn’t fathom—as if there were an antenna in my skull picking up signals. At Cristina’s I sent my girl off to play and watched my friend fold sheets as Andrew slept in his crib. She often gave me a job too—once it was untangling a bunch of silver chains in a jewel box (“I won’t get a chance for another fifteen years!”)—but this time she didn’t. It was rare for us to be alone, uninterrupted, and my hands so empty. I sat, still in my jacket, and couldn’t settle. The girls played down the hallway, door shut; the baby slept on. After a few minutes, I told her I had something to say but it was a secret: “I believe in God.” I felt my cheeks flush as I said it.

She reeled for a second. She physically swayed. But what struck me most was the quick gathering of her thoughts. Who else knew? she wanted to know. Whom was I talking to? When I told her Father Gregory, she nodded. “I won’t tell anyone else,” she said. “There’s a lot for you to work through and you must be left in peace. Keep talking to Father G.”

Her face held that same barely contained marvelling and joy that was within me—but like me she knew it had to be kept in, to be pondered over.

“Pray for me,” Father Gregory said to me when we parted after our regular meetings in the coffee bar with shattered windows on the promenade. But I had no idea how to pray. Falling to my knees still felt wholly unnatural. I couldn’t ask for anything from this God I didn’t know—and asking God for anything personal, when the world was full of so much suffering, seemed wrong anyway. Father Gregory, I knew, had placed me under the protection of Saint George on his feast day, after I told him I believed. But apart from that, I had no idea he was praying for me.

I had need of prayer. Creeping downstairs at 3:00 A.M., my exhausted mind alert to that strange signal, I poured myself a sliver of whiskey and took down T. S. Eliot from the bookshelves. My neighbor arrived home singing to himself, and I heard the familiar tap-tap-tap as he poured water on an Alka-Seltzer and stirred. Then, silence. A blackbird sang in the garden, the liquid notes precise and jointed—they tumbled and trembled. Their sound made the night seem even more unoccupied, as though the last bird on earth were singing. I read from The Four Quartets—poems I used to read on the tube in London, understanding little, but adoring the strange logic and beauty. Then, I turned to “Animula”, a poem I wasn’t familiar with, and read to the lines,

     The heavy burden of the growing soul

     Perplexes and offends more, day by day;

     Week by week, offends and perplexes more

     With the imperatives of “is and seems”

     And may and may not, desire and control.

Still tense and far from sleep, I put the book down and climbed the stairs to bed.

I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Flo’s room because her cough was still troublesome. I lay down on my back and felt something move through me. My tension left me—so suddenly it was as if I had been injected with a drug—and tears rolled silently and effortlessly down my face. I was soft and supple as hot candle wax and felt strangely naked and white, as though I could see myself as the limber white heart of a candle flame. I felt so soft and straightened out and yielding it was as though, after a lifetime of twisting and looking over my shoulder continually, I had turned to look forward, unencumbered. I thought of a patient I had once seen in the backroom of an old hospital. All day, she was clenched, bent like a fetus, at the age of forty-four, unable to lift her head. If only they had gently pulled her straight at the beginning, a doctor said to me. If only they had daily pulled the spastic muscles against the drag of her deformity. It would have been hard, but possible, logical even, for her body to straighten out. By then it was too late for her: she was snapped shut as a shell on a new nut. The pale flesh of a peeled nut is what I thought of that night as I came straight. I was undressed, broken open. The tears came and came and came, quite effortlessly. I had never been so still and accepting. I fell, at last, into the deepest sleep.

The next day I hesitatingly emailed Father Gregory with what had happened. I hesitated because, although something momentous had clearly occurred, I had no idea how my experience sounded written or spoken aloud. I didn’t know what it was. Would I seem mad, or would my experience seem like nothing? It had changed me, but I didn’t know how to describe it. I even feared (typical poet) sounding cliché. But I wrote the email and received a quick response. He copied me Saint John of the Cross’ poem “The Dark Night”:

   One dark night,

     fired with love’s urgent longings

     —ah, the sheer grace!—

     I went out unseen,

     my house being now all stilled.

   In darkness, and secure,

     by the secret ladder, disguised,

     —ah, the sheer grace!—

     in darkness and concealment,

     my house being now all stilled.

   On that glad night

     in secret, for no one saw me,

     nor did I look at anything

     with no other light or guide

     than the One that burned in my heart.

nbsp;  This guided me

     more surely than the light of noon

     to where he was awaiting me

     —him I knew so well—

     there in a place where no one appeared.

   O guiding night!

     O night more lovely than the dawn!

     O night that has united

     the Lover with his beloved,

     transforming the beloved in her Lover.

   Upon my flowering breast,

     which I kept wholly for him alone,

     there he lay sleeping,

     and I caressing him

     there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

   When the breeze blew from the turret,

     as I parted his hair,

     it wounded my neck

     with its gentle hand,

     suspending all my senses.

   I abandoned and forgot myself,

     laying my face on my Beloved;

     all things ceased; I went out from myself,

     leaving my cares

     forgotten among the lilies.

He finished with, “Next Sunday it is Pentecost.” I had no idea what Pentecost was.

3

The Son

My routine changed again. I still dropped Flo at nursery school; I still stared balefully at my book research; but now I also stopped off in the little Carmelite church near Flo’s school before I picked her up at midday. I still had not prayed. In fact, even walking into a church made me sweat with self-consciousness. The church sat close to the blue sea, at the end of the road. Inside, it was modern and the buzz of some electrical system bothered me. I would walk in without crossing myself and slink noiselessly into a pew. At that time of day, the church was empty apart from one lame elderly man I sometimes saw lumbering slowly up the hill ahead of me. He would sit in the front row in silence for about ten minutes, and then leave. Through those days he nodded at me in greeting. I was awkward and embarrassed, but sitting in a church seemed a good way to try to think this whole thing through.

It was a Wednesday. Flo had gone to bed the night before with a sore throat, but I was counting on her being well so I could meet Father Gregory for our weekly chat. Sure enough she was fit enough for school in the morning, and after dropping her off, I tore down to the scruffy bar where Father Gregory was already at a table, a large piece of paper more than covering it. His hands were shaking—he hadn’t slept, he said; he had been up working on his doctorate and had had a major breakthrough.

The sheet of paper was covered with a diagram of interconnected arrows, signs and circles. It concerned the Summa, which I had never heard of, and the Creed, which I had encountered only in those moments in the Church of Saint Anne. The Articles of Faith, he was talking about, and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. He spoke fast and was so caught up in his discovery and its interconnectedness, its logic and its beauty, that though I had no way of understanding everything he was saying, I breathlessly tried to keep up, as a person does who’s trying to learn a language, nodding and guessing and pretending to know so as not to stop him from speaking. He had to go into the city, he said at last. He needed books and to see his moderator at the Angelicum—Was I okay? Where was I with everything? I don’t remember much of what I said or what else we discussed. It was an overcast day; the sea was grey as he made his way to the train station and I drove down to Via del Carmelo. I don’t think I ever had such a tremendous sense of missing something, of nostalgia, as the Italians call homesickness. But for what, I didn’t exactly know. I went into the little church, which was empty—the old lame man wasn’t there—and sat in a pew midway on the left of the aisle as I always did.

The strange calm that had come upon me that night the week before had settled into a new longing to know what to do. I was tired and wanted direction. All my long-held beliefs, the creed of my childhood, the substance of my work, had been torn up and taken from me. Anything seemed possible; it was almost unbearable. I put my feet on the kneeler and my face in my hands and wept. I felt uprooted, entirely alone. At a certain point I looked up to the stained glass window above me—it was a simple icon of Christ’s face. I heard myself speak honestly and instinctively, with no belief or unbelief: “If you’re there, you have to help me.”

Something came over me. I felt almost physically lifted up. My eyes stopped crying instantly, my face relaxed. It was like being in the grip of panicked amnesia, when suddenly someone familiar walked into the room and gave myself back to me—a self restored to me more fully than before. It was a presence entirely fixed on me as I was on it, and it both descended toward me and pulled me up. I knew it was him. This was the hinge of my life; this compassion and love and humility so great it buckled me as it came to meet me. Later, I would read in Simone Weil’s writings what seemed a very similar experience—how, as she prayerfully recited George Herbert’s poem “Love”, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

I don’t remember leaving the church or what came next—except I would have collected Flo and the day would have rolled indefatigably on with pasta and the park and dinner, where we shared news as a family. But I didn’t know how to share this—this thing that I knew, beyond any experience, had changed me forever. From that night on I prayed the Our Father, because I safely knew it was his prayer. I took to sitting and praying while gazing into a postcard icon of his face, and asking what he would have me do. It was as if the Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection were plunged into my being in one gorgeous blow—this is how it is to all of a sudden know the meaning of reality: the heart kick-started to sense its intrinsic architecture of logic, love and reason.

Then I knew how to pray. I knew because there was someone there: I knew exactly to whom I was praying. This presence, so strong that day in the church, came back to me—sometimes strongly, sometimes weaker, never for the simple asking. Disrupted nights continued, with Flo’s cough and fevers, and I often slept on a mattress on the floor beside her bed. I was sick with worry for her, and overtired after a winter of many episodes of bronchitis and wheezing. Fabio was stressed at work in Rome, and suffering the jagged nights of her coughing and my tiptoeing through the house, measuring medication was getting to be too much for him. He needed sleep, and there simply was none. I was, quite literally, on my knees by my daughter’s bed most nights, hushing and comforting her and listening to her breathing.

One night, when I lay down, I felt someone beside me. There was a feeling of being known in every cell. My aloneness was taken away from me; and though it has often since returned, I know that loneliness is the illusion and Christ beside me the reality. This was my earliest prayer: being attuned to Christ’s presence, which by grace I perceived in those early days as strongly as my daughter’s breathing or the sound of the blackbird singing at night in the garden. Prayer became essential: I still didn’t know any set prayer aside from the Our Father, and I was still very chary of speaking my own words, which I knew would be colored by both self-consciousness and lack of self-knowledge. I knew that he would know the words before I said them, and I still felt that petition, beyond that first petition of “Help me”, was trivial and selfish. But now I knew that prayer should not be done lying down (unless I was ill; unless it was in the dead of night as part of a continuous exchange with God); I knew that, if possible, I should be on my knees. Why? What I remember most is being touched—if so pale a word can describe the sensation of being broken and healed—touched that he had come to me when I had rejected him and spoken against him and published lies about him in my books. I knelt not because he asked me to, and not because I was his servant (though I am) but because it was and is the right thing to do in the face of his miraculous presence. It isn’t abasement as such, but awe—a natural response to something so mighty we know our own smallness; we sink to the earth in acknowledgment of his height. So I knelt at my bedside and Flo’s bedside and set my mind and heart on this presence I felt with me so palpably.

The mock orange had come and gone; the garden was walled in with jasmine, its scent rising like flood water in the night and filling the bedroom as we slept. The fireflies began their courting in the garden, and every night Flo tried to stay up long enough to see the miniature fire show against the dark hill behind the house. The insects burned and snuffed out, coupled, burned and snuffed out in an elaborate dance. When the nuns at the school put out a call for help to decorate the street for Corpus Domini, I took Flo along with me to lend a hand. I had no idea what the feast signified, but I was full of a new quiet curiosity. When we arrived, the nuns and some of the parents from the school were filling a long floral design drawn in chalk on the road to the sea with flower petals and ground coffee. White, yellow, pink and red petals and coffee-brown stamens were forming floor tiles of flowers. Nuns came and went with sacks of petals; Suor Amalia sat on a chair at the convent door, cutting petals loose from roses; children carried buckets of water and squeezed wet sponges over the petals already baking on the road. Did it matter, I tried to ask, which color I put where? Was there a design on paper I could follow? No one seemed to know or care—except when I began a flower in red and a young black nun marched up and pointed out, “No, no, no, it has to be yellow, see?” pointing at another flower further up the street. By the end of the morning, unbelievably, it was a symmetrical mosaic, with not a breath of wind to blur its edges.

I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t think to ask. Despite a new docility, I was still sure I could never be a Catholic. I believed in gay marriage. I saw contraception as a civilized concept and argued that sex for pleasure was what distinguished us from animals. I was still appalled by the abuse stories coming out of the Church. What I needed to do now, I thought, was go to the origins, the source, and start from the beginning.

I began reading the Gospels, fast, making notes. What struck me most was not Jesus’ love (of which I now had no doubt) but his anger. “Hypocrites,” said Christ, and “Judge not that you be not judged” and “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy” and “There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth” and “Do you still not see or understand?” Every time we read a Gospel it’s different: it never changes but we do; and despite all the love I felt, what I learned from that first reading of the Gospels was Christ’s impatience and a relentless spurring me on to grasp the whole truth.

I made a note of Matthew 6:6, where Jesus tells us to go into our room to pray in secret. So why belong to any church? I thought. Why couldn’t I just continue as I was, praying alone with my Christ? But there was some pull to decide on a church and belong: it wasn’t a social need, and it certainly wasn’t for singing and group prayer. There was a sense that there was much more to be had, though I had no idea what it was.

* * * * * *

Years before, as a student nurse, I had visited Friends House in Euston, London, on a couple of Sunday mornings. My energetic, still-working grandfather had just died very quickly from cancer. My elegant young grandmother, his wife, was in the same hospital he had died in, gravely ill. Within eighteen months both she and their son-in-law, my father, would also be dead. In the middle of what seemed an unstoppable round of diagnoses, hospitals, breath-stopping blows and death, I wanted peace. I didn’t go to Friends House to find God; I went to find that part of people’s minds that was not content with the incessant chatter and roar of London; the drinking; the pairing off; the loud laughter. Friends House was genteel, civilized and quiet. From what I knew of the Quakers, they would not condemn an atheist who was alert to the God-hole in the brain. I liked that they were pacifists; I liked the sound of the social work they did. I liked their ambivalence and their tolerance. I liked that they placed the Bible in the center of the room (like an elephant) but usually did not refer to it, and no one was asked to believe any of it. The silence was welcome, and I liked the random intercon-nectedness of what people said. But I came away feeling absolutely empty.

I thought of the Quakers now, though, and the Anglicans who ran a thriving church in Via del Babuino in Rome.

Spring was ending. The jasmine in the garden was browning at the edges of its white petals and the scent had a tinge of decay. Bougainvillea was blooming in bright punches of fuchsia, red and purple. The plums on our tree were large, green and set to turn. Father Gregory was about to leave for Canada; it was doubtful that he would return and if he did it might not be for long. We arranged that he would come for coffee to say good-bye.

We sat in the garden and I told him about my experience in the Carmelite church and the presence I still felt during prayer. I harangued him half-heartedly about contraception and homosexuality. But most of all, I confessed that I had felt some grief about his going away. I had had the fleeting thought that God himself was getting on a plane and leaving me alone again with a thousand unanswered questions.

It was this fleeting feeling of abandonment that made me understand his being in persona Christi. It didn’t take long to untangle my feelings: of course God was not going away; of course the man before me was not God. But I knew that he, as a priest, had been and was still a channel of grace. I knew this from the way he hadn’t tried to convert me but had simply remained present with me. The link between him, sitting with me now, drinking coffee in the garden and making me laugh with tales of his old monastery, and Christ, who had come to me that day in the church, was evident. It spoke loudly because it was a simple fact, and he was not a hectoring proselytizer. It was one of my first experiences of the consecrated. And it persuaded me that priests could not be female.

That was my first secular objection to Church teaching to crumble and the most straightforward and easily swept away. In the creation of the world and the creation of the Church, it was already becoming apparent to me that there existed a deliberate and poetic structure that was not man-made. I was learning that as brides of Christ we are penetrated by him—just as I had been that day in the church. God sent a Son to penetrate us. He sent me his Son. I could not second guess why he did not send a daughter or a hermaphrodite—which he could certainly have done if he had willed it. But he sent a Son, and he chose men to follow him in that priestly role. The Church, I was realizing, even from the outside, was a poem, and a poem that contained much of the masculine and much of the feminine. To change a symbol would be damaging because symbols in the Church do more than represent, they are—just as Mary is our Mother, and cannot be represented by a man with a mothering side. I knew Jesus was not afraid of overturning the conventions of his time: he didn’t abide by the rules of the Sabbath; he taught women; he consorted with prostitutes and publicans. He broke enough rules to be crucified. Why would he have balked at having a woman among his Twelve? Why should I balk now at a structure—historical, literary, biological, and supernatural—that was the ultimate poem?

“Would you be happy if I became an Anglican?” I asked Father Gregory.

“No. Definitely not.”

He left for Canada and I walked the garden in the evenings, for the first time finding the name for the passionflowers tangled in their whips and thorns that appeared up and down the hedge—so beautiful I had always thought them poisonous. I gathered purple plums from the tree—four or five pounds a day—and set to making plum jam, despite the heat. And as I stirred the sticky mixture and the house filled with the scent of hot fruit and sugar, I read Saint John of the Cross.

Through that summer I picked, with haste, books I sensed, and that Father Gregory advised, could explain the fundaments of Christianity to me. Saint John of the Cross because of the poem Father Gregory sent to me, but also because the notion of the Dark Night has become so imbued in our culture. A poet and a mystic, he could show me the ineffable God so very far from the bearded puppet master of late buses and lucky breaks. And he did. I raced up Mount Carmel, underlining, making notes, and headed through “The Dark Night of the Soul”, and all the poems. Here was the dark sea I had begun to listen to that very first spring night. Here was the unknowable blackness, the God whose thoughts we cannot reduce to our own. Here was the God I still would not petition, only love and long for, and give up my desires to. Here was Christ, the face of God I loved so fiercely I would sit before the small icon with tears raining down my face and ask: What shall I do? What do you want me to do?

Saint John of the Cross took me to Teresa of Avila, whose life story I read. Then to Julian of Norwich, who led me yet more deeply into understanding the love of God. I read Augustine’s Confessions and was glad to find that my old preoccupations about the bearded God in the sky had had to be resolved in him as well.

I made thirty jars of jam, and the purple plums were through. But our tree was a hybrid and now came the yellow: smaller but sweeter and just as abundant. I gathered and cooked and read. I took jars to Cristina and her family, who would shortly be leaving for their long summer in the States. Cristina was always ready to listen.

What was becoming apparent was that the Catholics had the mystics, the poets, the doctors of the Church, the saints, the art, the Mass several times a day around the world in many languages. It was a universe of formal beauty. And something else.

“I wish I could find a loophole in Catholic rules,” I moaned, watching her stirring a big pot on the stove. “Can I become a Catholic and not agree with the stuff on contraception and homosexuality?”

“No,” she said gently, walking out of the room. It was striking how gentle she always was when talking about religion although she was naturally strident and fiery when discussing current affairs. She came back with Man and Woman: He Created Them by John Paul II and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I flicked through them glumly but took them home.

I found John Paul II’s writing circuitous and hard to follow. The catechism appalled me. Cristina called me a day or two later and asked me how I was getting on with it.

“It made me want to throw up,” I told her. “It’s like a Nazi handbook. It’s destroyed any chance there ever was of my becoming Catholic.”

There was a crestfallen silence on the end of the phone.

Soon she left for the United States, and Flo and I departed for a summer holiday in England. Father Gregory wrote from Canada to say he had stumbled across books by someone called Simone Weil in a used bookshop in Saskatoon, and she put him in mind of me. I bought Weil’s Letter to a Priest and Gravity and Grace to take with me on my trip. Here was a young woman who hungered for Christ from the moment he came to her. But she, like me, had felt her place was outside the Church in solidarity with those excluded.

Father Gregory and I argued on about Church teaching by email. One day, he simply asked me: “If you love him so much, isn’t it simply a matter of putting on the mind of Christ and becoming like him?”

I saw the logic, but I was still getting to know him, still getting close to him, and it was that that was consuming me.

* * * * * *

My days in London that summer I carried around Simone Weil, Josef Pieper and the Gospels. London, after so many years away, was always a shock: the walls of traffic, their roar, the frantic unstoppable tread of so many feet, the noise of talk and engines, the lights. The Santa Marinella smells of sea, fish and garbage were replaced by grit, beer and exhaust. At every corner through Westminster I saw a ghost of my old self—sitting on a curb with a drink; lying on the grass in Soho Square with a boyfriend; walking with a dementia patient through Leicester Square; going to a poetry reading in Covent Garden. But nothing looked the same. When I glimpsed three men in black walking together in Soho I thought that they were priests—until I looked again and saw that they were gay men in tight black T-shirts. What had been my wallpaper years before was alien now, even shocking: sex shops and peep shows cheek by jowl with coffee bars and newsagents. Rome disclosed a Madonna at every corner, above many window ledges; every other street had a church with its dark dimensions and sense of opening into another world. London was muscularly secular. Nothing was sacred. The empty plinth in Trafalgar Square with its changing display of sculpture summed up London—everything was up for grabs, nothing was forever, there was an audience anywhere if you could shock enough. London was grit and luxury: street food, sensual beats, rich fabrics, shoes to die for, the gloss of Regent Street windows. I felt restless, alienated.

I met an old friend from the days of poetry workshops and boyfriends and copious amounts of red wine on hot evenings. We went into a pub in Soho and ordered wine. It was harsh and vinegary. “I’m from Italy; I can’t drink this,” I told the bartender, and he tipped it out and poured me another from a bottle under the bar.

My friend and I sat outside on the curb in Carlisle Street in the gritty heat. She smoked. She had a way of holding the cigarette and pulling at her thick hair and twisting her long legs together that made everything she said very tense and considered. Men found her very sexy, but they rarely stuck around. She was telling me about a new man. There had been emails, a few phone calls, a trip to the theatre. We analyzed every look and word. Did he like her? He had emailed again twice: What did that mean? He hadn’t called that night: So he’s not interested? A low red sports car cruised down the street, a woman in a miniskirt walking ahead of it (like one of those men who would walk in front of the early cars with a flag), throwing packets of condoms at people on the pavements.

I had sat on that same curb the summer before I moved to Italy, I said. Steve (not his real name) had driven me around London at night on his motorbike and we had made a pit stop right there. Steve had been my attempt at a one-night stand. When my American boyfriend ditched me, my friends, sitting at a round table at a cafe near Saint James’ Park, had insisted I have a transitional hook-up. Without it I would be completely unable to move on, a chic and worldly journalist friend told me. Was peer pressure ever so easily succumbed to? It was more than that, though. I had decided, at age twenty-nine, that I wanted to marry and have children. I had spent a decade of dating and falling hard for men who didn’t want a relationship. I thought I had missed the point of sex—surely I should be able to wrest my sexuality away from love and fear and bonding, and just have a good time? It was what the post-feminist culture had raised me to believe. Even my uncle, when he asked me about the notches on my bedpost, winced when I gave a single figure. “Better do something about that, Sal.”

So, like children in a toy shop, we set about picking out who should share my bed. Steve, another regular in those bars, an ex-stockbroker of Italian parentage, was tall and dark-eyed, and often stayed on the outside of the hard laughter to look into his drink or smile conspiratorially. I invited him over to dinner in my new rooms in Mornington Place. We sat by my gas fire and I read him some of my poems. We drank too much. He told me he had given up the financial markets because it made him aggressive—he would swear and yell at other drivers. The chocolate mousse was too frozen to eat, so I blasted it in the microwave and turned it into a chocolate puddle. We roared. We ended the meal, as we both knew we would, by going to bed.

The body is its own thing; it’s in cahoots with the soul far more than the mind. I willed my own caprice and disposable sensuality; my body played dead like a hunted beast. My eyes widened and smiled, my mouth beckoned. But my body battened its hatches and cried over lost loves. “It’s okay,” said my lips. But the rest of my body, all my senses, sank deep into myself, just as blood pools at the core in extreme cold. I was like a girl in her coat, suddenly chilly and sober beneath the glitter ball in a loud dance hall, wanting to go home. He saw that I was bony and unyielding in his arms and the evidence of one tear. “It’s no good,” we both said. And because he was kind he kissed my forehead and held me, chastely, all night.

I didn’t hear from him for months, until, one night, he turned up at my flat at midnight, with a spare motorbike helmet in his hand. “Come on,” he said, “I’m leaving for Tuscany tomorrow. Before I go, come for a ride on my bike.” It was one of those things—like one-night stands and nude modeling—that at the time I thought I should do before I married and had children.

I never knew London was so small. We rode down from Camden, into Trafalgar Square, down by the Thames, by Parliament and Big Ben, all lit up in small orange lights against the black. We went by Hyde Park, the South Bank, the Eye and the City in the space of minutes. He shouted to me that I had to lean in to the corners—taking myself further down to the road—not fight against them, as that would destabilize the bike. I could barely bring myself to do it. My fingers were white from cold and hanging onto his black leather jacket so tight. Soon we stopped at an all-night Italian cafe on the river and ate cakes. By the end of the night, we were in Soho on that curb, and he was saying, “I’m sorry about that night. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

I was shocked he would apologize (in all my years of dating and men hurting me in various ways, I had never been apologized to).

“No,” I told him honestly. “It was my fault.”

“Come to Tuscany for a stay. There are lemon trees in the garden.”

I laughed and told him I would get my lemon trees some other way.

There are many other stories, far more brutal and persuasively against casual sex, that I could tell—and I wrote many brutal poems about them. What makes this one worth recording here is that it confirmed in me, finally, that I could not play the permissive game. Perhaps that was why I got married and went to Italy another way.

Now, my friend sitting next to me on that curb turned to me and abruptly grabbed my wrist: “How do you convert? Convert me! What do I have to do? Just tell me!”

“Go into a church,” I told her. It was an inadequate thing to say. But I didn’t know what else to tell her. I was aware of her pain and the pain of Soho with its loud ether of music and light all around me. I thought that without Christ I wouldn’t know how to walk, how I ever had walked. I had already sent my friend some Simone Weil by email:

God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his, he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.

I remembered my friend’s reply: “Oh God, it sounds like every man I’ve ever been with.”

That summer in London, there was the most immense hunger in me that I barely knew how to go about satiating. The best I could do (and it was a mighty best) was stumble through the day from prayer to prayer. At home, I knelt in my mother’s white bathroom, or in the dark of my bedroom, and prayed the Lord’s Prayer and a consecration to the Sacred Heart that Cristina sent me in June. Taking my cue from Saint John of the Cross’ meditation on the Song of Songs, in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, I also prayed, “Lord let me set you as a seal upon my heart. Lord let me set you as a seal upon my arm.” I knew that my passions, my passion to love and find truth, must strike him at my heart and nothing else, and then my love would increase and he would increase in me. I longed to receive Christ in the Eucharist. Transubstantiation, the Real Presence of Christ in the Host, was something I had easily, I would say instinctively, understood. Even long ago, during the discussions with a priest before my wedding—which was Catholic to please my new Italian family—I had understood it intellectually, even though I did not believe in God. It was a poet’s logic, “truer than truth” is what I recall the priest saying, though I can’t be sure if those are the exact words he used. Since I had encountered Christ in the Host and knew that Presence as real, I wanted him physically close. When I told this to Father Gregory he sent me the words for a Spiritual Communion, and I made it every day.

Mel and I spent two days together later that summer in London. We had been best friends for so long—since we were thirteen—that we knew each other skin by skin, and our visits were always bent on sorting, analyzing, finding ways ahead in our lives. She knew I wanted to talk of nothing else but the conversion, and we headed for Saint James’ Anglican Church in Piccadilly. The garden was busy with a market (“What would Christ have made of this?”) but inside the ancient grey church there was peace and vacancy. I read her parts of Simone Weil and talked about Weil’s terminal reluctance to enter the Church, despite her yearning for Christ. I ranted on about the abuse in the Church, the lack (as I saw it then) of social concern. After a good hour in that quiet space Mel said in her quiet way that somehow ripped through to the truth, “If you care so much about the Catholic Church and see so much wrong with it, is it really the best thing to remain on the outside of it?”

A troupe of women came in for a meeting and set about choreographing some kind of dance down the aisle, waving their arms gracefully through the air. I said I couldn’t think or pray with that going on, so we exited in a hurry, leaving my jacket behind. When we went back to collect it some hours later a man, whom I took to be a vicar, went to fetch it for me cheerfully.

“We’re about to have a service. Why don’t you stay?” he asked me and Mel.

We looked at each other, and I refused.

“Oh well,” he said and gave us a leaflet.

It was very welcoming, very English, very friendly. I remember its inclusiveness most of all—whatever your faith or none, whatever your sexual orientation. Perhaps it was akin to Jesus’ hanging out with the tax collectors and the prostitutes. Certainly it embraced the excluded about whom I was so concerned. But for some reason it didn’t convince me—perhaps because that kind of inclusion is so ubiquitous in British society today and doesn’t seem to lead to God. It turned me off. I was hungry, yearning. I sensed that there was something monolithic, something tangible, that I was headed for. Something that had no need to sell itself. Something that would pull anyone in without a leaflet.

Mel left me the next day still confused. I had more errands to run before I went home to Suffolk. As I wandered in and out of bookshops and telephoned old friends, another recollection came back to me—a friend who had dragged me into the ladies’ room of a pub to tell me she was pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t want the child and neither, really, did she. Not now. After the abortion her boyfriend picked her up from hospital and took her to a shop where they bought video games; then they went home to play them. Thinking of this and other stories from those years—my own and those of friends—I was astonished at so much pain. Desertions, abortions, addictions, near rapes and actual rapes, mental illness and breakdown. I thought of the Jewish doctor. The vertiginous capacity I had had for pain and longing that I would later find echoed and met only in the Psalms and the Song of Songs.

The iconic book of my twenties, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was the first I had heard of the Song of Songs. That book stole God’s poetry for us as his bride, and used it for an earthbound, excruciatingly painful relationship. Now I was learning that the infinite reach of that type of desperate love cannot be assuaged by men, only by God. I was encountering his poetry in its literal truth.

     Upon my bed by night

       I sought him whom my soul loves;

I kept thinking I glimpsed the Jewish doctor cruising beside me in his red car: “Are you going home?”

     I sought him, but found him not;

I remembered buying lingerie to wear with one boyfriend, with a deep and narrow sense of uneasiness. When I had wandered, silk clad and soft, into his bedroom, he had barely glanced at me. He was spending all his time on the Internet, he confessed. An hour of watching porn was turning into a day, then days. One willing young woman in silk wasn’t going to do it for him anymore.

     I called him, but he gave no answer.

I began to look for a Catholic church to sit inside. It wasn’t easy. Each church I came to—and there weren’t many—was shut. Even in my home town in Suffolk, the Catholic church was shut that summer for the heating system to be replaced. I thought of Father Gregory singing the psalms alone in Saint George’s Cathedral in Saskatoon. How miraculous to walk into a church and find someone singing that thread of prayer and human consciousness that defines our existence. I walked up to Soho Square with the confident recollection of the long darkness of Saint Patrick’s opening out onto the street.

     “I will rise now and go about the city,

I saw an old poet friend slouched at a café table on my way. How could I tell him how I was? How could I explain? I remembered his calling me many years before to tell me he had slept with a mutual acquaintance whom he disliked intensely.

“But you can’t stand her!”

“Oh well, Sal, you know how it is. Sometimes men are like dogs; they’ve just got to have it.”

     in the streets and in the squares;

     I will seek him whom my soul loves.”

I walked on to Saint Patrick’s, with some urgency. I knew I would find Christ, as I had that day in the Carmelite church. I needed that presence. I knew about transubstantiation, I knew about the presence I felt in Catholic churches, but I didn’t know about looking for a lit red candle at a tabernacle. I just felt as though I was running to see someone I had been missing for a very long time. I crossed the square. The door that I had always seen open onto darkness was shut. There was a notice: Closed for renovation.

     I sought him, but found him not.

I was winded with disappointment. I had to begin to make my way to Liverpool Street, to the old 7:00 P.M. and home to my daughter who was waiting for me. I took the tube with some time to spare—I seemed to remember, from days in Spitalfields Market, that there were a few churches around the station. I would walk until I found one and hope it was Catholic. It was the early evening of a hot summer’s day. People were already spilling out of the pubs and cafes, drinking and laughing. I felt like a stranger. I found a church, but it was being used as an art gallery. Another was available for private hire.

     The watchmen found me,

       as they went about in the city.

     “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”

(Song 3:1-3)

The laughter seemed louder. I had no more streets to walk down, and time was moving on. I headed back into the bright lights and the quick, rushing tread of Liverpool Street station. I bought a newspaper: I don’t remember exactly what the headline story was, but I do remember it was full of terrible human cruelty. I sat down on the steps outside the newsagents and knew that I was already Catholic.

4

The Church

At the end of summer, Santa Marinella had the worn out, overblown look of a party girl the morning after. The streets were dirty with trash and trodden petals. The smooth blue bay of the main beach had been bathed in by hundreds of people day after day, and its clear waters were misty with sun lotion and churned-up muck. We were back, Flo and I, to Fabio, to another school year, and I, with my heart lucid and focused, was back to reading.

This time I went to Thomas Aquinas, though I knew he would be difficult. And, aside from my brush with him in the run-down bar, the only time I had heard his name was in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh, and as the middle name of one of the little Catholic Americans—“James Thomas Aquinas, c’m’ere!” his mom would yell down the promenade.

He was difficult, Aquinas, but I ploughed on, underlining and combing through. From him, his sense and his calm syllogisms, I began to understand how love was inextricable from logic and rationality. The catechism read differently to me now, just three months on. I appreciated the dicey endeavor of crystallizing God’s will into words and numbered passages. I saw that language is often inadequate when describing God, angels, prophecy and the afterlife, but that God speaks to us as his children in images, words and stories to help us to comprehend what we can never fully comprehend in this life—the final and most comprehensible Word being Jesus Christ himself. No one argued me down from any of my “liberal” or “progressive” positions, but the logic of Christ’s love was penetrating deeper and deeper into my heart. I was aware of being known as I never had been before. He knew me beyond the limits of my life and certainly beyond the limits of my self-knowledge. He knew me as an eternal soul, but also as a physical and sexual being. It astonished me, even then, to think I had ever thought of the Church as sexually repressive. In Western post-feminist culture, with its obsession with pornography and extreme sexual acts, normal women, in the eyes of some men, are diminished, certainly boring, almost rendered obsolete. The Church made me feel the reverse—fully human, fully a woman; sensual and potent in my very ordinariness.

Almost without my realizing it, my old objections to Church teaching had fallen away. I had already, by faith, understood the Eucharist. The other sacraments (like marriage—the union of one man and one woman) now had my faith and understanding too. They are God reaching his hand down to us in seven ways. I wanted to grasp him, unequivocally, each time.

When Flo was back in school we collected the leaves that had begun to fall from the plum tree in the afternoons to make collages and wax rubbings. She crayoned their patterned undersides through paper and turned their skeleton structure into fish bones. I told her again the story I had told her from her birth, about how I had climbed to the top of the plum tree before she was born to wrestle her away from an angel in the sky. I got her from him, but his hand that had clutched her so tightly left a small brown handprint on her shoulder. It was a way of explaining a birthmark, and she couldn’t get enough of it. Now, though, I was telling her, too, that angels were neither male nor female and in fact had no bodies at all. Both of us were seeing that everything was connected in the ladder of being, from angels to little girls to fish and dry brown leaves, and I was seeing ever more clearly how the Church, as I had come to see also in Saint Augustine, is like a poem: step outside the meter, the rhyme scheme, the scansion, the range of metaphor, and you lose its life.

The other man with a terrible reputation for being a dry old stick, Benedict XVI, I also read. When he was elected pope I was at my most anti-Church, and I howled with laughter at this severe-looking German with the dark gaze. His writing, I now found, was truthful and incisive to the point of being poetic. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, I found evidence for my sense of the Mass being the ultimate poem. It also confirmed in me that to get close to Christ I had to let him into me—not solely through mental prayer and actions, but by physically taking him into my body. There is nothing empty in God’s poetry; nothing is mere metaphor.

Fabio was beginning to view the change in me as something permanent. He began joking about grace before every meal, intoning it in an ironic Gregorian chant. But gradually I could see his irony wearing out. Once, I overheard him tell a friend about the positive changes in me. Sometimes though, he would throw my new faith in my face: time spent in prayer was used as an example of my uselessness and selfishness, and also of hypocrisy if I failed to make someone a cup of tea or lost my temper. For a while, he proclaimed himself an atheist, as though this were just another fight and we had to take sides. But loss of faith in Italian society is still largely coupled with Catholic-favored superstition: my husband crossed himself and squeezed his testicles at the sight of a hearse. He was lightning-quick to invoke God, Christ, Mary and many saints in rage. His blasphemy, as with many Italians, was lurid and shocking—but in Italy the presence of God, the echo of faith, runs deep. Soon he was crossing himself before eating with no protest or joke.

There was one very important email to write now—to Father Gregory, who would after all be returning to Rome to finish his doctorate. I began with telling him how I was: bent double with a chest infection and a wracking cough that was keeping me up all night. The iodine-filled air of Santa Marinella is famous for its curative properties—but it seemed to make us all sick too. Then I told him I had decided to become a Catholic, but would he please not tell anyone yet? He wrote straight back, full of concern about my bronchitis: Had I seen a doctor, was I going to the shore regularly to breathe the sea air? Underneath he wrote a PS: “I won’t whisper it to a soul.”

When he returned from Canada I wanted very specific things from him: instruction that would enable me to enter the Church and a parish that would receive me—as he didn’t have a parish, he couldn’t organize it himself. I was, oddly, already baptized into the Church of England. When my mother was young, baptism was required for things like teacher training courses, and she herself had had to be baptized in her teens so as not to be excluded from various life choices. So we were all baptized as babies—part of a still-existing social rite of passage for nonreligious British families. My mother says I screamed incessantly for the first eight weeks of my life and continued to do so in the church. “She’ll stop crying so much after the baptism,” the vicar told her. “It often happens that way.” To my mother’s irritation, he was right. Already baptized as a Christian, I needed to be received into the Catholic Church, to be confirmed, and to have my First Communion. I discovered that in Italy it took two years of classes to become a Catholic—perhaps nine months if I could convince anyone I was simply crossing over from Anglicanism (which I plainly was not). I wasn’t prepared to wait. Father Gregory would admit to me much later that my intention to become Catholic nearly threw him off his chair in surprise. But he understood that after a lifetime of lacking Christ in the Eucharist, I could barely wait another day.

Every serious convert faces concrete changes in his life. Those who are married know that if they are driven to a separation, remarriage is not an option, unless the first marriage is found to be null. People who have same-sex attraction will be choosing a life of celibacy. Dorothy Day, that famous convert, gave up Forster, the love of her life, to enter the Church and remained celibate the rest of her days. And it’s not just sex that’s affected. A writer friend asked me, “Don’t you feel stifled? All narratives now boiled down to just one?” Another writer friend wrote me: “Freedom is most important to a writer. You can’t be enslaved by a doctrine.” I admit that I was concerned—not concerned, curious—about what would become of my writing, but I had never felt freer, both personally and creatively. I could hold to truths, and these truths held dimensions unacknowledged or simply denied by contemporary culture. The weight of what we had to give God to live in that truth did not surprise or trouble me. I was running toward him breathing, Tell me what you want me to do.

Back in Italy I was able to run to Christ whenever I wanted to, and I had immediately begun attending Mass at the largest parish in town. It seemed complicated—when to stand or sit, and what the responses were—but I set about learning. And at the Consecration of the Host, the reality of Christ’s presence would jolt me—sometimes to tears, always to a pitch of longing. Most Sunday Masses at San Giuseppe were packed, and I saw other people’s reaction to the Consecration. Some either didn’t know what was happening or simply didn’t believe—they would whisper throughout; occasionally a cell phone rang. Sometimes I would be struck by a person kneeling and praying intently. During one Consecration, an old Roman lady behind me in fur coat and diamond rings breathed huskily through the eucharistic prayers, “Signore mio e Dio mio, Signore mio e Dio mio, Signore mio e Dio mio.” I usually sat near the back: I feared being asked to read, or betraying my ignorance. I seemed attuned, then, to the reasons, the emotions, and the feelings of anyone who came into the church, particularly those who, like me, stayed in the last pews. One man with the leathery skin of an alcoholic, tattoos, dirty hair and torn jeans glanced around shiftily before taking his place across the aisle from me. He didn’t look at home; he looked as if he desperately needed to feel at home. He scuttled out long before Communion. Others, often men, would stand near the door and drift in and out for cigarettes—they crossed themselves and kissed a knuckle that they batted in the direction of the altar, but never knelt. One woman with red eyes looked as if she was summoning up the strength to kneel, but she drifted toward the daylight coming through the open door and was away. I don’t see those people anymore. I have to remind myself to look for them.

Back in Cristina’s kitchen, my decision was met with shock, delight and relief, but there were also some murmurs of concern that I was intent on skipping the course. Cristina’s sister taught catechism in Texas and sent a message to say that those two years weren’t just about acquiring knowledge and understanding (which Father Gregory was certainly taking care of), they also helped a person to integrate into a parish and to understand his part in the community. I saw the reason in this, and I would never advocate the course be skipped. To say I didn’t need to go through it sounds like arrogance, and perhaps it is. It was as if, though, a taproot, even a whole root system, had been growing in and through me unnoticed for years, and was now ineradicable—more, was ready for a blossoming. It was as if the lifting of the amnesia that Christ cured me of when he came to me in the church that day, beckoned me immediately back to my real life. To bar me from that would have been like telling a person with a recovered memory that no, he couldn’t go home.

At Cristina’s there were other changes too, as we discussed my decision and plotted ways to get me into the Church: Cristina was pregnant again with baby number four, though Giulia, the eldest, was only four. This time her back was hurting badly, and both Andrew and Sophia were still in diapers and needed a lot of looking after. There were many logistical things to talk through—who would sleep where; how would Cristina walk to the shops with a double buggy and all four children; could they afford a dishwasher?

Matt, her husband, would come in after studying at the Biblicum in Rome, tired and crumpled from the train, pick up a child and pour himself a vodka and coke simultaneously, and insist Flo and I stay to eat with them if Fabio was working late. Who could get me into the Church? We all wracked our brains as Andrew clutched handfuls of popcorn in his high chair and Flo and Giulia tore up and down the hallway. Matt asked professors and priests he knew, but the answer was always the same: she must do a two-year course.

Father Gregory was also working on it but, equally, getting nowhere. Nevertheless, we began my more formal instruction in earnest, beginning with the Old Testament. At tables pushed together at the run-down bar, Father Gregory spread out a chart the size of a double bedspread showing connections from the Old and the New Testaments, timelines, geneaology, tropes and symbols. Unlike Simone Weil, I was to be under no illusion as to the cohesion of Old and New Testaments and the consistency of God’s will from the beginning. I was given homework and each session began with an interrogation: Who was Seth’s father? When did the Levitical priesthood come about? What were the “works of the law”? Why did they cease with the gospel? What is the priesthood of Christ? I would sputter and squint as he badgered, “Well, did you read it or not?”

That autumn there was yet another great change. Father Gregory, who had left Ukraine because of threats to his life, was to become a hermit. Like most people, I had little idea what being a hermit meant, but I felt that I would be losing him to an even greater solitude and darkness.

In a sense, we had met standing in the ashes of the reeking human defects of the Church. My own disgust at Church corruption that spring had come up against this man who had fought corruption, both in the Church and in society, firsthand—and it was a fight that almost killed him. In Ukraine, he was threatened with being burnt alive in his car (a favored method of murder by the Ukrainian Mafia at that time) if he didn’t leave the country. He didn’t leave at first. He told me his great fear was for his driver, who had a family, and he didn’t want to desert his post as head of the Basilian Order. Like any serious Christian, he wondered if this was to be his cross, and he didn’t want to climb down unless he was sure he should. Two weeks after that first call, he received a second one: this time with a promise that the threat would be carried out two weeks from that day. Once again, Father Gregory informed his superiors. The Canadian embassy wrote immediately to urge him to leave the country at once, but there was still no word from Rome. Those days of waiting were still visible on his face, in his words and manner, when we first began to meet. It is one thing to contemplate death; it’s another to contemplate the inhumanity of people who are ready to kill you.

Eight days before the threat was to be carried out, an email came ordering him back to Rome. He arrived in the city he had studied in, on and off, for so many years, with only a small amount of money he had requested from the monastery bursar in his pocket—no place to live, no role. He walked the streets of the city for days, unable to stay still, sitting in piazzas, moving from church to church. He put me in mind of Lazarus, after his trembling exit from the tomb. There is the relief and the glory of being saved, but no one talks about the burden of knowledge you bring back with you into the world. Being saved in body isn’t the end of praying for resurrection.

Father Gregory moved into a monastery on the Aventine, and then out to Santa Marinella, where he decided to lie low and finish his doctorate. He walked miles a day; he couldn’t be still. Some religious who witness corruption, bullying or abuse in the Church end up questioning their faith. They cannot understand, as I couldn’t when I heard of the Irish abuse stories, that something so evil can happen in a religious environment. Romano Guardini described the failings of the Church as the Cross on which Christ is nailed. Father Gregory told me that he didn’t ever question his faith or consider, even for a moment, leaving the Church. “Ukraine is a wounded country,” he said, “and religious aren’t exempt from being wounded.”

We stood on the Liberty-style promenade, where we had had all those coffees, the day before he was to profess his vows as a hermit. The sun was still strong in early October, and the pressing blue of the sea made the town seem small and the sea a vast mass on which we were floating.

He was full of stories of journeys that day, and in a different mood—less of the guarded priest, and more someone who wanted to joke and to talk about his past before he moved on. One thing was becoming clear to me: he knew all about the deep, unkillable life of the Church. As a young priest-monk from Canada, he had been sent from Rome—where he had learned to speak fluent Ukrainian—into Soviet-controlled Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was just beginning to emerge, stealthily, from hiding. He rode the train from Rome to Kiev with Bibles and cash strapped to his body under his habit; the Bibles were useful for bribing the guards who found the cash—they fingered them eagerly and tucked them away under their jackets. The train was stiflingly hot back then; the windows were nailed shut to prevent people from getting on and off where they shouldn’t. Guards walked up and down the carriages pouring boiling tea into glass cups with metal holders, and the people sucked it through a sugar cube clenched between their front teeth. At night, he would be awoken by a jolt when the train lifted off the European train tracks and swung clunkingly onto the old Soviet gauge. Then he would fall asleep as the train adjusted to its new rhythm and went on its way.

It was the early nineties. Ukrainian priests, bishops and faithful had been executed by the Soviets in the hundreds. Divine Liturgy was said in secret, in private homes, but slowly, Ukrainian Catholicism was becoming visible again. When he first arrived as a young monk, he told me, as he walked through Kiev in his long black cassock the people simply stared at him. They stuck their heads out of the shops with empty shelves and gaped. An old lady came and took his hand, led him to her front step and gave him spoonfuls of thick honey from a jar.

He lived in the old Communist Party school at first and attended Divine Liturgy in the botanical gardens that surrounded the shut-down Vydubysk’yj monastery while members of the Orthodox Church would circle and catcall and jeer as they prayed. Through the Soviet era, churches were used as tractor sheds. When the monks retook them, they found oil all over the floor and filthy altars that had been used as workbenches. The monasteries were derelict and infested with rats. When he eventually moved into one he would find bread gnawed by rat teeth in the kitchen in the morning. Some of the monks simply cut off the end and ate the rest for breakfast. There was only one way to cull the rats, one old monk told him: capture one, plunge a knife into its eyes, then throw it, screaming, into the cellar. A blinded rat will eat its brethren, he said.

Most of all, he remembered the golden sun against the golden domes of Saint Sofia as he explored the streets that first day in Kiev, people staring at him as though he were a ghost. His recollection was so vivid, it was almost as if I remembered it too. I saw him: thin, uncertain, blinking at this new reality as though he himself had been living underground.

He had stumbled, too, into Santa Marinella, after his exodus from Ukraine. Now he would become part of a Canadian eparchy, though he intended to stay in Santa Marinella and live as a hermit while he finished his doctorate. He would be giving himself to God, as hermit, teacher and contemplative. I felt as though he would be receding into some deeper darkness; there was a sense of finality.

Fabio was willing for me to go to Father Gregory’s profession of vows in Rome. He even took the day off work to look after Flo. God was beginning to go unremarked in our house, though I could see that Fabio was watchful, still unsure of the endgame.

My days alone in Rome were so scarce that I could hardly believe the sense of freedom. I was sure that Flo would get sick at the last minute or Fabio would be called into work. By 7:00 A.M. on the day, both my husband and daughter began to complain about sore throats. I bid them a hasty good-bye, before they could ask me to stay behind, and set off for the train, though the ceremony wasn’t for another four hours.

It was October 8 and still blindingly sunny in Rome. When Cristina called me to see if I made it in, I was already on the 64 bus at 8:30 A.M., just crossing the Tiber. I had hours to spare. I walked the narrow street of Via Giulia, looking into little shops with ukuleles and dark oil paintings and old polished furniture in the windows. I found the cramped piazza and the tall dark Church of Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini, where Father Gregory was to make his vows. I wandered the still cool morning, staring at the tall ceilings of lit interiors and the umbrella pines’ emerald fists against the cornflower blue sky.

By 10:30 I was back at the church and walked into absolute emptiness. I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. Then Father Gregory stepped out of the sacristy, dressed in his long black cassock. He came to greet me and led me to the front of the church, where a young woman in a veil was on her hands and knees arranging and pinning a large black rug decorated with a gold cross and golden skulls at each corner to symbolize his imminent death to the world. Some nuns arrived, and some students from the university. Sitting in the front pew, it occurred to me that not only was I not Catholic, I had never been to the Byzantine Divine Liturgy.

I knelt and tried to pray. In reality I was in a prayer. A priest and two men sang the responses in a deep chant. The language of the prayers explicated and etched on air the multitudes present in every Mass or Liturgy—the “thousands of archangels and tens of thousands of angels, the cherubim and seraphim, six-winged and many-eyed hovering aloft on their wings. Singing, crying, exclaiming, and saying the triumphal hymn: Holy, holy, holy. . .”

I had no clue when to kneel or to stand, and as I was at the front of the church I had no one to copy. I tried to spy on the veiled woman in the periphery of my vision. The bishop, large as a bear and larger still with his golden domed hat, hove toward me with a thick red Bible. I pleaded with my eyes, “What do I do?”

“Kiss it,” he whispered kindly.

Father Gregory knelt before him, and the bishop cut a lock of his hair. Then Father Gregory prostrated himself on the floor, his arms cruciform, his black cowl covering his head. The black skull rug was lowered onto him as he descended into the tomb to leave behind worldliness, material possessions and the passions that consume, distract and distort us. I prayed, though I didn’t know for what. I prayed as I knew how to in the earliest days of my conversion, a simple listening to that dark sea. I saw blackness in my clasped hands, but then streaks of gold from the stories I had heard: the sun on bright domes in Kiev; a spoon of thick orange honey.

After the ceremony, there was a merry air, a catharsis. We all went out to lunch and laughed and joked like people who had been through something huge—a birth, a fire, a production of Hamlet with no rehearsal. “Christ’s wounds are clean and open,” Father Gregory had said to me before. Nothing had been left behind now, but everything had been resolved into a new way of being with God. As we toasted the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs, he was lighthearted, as if he knew, now, where to tread. And if I had thought this new death, this new life, meant he would be deserting me, I was wrong. “Now,” he said, on the train back to Santa Marinella, “now we have to find a way to get you into the Church.”

If he had had a parish, he would have done the deed himself, he said. But, though I had little grasp of it at the time, I was destined to be a Latin Rite Catholic. Though I was bowled over by the beauty of the Byzantine Liturgy and at that time would have gladly taken it for my own, later I would be more and more aware of how the words of the Mass and the Rosary formed part of my unconscious history. Despite the atheists, the Orangemen and the Anglicans who were my ancestors, deep in the thick low branches of a British family tree there are always Catholics. I could almost hear the Hail Marys of my great great great, so many great grandmothers, adumbrating through this strange interruption of faith.

Almost at the point at which we felt hopeless about any imminent entry to the Church, Father Gregory had one of his regular meetings with his moderator at the Angelicum University: Father, as he then was, Charles Morerod. They went out for coffee, and Father Gregory told him about me and our quest to have me received into the Church. Father Morerod immediately called his friend Cardinal Georges Cottier, who agreed to do the job himself. Afterward, Father Gregory called me from Rome and we danced for joy, it seemed, he in the street and I in my kitchen. I had to meet with Father Morerod first, and we had to find a church and a date. The lines of Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Birthday” ran through my mind constantly in those days:

     My heart is like a singing bird

     Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

     My heart is like an apple-tree

     Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;

     My heart is like a rainbow shell

     That paddles in a halcyon sea;

     My heart is gladder than all these,

     Because my love is come to me.

Fabio was more measured. He was heartened by my becoming normalized, to some degree, to Italian culture. When it came to practical issues, such as getting to Rome for meetings, he backed me up. But we were a way from discussing the more profound changes within me. They felt a little like the changes I had gone through when I was pregnant that had somehow created distance between us—how does one convey those things? It’s also true, however, that I was chary of talking openly about the intensity of my prayer life or love of Christ. I had no idea what was normal, what I should tell (and I was, even at that point, wondering what I should write). But Fabio was showing me why I had married him: the indissolubility of the sacrament that bound us had echoes in his character. He exploded, he raged at times, but he didn’t break. My mother’s reaction was less phlegmatic. We hadn’t discussed the issue of religion since I told her, that preceding spring, of my new belief in God. Religion to her, daughter of a Northern Irish lapsed Protestant, meant only violence and division. Other people’s reactions were characterized by silence. Impatience. I cancelled my Facebook page and drew away from many friends so that the pieces of my life could fall, unimpeded, into place.

I sat waiting for Father Morerod, a Dominican, at the Angelicum University in early November. In that hallowed building, awaiting this priest who was also rector of the university and secretary general of the International Theological Commission, my stomach worried hotly, like another consciousness. In eight months, how had I ended up here? But he arrived briskly, and talked briskly, and joked briskly. He wore sandals, although it was by now very chilly, and he had the rosy complexion of someone transplanted directly from the Alps. He was kind, matter-of-fact, and as we drank coffee, he simply let me talk. My mind was still assimilating, absorbing, questioning. At the time I was reading and thinking about social justice and pastoral care. We spoke about the differences in Catholicism in the United States, England and Italy.

After a while, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together: “Well, you’re happy. I’m happy. And we’re not the only ones.”

The time, date and church were chosen—December 14, the Feast of Saint John of the Cross, at the Church of San Domenico e Sisto on the campus of the Angelicum University in the very center of Rome.

In the elation I felt at the prospect of receiving Communion, I was also aware of horizons soundlessly expanding around me, and the world and time becoming something more than three dimensional. I stood, one rainy evening that month, waiting for my husband in town, and on hearing the rumble of voices from the Church of San Giuseppe, I walked up the steps to observe the now more familiar machinations of the Mass. “I believe,” the people said, and I knew that same Creed was being said at other times in churches all over the town, and in every town and city in Italy, and in other countries throughout the world, so that when Italy was sleeping the Creed and the bloodless sacrifice began again in distant countries in other languages. The Mass was about an event complete and done in history; an event enacted now, again, in Christ’s Real Presence in the Host; an event that is to come—the perfect banquet in heaven that is happening continually and that we unite with in the Mass.

Time became something multidimensional—life more than a chain of linear moments, but rather something that had always existed and would always exist, each moment colored and contextualized by every other moment, and all so easily taken in, in the blink of God’s eye. That day in Rome when I met Father Morerod, I had, also, to make my first confession.

Father Gregory arranged for this, my general confession, to be in Rome, with Father Kramer of Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini, where he had professed his vows as a hermit. Our own discussions had run so deep and long he thought it would be a useful experience for me to go to someone fresh and to sum up a lifetime of sins with a person who didn’t know me. For me to understand that strange intimacy with someone who is simply in persona Christi, dispensing God’s mercy. For me to see that confessing was not simply pouring out one’s heart to a friend, but rather using a priest in a confessional as a clear connection to God—free of shame, build-up or the need to impress or excuse.

It is a particular experience, disappearing into a lit cubicle to face, or sometimes not to face but to peer darkly through a grille at, someone young or old, kind or bad-tempered, full of God’s mercy or, on rare occasions, the perverse need to scold. A good confessor is hard to find: a Catholic truism I was to grow used to hearing.

The air had already turned icy in the city. Rome was becoming festive in the discreet way Italy does at Christmas: red bows and wreaths, small white and pale-gold lights decking the avenues. Father Gregory and I navigated the bullish traffic between Piazza Venezia and Campo de’Fiori, he stepping out fearlessly into swarms of cars, and I tripping, terrified, after him. We stopped for coffee in a bar, elated by our meeting with Father Morerod and from seeing the inside of San Domenico e Sisto. But I was beginning to feel nervous about the confession. Father Gregory got me laughing and led me through another small maze of lit cold streets, the tall houses bulging with age into narrow alleyways. A man with an accordion followed us, playing erratically, his small son running in circles around us. There was the smell of chestnuts roasting on a brazier. We passed wooden toys and gold-bowed packages in shop windows, then—abruptly—we were in the piazza of the tall dark church I knew from his vows. “Already?” I wanted to say. And “Not yet!” We bypassed the main door of the church and walked up a side street beside it, where the walls were grubby and covered with graffiti. Father Gregory pressed a buzzer by a small door and stepped away as a voice said, “Si?”

For some reason I had expected Father Gregory to do the initial talking, perhaps even to come in with me. But he was walking backwards down the side street, away from me. I explained who I was into the intercom, pushed the door and walked in.

It was dark inside, with no window I can recall, and no indication of where I should go. I stood still for a few seconds, hoping the priest would appear. He didn’t. I called out, “Hello?” No answer. I blinked hard, hoping my eyes would adjust enough to make out a door or passageway I should walk through. I saw a staircase—nowhere else looked likely, so I walked up it. It had no railing that I remember, and when I reached the top there seemed to be nowhere to go either—a blank wall. I felt as if I were in Escher’s Relativity. I descended again and stood confusedly in the dark hall. I headed blindly down a passageway. Then Father Kramer’s tall black-clad figure appeared. He led me through another door into the deep light of the church.

Without preamble, he gestured to me to kneel at an old wooden confessional, and he went inside the box. I had great trouble speaking to someone who wasn’t looking at me—though I don’t even recall if we spoke through a grille or not. Most priests avoid eye contact, which always makes me feel as though I’m not being heard. It felt strange too, as it feels to this day, telling things that God already knows, and knows my heart and mind regarding them. And then, to tell a life of sin—how is it done? I didn’t fear God’s judgment: I knew that my sins were mostly contained in that time before Christ had entered me that spring. Without him, what hope did I have? But there were great things to wrench out of me, things many of us carry, buried deep and silent, but always there. I had talked some things over before with Father Gregory, so I was used to hearing the sound of the words I had to say. I murmured and talked quickly. Father Kramer talked low and slowly and kindly. He didn’t diminish anything I said, but his quiet seemed able to absorb anything. He reflected, he suggested books I should read; much of what he said has had a sustained impact on my life. But then there was one thing so large I thought I could never tell it, let alone leave it behind. The sort of thing that creeps back into your mind in the middle of the night that you almost fear could block the passage of time till morning. The sort of thing you bury but know the shape of it as you get on with your life, and it’s there in the corner of your eye, under your hands, always. I confessed it in small phrases.

I will never forget his very deliberate words after his initial response: “Now, I want you to put this out of your mind forever.” It was as if he had physically taken it from me, literally lifted it from my heart.

Before absolution, he sighed and said, “Well, two hundred years ago I would have told you to stand outside barefoot in the snow for two days.” As it was, I had a handful of prayers to say.

As I stood and followed him back out of the church, I was almost breathless at the swooning simplicity and completeness of God’s mercy. The Catholic Church, which I had always seen as wrapped in barbed wire and brambles, was as yielding, accommodating and nonjudgmental as a mother. I use those words in the sense I understand them as a Catholic—I gave myself to God and he accommodated me entirely, my past, my weaknesses, my (doubtless) future sin. In return he wanted the whole of my self.

The day was approaching. I spent time in Cristina’s kitchen discussing which saint’s name to take. Cristina was to be my sponsor—she whom I had rowed with and talked with and eaten with: the only truly Catholic woman I was close to. Her absorption of God, her Catholicity, were evident. Between Facebook posts and recipe experiments, she was only ever a breath away from a prayer. She was naturally sparky and, like me, even argumentative (I often reflected it was a good thing she was on God’s side). But he sweetened her where necessary, and hardened her when necessary, and she had the wisdom and the love to let him.

We discussed the saints—Edith Stein, Therese of Lisieux, Teresa of Avila. But I chose Mary Magdalene because her love for Christ was so achingly evident from Scripture and I wanted the name of someone who had touched him in his earthly life. I wanted to bathe his sore feet, dry them with my hair, wait under the Cross, and go to clean his poor dead body. We were both women of hands, of the flesh; lovers and nurses. Not Noli me tangere, but Me mou haptou is what the evangelist wrote—“Don’t cling to me” is a closer translation. Like Mary Magdalene, I was a woman of the physical who needed his touch and was wont to cling. As Mary Magdalene doubtless had, I would learn that Communion continues the physical in the most tangible way.

Then, news came through from Cristina’s Italian neighbor that a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Berlusconi was expected the day of my reception into the Church. It would be sensible to postpone: riots were likely, especially if he scraped through; public transport might be interrupted. There had been unrest through Europe lately, as a response to financial collapse. “No, I won’t postpone,” I said flatly.

“It wouldn’t be for long,” Cristina reasoned. “Maybe the cardinal could do it sometime in January.”

But I wouldn’t budge. Partly it was because of my impatience to receive Christ. But there was the other, poetic part of me that wanted the conversion neatly embraced in the year it had all begun—it had a momentum and a cohesion that didn’t go with pragmatism and being sensible. Seeing I was not to be persuaded, Cristina and Matt wrote to Father Gregory and asked him to reason with me. To my relief, he was on my side: “I think it will all turn out okay.”

My mother-in-law arrived from Sardinia to look after Flo, bringing a silver rosary for me as a gift. Like Fabio, my in-laws experienced a sort relief at my conversion—at last I was doing something they understood. Fabio arranged to leave work early and said he would meet us at San Domenico e Sisto. Cristina’s neighbor had called him to say I was mad to consider it. Oddly, Fabio didn’t try to dissuade me. There was something of that old respect of his for his determined wife.

Finally, the day dawned. Cristina called early: “I’m sick!” Four months pregnant, she had an upset stomach.

“Stay at home,” I told her. I felt my insides fold up: she was my sponsor—I didn’t know anyone else I could ask.

“No,” she retorted, “I’m not missing this for the world.”

“No!” I almost yelled, “You’re pregnant, ill and probably highly infectious. It might even be dangerous in the city today.”

Silence. Then: “Are you telling me I can’t come?” Her voice went up in a wail.

“Yes!”

I called Father Gregory and explained the situation, “Could you be my sponsor?”

He wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought not. We were both caught on the hoof. The situation in Rome was already looking dodgy, and some streets had been closed. “I’ll get you there,” Father Gregory said, “even if I have to take you on horseback.”

Cristina called back: she was coming. God knew how, but she was coming. Father Gregory and I were already on our way. We figured it was better to get into the city and to the church as quickly as possible. So at 10:00 A.M. I donned a long red velvet dress, with four woolly layers underneath, and the new coat that my mother had bought me for the event (“If you’re going to do it you’ve got to look good”), and we set off on the train. Fabio called as we journeyed into Rome to say that rioters were on the streets and public transport had been suspended through large areas. I didn’t think beyond the moment—the fields outside Rome were yellow and empty, flat as prairies stretching to the sea, and led almost up to the city’s door. The thought of urban violence didn’t seem real. But as we stepped out of Saint Peter’s station, there were no buses to take, and helicopters were circling overhead. We set off on foot in the freezing cold, passing blockades of police and then taking side streets to avoid trouble. Above the skyline in the direction we were walking was a stately plume of black smoke. In the frosty air, against the smudged blue of the sky, and in its stillness, it looked as though it had been drawn with soft charcoal. There were flames in other directions and the sound of breaking glass. Near the Church of the Gesu and with hours to spare, we ducked into a narrow street and a very unassuming trattoria. Inside, no one cared if rioters were smashing shop windows and lighting fires. The family who owned the restaurant sat at a large table eating ravioli. Several elderly men were lunching alone in silence, slowly turning the pages of newspapers. We sat at a table and ordered some pasta, which we picked over wordlessly.

We were there long enough for me to feel almost tired by the anticipation. We didn’t call anyone, so scared were we of being told, “No, go back, you won’t make it.” It was almost painful to pay, put our coats on and move out of the quiet dark warmth of the trattoria into white reality. When we did, the city was deserted. No traffic. No police. A metallic cold. In the absence of cars, our voices echoed as though we were in an empty room. We walked to the Gesu and went in. Father Gregory showed me La Madonna della Strada at one side altar, and we prayed a Hail Mary together. Then we crossed the church to the original Sacred Heart painting and prayed again. But my stomach was beginning to fidget.

Outside on the steps we saw one tall lone man ambling over with a large camera: John, whom I had invited to photograph the occasion. The three of us picked our way over broken glass through Piazza Venezia. “Nice perfume, Sally,” drawled John as he walked a few feet behind me, the uncommon sound of our footsteps filling the air. It was so cold, so quiet without cars in that usually choked part of the city, that every scent and sound was intensified and crystallized. Some sort of battle had evidently occurred as we sat in the tiny restaurant, but everyone was long gone. Smoke still billowed out with unbelievable stiffness into the icy air. We were almost there.

Inside San Domenico e Sisto, Father Gregory and I exchanged triumphant smiles and headed for the sacristy for him to robe. Father Morerod, in his long white cassock, bounced down the corridor to meet us—me still beaming from the accomplishment of our odyssey.

“Yes, you made it,” he said with a lopsided smile, “but Cardinal Cottier will not. The river is blockaded. He cannot cross it.”

I clapped my hands over my face. No one had thought of that. Yes, we had walked for miles—and Cristina would take the train right into Termini and walk and get there finally, and Fabio was just arriving. We had all walked miles. But the cardinal was almost ninety and frail.

“So we will walk to him? Yes? You like walking?” Father Morerod held up his hands questioningly. I gasped. Yes, he had already telephoned: the cardinal would receive me into the Church inside the Vatican. “Is that okay? Do you like to walk? I like to walk. Do you?”

I said that I did.

By the time we exited the church and were walking back across the deserted Piazza Venezia, Cristina, Matt and Fabio had somehow joined us. Cristina strode on with her bump looking anything but sick. “Can you do this walk? Are you sure?” I asked her.

“Absolutely,” she replied and never fell out of step for a second.

Father Gregory in his black, and Father Morerod in floor-length white, flanked me. The air became colder, and the sky lost its bright blue as the first intimation of dusk set in. Soon, great murmurations of starlings filled the sky, doing their collective acrobatics as though sucked and controlled by a huge breath. They sank in their thousands as one mass and came so low they almost brushed our heads. We could hardly hear ourselves for the rush of air and wings. Then they began to excrete. They got us one by one—me on my new coat. Father Morerod put up his cowl, and we stopped and mopped up with tissues and hand sanitizer.

“It’s spiritual warfare,” Father Morerod smiled, “one last attempt from the demons for your soul.”

And then the starlings left us, as we crossed the river, and Saint Peter’s loomed against the deep blue sky like a ship in a harbor. Down Via della Conciliazione, Father Morerod halted outside an open bookshop: “Do we have the rite? Which rites do we need? Shall we buy them here?”

There was a tussle of papers pulled from pockets and murmurs of a confab, and we marched on. The silence changed again, as though a great wind had dropped. The tinny echo of earlier was replaced by a deep, listening hush. At the gates at the side of Saint Peter’s, the Swiss Guards eyed us all suspiciously but were easily persuaded to let us through by Father Morerod talking in French. At the next barrier, the police looked less likely to yield and were a lot more suspicious. After more in-depth explanation, and phones being pulled out, and looks being cast at the entrance to Santa Marta and then back at us, they let us in, mumbling, “Auguri,” as we went.

     Scarcely had I passed them,

          (Song 3:4)

Inside Santa Marta, the cardinals’ residence where the future Pope Francis would live, the hush was complete. It was suddenly hot too. With the exertion of walking and all my layers, I was sweating. The cardinal, who served as papal theologian under John Paul II, was small and elderly. He greeted us all with a very broad smile, and we filed into the chapel of Santa Marta.

     When I found him whom my soul loves.

This poem, this prayer is about what happened, what is happening and what will happen. I recited the Creed, and the words that come afterward in the rite of entry shone in their controversial sincerity—that I adhere, with my will and intellect, to the teachings of the Roman Pontiff and Episcopal College when they exercise their authentic Magisterium. Because what I believed and believe more so every day, through faith and reason, is that the structure of the Church is God’s poem—the transformative instrument of the chaos of the everyday. I believe in my place in that poem, as a being that will help to sustain it. I believe in the power of grace to transform us and to lead us closer to God. I believe that the wisdom of the Magisterium maintains the channels of this grace. I believe that here is meaning, here is love.

I received the gifts of the Holy Spirit with Cristina’s hand on my shoulder, and then God was in my mouth. That first time, I felt the gentle presence come down again and the enfolding simplicity and relief of an embrace. The embrace was no metaphor, it was the touch of God, who knows me better than I can ever know myself. In the quiet and dark of my body he was there, and in his sublime comprehension I was healed. I had stepped out of chaos and cold, the interminable clatter of talk and argument and violence, and found the still point in which I could sit quietly and receive the kiss of my Creator.

     I held him, and would not let him go.

          (Song 3:4)

Cristina sang Anima Christi, Suscipe and Salve Regina. It was done. The cardinal spoke with us all in a side room, and, when I held out my hand, he grabbed my face and kissed me heartily on both cheeks. Then he went up to his rooms, and we ate pizza and drank wine nearby with elation and excitement. I told them how I noticed, at the hem of the cardinal’s vestments, that he was wearing a pair of Nike trainers. “Just do it!”

“Yeah,” nodded Cristina, “that was everyone’s motto today.”

It was a very cold night in Rome. Father Morerod paused in the Piazza and talked about some of the stone saints standing against the deep blue sky above us. We could see our breaths in great indissoluble clouds. The journey, for that year, was almost complete. Father Morerod took a taxi back across the river, and the rest of us, merry and singing, boarded the last train home.

A few days into my life as a Catholic I received an email from a friend who accused me of behaving ignorantly, of abandoning my intellectual standards. I wrote back, “I know more now than I did a year ago, not less.”

The knowledge I had gained could not be assimilated in one go. It was creeping through me, my past and future. And it wasn’t just me that it implicated. Only now was I beginning to think about heaven, purgatory and hell.

Cristina’s father had died eighteen months before, and she was still treading, sometimes energetically, sometimes despondently, through the grief process. We were at her apartment as usual, folding laundry and mopping floors. Her pregnancy was giving her back trouble, and I was trying to help out in small ways. “Well,” she said at last, “at least we know where he is. I don’t know how people cope when an atheist dies.” I sat very still. I didn’t comment. We carried on with folding and Cristina chatted on. I had heard a similar thing from her mother when she visited Santa Marinella not long after her husband’s death: “At least we know he’s there, at that Banquet.”

It was hard to insert my dead family into this new scheme. Not one of them, aside from my father’s mother, was remotely religious. More, I suspected that my maternal grandparents were scathing about religion. My Northern Irish grandfather became depressed at the sound of church bells on Sundays. In England, their iron grey sound against a colorless sky made the shops seem more shut and the streets even emptier. Sundays meant sitting around with a dry sherry, digesting a roast. They made him sigh in spasms and a drawn-out whistle. His voice became quieter and quieter. They both, particularly my stylish grandmother, used words like “wet” and “drippy” to describe anything that was overly emotional or ethereal—or, indeed, humble. “Start at the top and work your way up” was my grandmother’s motto. How to understand their eternal souls? I could picture my grandmother suspended in some otherworldly place in her cashmere twinset, rigidly elegant, lighting a cigarette in a long holder, legs crossed, and passing shrill judgment on the hairdos of the other women in purgatory. And what on earth would she say about the ones “drippy” enough to pass further toward God? “There goes Ducky Daddles.” I could hear her say it. What would it take to purify her in the way I was beginning to understand the word? On the other hand, she had suffered more bravely and patiently than many Catholics I knew, in her final, excruciating illness. But of course it was my dad I thought of most, and for whom I felt most responsible. I was still far from the stage I could imagine him appreciating my prayers.

After my talk with Cristina, I cried stormily but resolved to bring it up with Father Gregory after the Divine Liturgy we were celebrating two days after my entry into the Church. It was the thirteenth anniversary of my father’s death and the seventh anniversary of my grandfather’s, his father’s, death.

It was colder in the church than outside in that very cold December. I kept my coat, scarf and gloves on, and our breath hung in clouds as we spoke. Almost as soon as the Liturgy began I wrestled with crying. My throat throbbed. Soon, I just let the tears slide down my face. Father Gregory looked at me quizzically but carried on.

The Liturgy, as usual, offered prayers for Mary. Father Gregory paused as he said the words, and in his homily he talked about it, thoughtfully, as though speaking of it came to him only now: “Why do we pray for the Theotokos, when she is already so close to God? Because Liturgy renders all time eternal; we are not solely in linear time that consigns the young Mary of the Annunciation to the annals of history. Our prayers for her in those moments and all the moments that followed—when she lost her twelve-year-old in Jerusalem, when she saw him crucified—are part of the exchange of the merits of Christ within his mystical body.” I imagined Mary as a set of Russian dolls—the Queen of Heaven containing the stricken mother under the Cross; the worried mother of the lost boy; the devout young girl, shocked at seeing an angel.

Thomas Aquinas wrote that God “knows the flight of time in His Eternity, in the way that a person standing on top of a watchtower embraces in a single glance a whole caravan of travelers.” My prayers that day, Father Gregory said, were a part of the frozen night my father died. Chronologically the two days may be separate, but Liturgy united them.

“No one knows what passes between God and a man when he dies,” Father Gregory said after the Liturgy was over, and I told him what Cristina had said, and cried some more into my gloves.

Was it credible that my prayers now, from a two-day-old Catholic, were enough to bring my dying atheist father to God then?

My father actually had a lot in common with good Catholics: he was uncompromising on truth; he had a sound conscience and was always ready to stick up for the underdog. But more than that, the good atheist’s soul, I had come to see, can almost be a tabula rasa, readied for God. It was Simone Weil who described atheism as a “purification”. My father, the most scrupulous atheist, had rejected the false trappings and evils that can exist in any religion: the superficial consolations, the conveniently personalized god, the sin. And he taught me to do the same. Neither of us were satisfied with half-truths or superstition; we had no fear of supernatural punishment. There had been a gaping space in my soul for truth. And I believe the same could be true of my father.

That day I began to see the polar opposites of atheism and Catholicism as synapse-like connections in the infinite medley of our own free will. What we kick against may turn out to be what we are most attached to, where our passion lies, at the quick of our soul. And when those connections flip over into faith—even on a deathbed—they can color an entire life, as one drop of cochineal, added last, colors a tall glass of water.

My understanding of heaven, hell, purgatory and this life as exile, grew steadily after those late December days. I realized that, though my father would never let himself be seen as vulnerable, it was now that I could look after him—through prayer. Only now was I grown-up enough to do that.

I realized, too, that I had already glimpsed hell, that day I sat on the floor of my flat in Belsize Park and inadvertently spoke the truth aloud: “I’m in hell.” But it was only after I had entered the Church that I tasted (however barely) its counterbalance: heaven. In the intimacy following Communion I was aware of my story, with all of its contradictions, doubts, desires and sins, resolving in the same way a city’s random, scattered lights take on one whole form when viewed from the window of an ascending night flight. I was taken in by Christ’s gaze and felt no pressing inconsistencies or troubles. He saw the long sweep of me, with infinitely tender comprehension, from before I can remember to the rangy future of how I should and could be. The acceptance of his gaze—like that drop of cochineal—colored everything. I recalled how my screaming had stopped after my baptism as a baby; it felt as though another long cry inside me had been silenced now, too. I had arrived. At the same time I suspected that I was only at the very beginning of my conversion.

5

The Mother

The truth is that the Jewish doctor in London all those years ago had a girlfriend. He never left her. I had assumed that I would extricate him from her entirely—that I was the story and she the walk-on in the first chapter. She, too, worked at the hospital, and through that period of time I saw her everywhere—in the wards, across the street, in the park. She was beautiful and delicate-looking; her face had a barely sustainable perfection. As, appalled, I watched her put food onto her plate in the cafeteria, I was reminded of a deer before it knows the hunter has clocked her. What damage was done to her by me, I don’t know. But even after the doctor exited from my life, her smooth and undisturbed face lay across my inner eye—she reminded me of someone, some image, and one day, clearing out an old suitcase, I came across it: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Filippo Lippi.

Mary’s name has, so far, been largely absent from this story—and indeed she seemed almost absent in the early days of my conversion. But of course, no true mother is ever absent. In fact, the best mothers make us feel we are striding out boldly on our own; we are unaware of the watchful mother’s eye and continuous prayers that follow us. She was there, but only Jesus filled my gaze and heart and mind. I know she didn’t want it any other way.

The Lippi Madonna in the suitcase was, for me, where she began. My father’s mother was an Anglican, and she had a friend, a vicar, who for a while before he died was almost a part of the family. I was too young to remember him, but even now, at home in Suffolk, I’ll open a drawer and find a large wooden crucifix under old pairs of tights and my unopened mail. I’ll go looking for a pair of gloves and find a wooden figure of Saint Joseph from a Nativity set. The vicar liked art and liked to paint. He copied Raphael’s Madonna and Child in oils with quite extraordinary skill and tenderness. And as a young man he travelled to Florence and bought that print of The Madonna and Child with Two Angels in a dull-gold Florentine frame for his sister. When he died both these pictures, and many other treasures, were left to my grandmother, and on the walls of a small bungalow in Yaxley, Suffolk, they became icons of my childhood.

My grandmother would not have dared to pray with us children, nor to talk with us about God: my father would have been furious. He was given to berating her vociferously for far smaller transgressions of family law, like putting sugar in our tea or telling us scary bedtime stories. But far from the heat of the coal fire, down the hallway in a cold bedroom, in a bed warmed with hot water bottles, I remember staring at a bluish print of children in a wood—one of them was dressed in white, and memory tells me it was the child Jesus. Very oddly, I also recall beads strung from that picture, though I can’t say if I remember accurately, or why, indeed, they would have been there. The Lippi picture was, at some point, in the same bedroom. I can hear the rheumatic workings of the grandfather clock in the hall as it girded up for striking the hour, and the swish swish of my grandmother’s nylons as she walked down the hall, and the hard slide of coal from the hod as my grandfather fed the stove. I can taste the lightly boiled eggs I ate beside that fire as I sat in the mornings in my dressing gown, spoiled thoroughly by my grandmother, who couldn’t rest while I was there to be spoiled and would swish swish back and forth for more bread, more pepper, woolly socks for my feet. I can smell her face powder and lavender soap; I can smell the tobacco from my grandfather’s pipe and the polish from the wooden dresser. The snap of the coal; a distant radio; Granddad singing wartime songs gustily in the kitchen. Mary was never mentioned nor was God. I only remember my grandmother’s short gasp of fear and hurt when my father blasphemed. He said she was terrified of God and ridiculed her for it. Now, I wonder.

The lifeblood of Catholicism runs in every British family, no matter how deep. My grandmother’s maiden name was Neville. She was teased when I was little, for wondering if she was connected to the aristocratic (and recusant) family of the same name. Certainly, Catholicism seemed a very long way away from us all, and from the fens where she grew up as the eldest daughter of a publican, and from the quiet flat village where she lived as my grandmother. But of all the images of that bungalow, the Lippi Madonna best evokes that time. When my grandmother died I asked for the print and kept it, at first, in the suitcase. She was my earliest Madonna.

It was the face of the doctor’s girlfriend that led me to take that picture out of the suitcase and scrutinize it again. I hung it on the wall when I moved into my rooms in Mornington Place and began to write about her. I was fascinated by her eggshell complexion and lashless, downcast eyes. In the poem “Confession”, I wrote about the cracks that minutely patterned her flawless skin:

     I’ve looked so hard I know

     the pattern of crazing in the paint, like parched earth

     cracked to diamonds; her image, as true as I’m sitting here,

     held together, but caught in recognition, pain perhaps,

     that moment of its shattering.

It was that relationship to pain that compelled me, for Mary’s story is full of pain—and so was the doctor’s girlfriend’s. Where did this Madonna-face hide the pain; what did she do with it? Was it delusion, ignorance or craven obedience that made her seem so calm? It was a calm that, I felt, I would never possess and that could sustain no human being.

Mary stood for everything I had been brought up to reject: submission, docility, chastity. She represented all that we, as feminists, had fought so hard to shrug off: shame, slavish love, repression. Here was a woman, I argued, that the Church had forced into a glass-cased shrine—she was a tamed woman. I wanted to liberate her—to give the real Mary, woman of Nazareth, back what I felt she had lost: identity, voice, power, even pain. I collected images of her, deliberately seeking out Marys who looked you in the eye (the downcast gaze was, I felt, all servitude and imposed modesty). I asked friends to send me Madonnas from all over the world. I collected La Guadalupe in glass-encased glitter, Velazquez in the heavens, strapping Cara-vaggios, motherly Raphaels, meager girls by Fra Angelico and Lippi. My mother brought me back a plaster goddess with a greenish tinge from Greece, and I took her straight to Oxfam. One boyfriend bought me a picture of the saccharine, oval-faced Mary of twentieth-century mass production that lit up and blinked small red lights around her face; I laughed and kept it on my table for a while. I was slightly repelled by the flat, reptilian stare of Byzantine icons; I didn’t understand them. In the end, I framed a Raphael Madonna and hung her over my mantelpiece. But I never felt I could reach the woman herself.

I wrote another poem, another two poems, both about the Annunciation. In one she is the woman of the Song of Songs, seeking and experiencing a very human consummation before being trapped in the stiff myth of the Madonna, this time in the form of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation:

     My hands dove-tail, weakly crossed.

     If I cried out it would reach you

     with the slow girth of sea-swell,

     millennia later, like the light of a star.

She is trapped in the painting, but remembers the “taste of a mouth”. Her immobile legs are still “ghosting a run”.

I was writing a lot of poems about the way women are perceived. For a year following my father’s death I travelled to South Dakota to stay with dear friends and study and write at the state university. There, I began to get a reputation for “writing the body”: the language I used was, itself, visceral, but I was also questioning the violence of casual sex and women’s collusion in that. I was fascinated by how women are seen.

After London and all that had happened there on the psychiatric wards, with the Jewish doctor and my father’s death, the Plains were my liberation. Southeastern South Dakota shows the bare bones of the planet and not much else. For miles at a time, there was nothing—neither a hill nor a building nor a tree—to break up the stark run to the horizon as I drove the half hour every day from Yankton, where I was staying, to Vermillion, the university town. Then, a farm in a ring of trees to shield it from the untempered blast of wind and sun would glide by as though on a sea. Then nothing. The landscape was so unchanging I often felt the car was not moving as I drove: I squeezed the gas; nothing changed. The vast expanse of sulfur yellow and pale, dusty blue was panic-provoking at first. It was no wonder to me that pioneer women had gone mad on the prairies. But, as the year rolled on, I grew to love that empty landscape. By the time snow came and I was driving through red sunsets, the light bleeding over the snow as if it were water, I almost couldn’t bear to go back to the city. That year was a time of healing and playing and creating in the safety of a town where you didn’t need to lock your house or your car, or even to put the handbrake on when you parked.

At the university I met women, prairie women who knew how to shovel snow and build storm shelters. They were creative too. Laurie, tan and blonde, who spent a great deal of time with her hands in the earth, was writing poetry and painting at the university. Nitasia, just back from living in a croft in Ireland with her husband, was writing and studying photography. We would meet in Laurie’s old clapboard house in Vermillion, where I could always help myself to freshly ground coffee, even when Laurie wasn’t in. She was mostly just out in the yard though, planting zucchini and squash or stripping down an old piano she bought that summer for fifty dollars. She took it carefully to pieces, that piano, laid out all the keys on the deck and cleaned them off with a soapy sponge. I remember the skeleton back of the instrument, its long connections from hammer to key, facing the street. When we finally got it put back together, the local piano man came around to play “Over the Rainbow” in the hot July air. Everything seemed new, everything ready for creation, everything a work in progress. Sometimes there were no sounds in Laurie’s yard but the song of a red cardinal and the tick tick tick of a bicycle down the street. We wrote college papers under the mulberry tree and developed photos in Laurie’s homemade darkroom. In that blessed state of studying as adults, and reading aloud Berryman, Auden or Plath, it seemed I heard every poem for the first time.

When Nitasia wanted a life model for a student project, I was up for it: I was the life model who wanted the experience—who was willing to be looked at and wanted to know what that was like. It was my way of being the seen, the watched. I wanted to be a model who was real to counter both pornographic views of women and the too-perfect Madonna. Nitasia used Laurie’s house for our photographic session, as she had a Victorian bathtub and an old-fashioned white pitcher with basin. I stripped off my clothes and sat in the tub while Nitasia photographed. I didn’t feel odd; I wasn’t self-conscious. When I look at the photos now, I see the simplicity of my young body echoed by the long, simple curves of the pitcher. I see freckles and girlishly slender legs. They decked my head in a wreath of Christmas stars and took the photo in soft-focus black and white. It looked like a crown of thorns, they said. Laurie photographed my back, and Nitasia took shots with a slow shutter so that I had two faces or three sets of hands like those of a Hindu goddess.

We drank too much Zinfandel; then, in the late afternoon sun, we ambled down to the creek, where dizzy with freedom and drink, I stripped again and darted into a copse. Nitasia followed me, laughing, and Laurie trailed afterward carrying my clothes in a motherly way and smiling. It was a student prank (if I had been seen, we reflected soberly the morning after, I would have been kicked out of the university). It was childish and D. H. Lawrence; liberating and drunkenly stupid. But as I ran barefoot over grass and twigs, grazing brambles and low branches with the mild air all over me, I felt, in the blind and stumbling recognition of my uncovered form, a kind of freedom. I didn’t desire, and I wasn’t interested in being desired; I thought I had come close to simply being. My body was blameless: what Saint Paul called the soma.

It was a small and questionable victory when Laurie exhibited some of the photos in the local coffee shop. “Hey Sally, I saw your bare back over coffee this morning!” a burly South Dakotan in a checked shirt called across Main Street.

But my hands weren’t “weakly crossed”; I wasn’t trapped, I reasoned. My eyes were not downcast. I was free, or so I supposed.

Back in London and looking for work, I took a couple of commissions as a life model. Back to tall brick and icy rain; the melt of yellow lights across wet streets and the pounding of engines and feet. The East End was the new arty district. Warehouses and churches had been taken over for galleries and studios. The utilitarian composition of rooftops and chimneys was suddenly sexy. “Abandoned” meant cheap space. In the evening, the area around Spitalfields seemed all darkness, with small squares of yellow light dotted in empty buildings. I was soon to discover that stripping for a man was far different from stripping for a woman.

In a damp East End warehouse, my skin rose in goose bumps of chill and unease. The distance between the lens and my body seemed both long as the prairie horizon and close as my own breath. I had no way of understanding what was being seen. The edges of my body that I had fully inhabited as I scampered around the creek in South Dakota, were exposed and alone as I retreated deep into myself, eyes shut, silent. I didn’t feel free; I felt trapped. The artist (who painted from photographs) was kind and professional and, I knew, very talented. But I was aware for the first time that my body was being taken in a way that divorced it from myself. He circled me. I couldn’t see his eyes. It was that cold evening that I knew I had misunderstood—both what he wanted and what I thought I wanted. As the camera closed in on parts of my body, the juxtaposition of not being known and being seen too intimately made me nauseous. Now, I knew, my body was being asked for something that I couldn’t give—to provoke desire, questions unrelated to me as a person. What Saint Paul called the sarx.

     Who told you that you were naked?

          (Gen 3:11)

I made my excuses to the artist abruptly, dressed myself quickly and ran back to the tube station. Safe on the train, I couldn’t help thinking about the time I laid out my first corpse—that unsettling disjuncture between body and soul.

It wasn’t long after this experience that I heard on the radio one morning that a sculptor had carved a statue of a naked Madonna and she was exhibited in Saint Matthew’s in Westminster. I had to see her. I called the sculptor, Guy Reid, and arranged to meet him one morning outside the church. He was a young artist, passionate and sincere, and as we walked into the body of the church together he spoke enthusiastically about his take on the Mother of God. Then, surprisingly, there she was, near the center of the church. She was a wooden sculpture, smaller than I expected, set high on a plinth, holding the baby Jesus on her lap. She looked straight ahead and seemed, somehow, blind and hyperalert. There was no self-consciousness in her nakedness, and yet she didn’t seem like Eve before the Fall. Nor did she seem like Mary. This woman looked as though she hadn’t begun the journey of being filled and transformed by God’s gaze. She was utterly earthbound. Then, I couldn’t articulate those thoughts. I only knew she wasn’t the Madonna I was looking for.

Back at Mornington Place I read Robert Graves’ The White Goddess and found validation for my own instinct that sex and death, personified by the triple goddess—bride, mother, crone—were present through all real poetry. I still believed that the Catholic Mary was a continuation of this old pagan goddess and represented the archetypes of longing, fecundity and mourning within us all. I was attuned to the fact that writing poetry in particular had a somewhat mystical, or dreamlike, aspect (later, I would discover that the receptiveness of the mind when writing is the same, though less pure, as that of prayer). I discovered that February 2, the Feast of the Presentation, was the ancient pagan feast of Imbolc, when spells were said to Bridget, the pagan goddess of poetry, family and hearth. A friend bought me one of those books of spells that were so popular in the nineties, and I made a habit, for a couple of years on February 2, of making an ivy wreath in the form of a Celtic knot and tying colored ribbons around it. I lit candles and said ancient prayers to the goddess Isis that I found in Graves’ book. There was warm milk and honey to drink too, and bells to ring. I have to say, the meditation with candles was conducive to inspiration. The warm intensity of the flame, the power of the words, all made me feel ready for the creative year ahead. But once the candles were blown out and the wreath put on the mantelpiece, there was nothing there but smoke and an empty glass of milk. Anyway, I wanted nothing to do with a goddess who manipulated and controlled as much as any patriarchal religion: Graves described her as a jealous monster who wreaked revenge on those disloyal to her.

No, truth had to come, more seriously, from a rational source. I thought about the real Mary, the young woman who had evidently existed, and what had happened to her that day she conceived her son. It seemed logical that she had become pregnant out of wedlock and had to invent some story to protect herself.

The next “Annunciation” would come out in my second book. Mary is a young girl and the angel Gabriel a stableboy who overcomes her. Between their graphic encounter and Mary’s arrival at her cousin Elizabeth’s, the story is concocted,

     Each blameless feather

     woven in the trembling lucidity of sky.

With that, I thought I laid Mary to rest. Shortly afterward, I moved to Sardinia and then to Rome. In Sardinia, Mary was mostly represented by chubby statues with curly blonde wigs. In Rome, she was everywhere: in niches, on windowsills, by roadsides. But I thought I had exorcised her from my life.

The imprint of Mary in our lives runs deep though, as deep as Christ himself. Once I was a mother, and thoughts of Mary were, ironically, far from my mind, she came back to me in one last visitation before my conversion. It was the winter before that spring and Flo was very sick with bronchitis. We took her to the emergency room, and as we waited for what would turn out to be very worrying blood test results, she lay across my lap in a dead sleep, white and heavy. She was only three but long enough to be hard to gather up in that limp swoon. In my mind, the image of Michelangelo’s Pieta came to me as I had seen it that day of Sophia’s baptism. My posture, our tableau, had echoes through millions of mothers right back to Mary. I understood the vastness of her that she could take all that pain. Her helpless power.

“Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee.”

“Ave Maria piena di grazia, il Signore e con te.”

It was spring again and I was learning to pray the Rosary on a hillside overlooking the town. The impossibility of colors astounded me again: the sea stirring as if retrieving all its deep blue after the long winter; the yellow fields, the pink and red roses. The air was full of the coconut scent of broom, and wild garlic. Only now was I realizing that Mary had been at my shoulder all those years—from my nights in my grandmother’s house, to my postcard collecting, to my experiments with sexuality and shame, to my preposterous spells with the white goddess, to my blasphemous poems, my poems.

I had not been able to understand Mary, and I could not write poems about Mary, without faith and some comprehension of her radical faith and a courage that is hard to reconcile with docility. For it’s her courage I see, now, more than anything—her might, her strength as she stepped out into darkness, into the invisible arms of God. This strength is, of course, simply trust, a trust she could not maintain if she took her eyes from God for a second. And this sublime focus asked everything of her, including her sexuality.

Now I understood God’s wanting our all—even, especially, that torrential power, that force, of our sex. Sex is not wrong or shameful. But it, above all, asks us to abide in God’s eye—fully known, fully integrated, undivided in body and soul. Otherwise, as I discovered in Steve’s arms, and before the male photographer, the soul—our presence before God—cringes in the body like the pupil of an eye in violent light. We give ourselves up to thrills, to risks, to shamelessness that take us further and further away from his protective arms and leave us shivering, like children stranded with no coat and no way home.

Mary’s body, we are told, was assumed into heaven. Every hair on her head, every finger, every cell is precious to God. She died, we are told, an old woman, but utterly beautiful in the inextricable bond of her flesh and her spirit, because her flesh never forgot, for one moment, the gaze of God. She was filled with God. Her body never moved away from his love and knowledge of her own eternal soul. In prayer and adoration, her womb was readied for the embedding of God himself.

Theodotus of Ancyra described the Annunciation as an act of hearing. It was reading this that finally explained this mystery to me, as well as any mystery can be explained. The angel was extraordinary, his news was extraordinary—but Mary was already listening; her prayer was fertile and receptive; she was constantly, calmly preparing herself for this: God’s will.

And now she was teaching me how to pray. I often felt an almost palpable presence when I prayed in those early days. As a poet, I was used to emptying my mind and receiving from a black well of silence, but I was not used to emptying myself and giving up everything to God. Though I thought I was willing to give him all I had, in reality I was at the beginning of spiritual infancy, still learning how to trust.

This was nowhere clearer than in my relationship to my daughter.

I found petitioning God hard at the start. The first six months of my belief, prayer was a simple presence: mine and his. I simply sat with God and knew his vigil. But then, slowly, I prayed for my life and the lives of others, nearly always as a simple placing of concerns in his hands. One thing I never gave him was Flo.

It is almost comical to think of now: I was attending Mass, praying the Rosary, offering each moment of my day, each decision, as I thought, to him, but I wasn’t praying for my daughter. Despite the great conversion that had occurred within me, I was still tucking her under my wing and saying, “I’ll think about her.”

But Flo had a profound understanding of God that seemed to grow in step with my own. When she began school and didn’t like it—more, was anxious and dreaded each morning—every tactic was inadequate: treats, help with homework, meetings with the teacher, early nights, talking it through, not talking it through. Nothing stopped the agony of worry that would seize her each evening.

It was then our nightly prayers became earnestly targeted. She took up the rose-scented rosary that Father Gregory had bought her and prayed it till it broke. (He told her he could fix it; it was something they taught you in priest-school. In fact he bought her another rosy one “to sniff” and a sturdier one of olive wood to pray with.) One morning in the car on the way to school, she piped up from the back, “I’ve got a secret why school is better these days—the Rosary.”

Out of ideas, out of hope, when she was at her most anxious, we would say a quiet Hail Mary at the school gate, and her face would clear and calm. “Mary’s going in with you,” I would say. I was discovering the relief of giving him everything.

The archetypes of Mary’s life run deeply through our own, especially as mothers. How many mothers have jiggled a colicky baby up and down the street in the evening and been told by an elderly neighbor, “First they make your arms ache, then they make your heart ache.” This is what I think of when I read Simeon’s prophecy to the young Mother Mary—more wounding, more deadly, as it is.

More, when I grieved that Flo was an only child, or when she came out of the school gate last, set aside from a gang of giggling girls, or when I felt we were set aside as foreigners, I was reminded of my kinship with Mary. The agonizing uniqueness of her pregnancy, her motherhood of exile and unprecedented difference, let alone her own passion on Calvary, all of these have traces, however mundane, in every mother’s story.

For yes, there was surely pain for Mary. She was immaculate, not lobotomized. That is where the tension lies in that Lippi painting of such imperturbability: pain is implicit in her tender humanity; what stops her from shattering is faith and the robust spirit within her.

An artist from a totalitarian country was admitted to the psychiatric ward when I was a student nurse. Her work meant her life was in danger and she could not return home; she was depressed and suicidal. One day, we learned that her daughter had just killed herself. Once she had been given the news and the psychiatrist was sent for, I was charged with standing guard in the empty room where she was, to ensure she didn’t jump from the window or harm herself in any way. I don’t think I have ever witnessed such pain. She couldn’t be still. She moved through the room like a wounded animal, pawing walls, almost trying to climb them. For years, until my conversion, I was ashamed of the fact that I could not prevent myself from crying as I stood by that door. For most of the time she was oblivious to my presence, but once she rounded on me and implored, “How much suffering can one woman take?”

The four walls could not contain her. She looked as though she would crawl to the ends of the fragile earth and beyond. And yet, we are held. The galloping immensity of human pain, and the witness of Mary’s ability to go through it in God, is what reaches down the millennia from her to us “like the light of a star”. Our Mother who weeps under the Cross; our unbreakable Mother.

6

The Mystery

Four years after entering the Church, I was in London again. It was summer, and Mel and I were having our usual discussions in churches and on park benches. Soho Square was furnished with crowds of office and shop workers, bare arms and legs spread long on the grass. Hundreds of people were able to relax in their tiny square foot of space. We breathed the jagged marijuana of a man sitting three feet from us, and moved again.

Mel was a practicing Anglican. She had had her own brush with God some years before my electric spring, and through that time of grace, as I stirred plum jam and read Saint John of the Cross, we had created sparks through the phone wires to each other. It never crossed my mind to convert her to Catholicism, but through my journey she herself had turned to Therese of Lisieux and Thomas Merton. She prayed the Anima Christi and the Jesus Prayer. She had just discovered the weight and power of the Rosary.

How to describe the changes that had taken place in me over those four years? Facts and assessments are so easily dismissed or scorned. Suffice to say, I was (and still am) most imperfect. But there had been empirical changes in me—none of which came from external rules or prohibitions: I lost my temper less; I drank less (not hard some might say); I swore less (ditto); I was far less likely to judge; I was more likely to give. My lifelong anxiety had markedly diminished. My marriage was more stable. I was, yes, happier. I had lost a lot of the old swagger and bluff. And the anger. If I seemed more uncertain, at the same time my being was founded on a new certainty. I was not scared of being vulnerable.

As for that cold rock and the void on whose brink we teeter, they still exist—but they are different in the acknowledged presence of God. I know that if I fall, when I fall, though I fall a long way, I am in his arms.

Saint Patrick’s Church was open. Through the door and the long darkness, right at the end, was a gold structure with rays striking out, like the sun. At its center was the consecrated Host, the Real Presence of Christ. It glowed there, at the fount of that river of darkness, which, in turn, flowed out onto the sunny, messy sea of humanity in the square. “Let’s go back in,” Mel said. And we gathered up our bags again, brushed off pieces of grass from our legs and went into the church for the third time that day. The Host, as always, had a centripetal effect on us, leading us gently forward, holding us in prayer. “Adoration brings forth great fruit in communities,” Father Alexander Sherbrooke, the priest of Saint Patrick’s, told me. Sometimes Adoration takes place all through the night at Saint Patrick’s. Evan-gelizers from the church go out into the square and streets nearby, inviting people in. There are candles and music. “Christ does the rest,” Father Alexander said.

A few days later I was standing in the rectory of Saint Patrick’s with him, looking out of the long window at a violent downpour and the people huddled beneath the black and white gazebo in the square. From there I could see where I had sat with my friend and drunk wine that summer four years before when I had searched so hard for an open Catholic church and found Saint Patrick’s closed. I could see where I had lain in the sun after work as a nurse. And where my grandmother, who owned the Lippi Madonna, had worked as a midwife in the Soho Women’s Hospital during the Second World War.

Father Alexander and I had been talking about what Christ wants of us; how best to live out a vocation. He had read about my search for an open church that August day of 2010, and had taken the trouble to write to me to say I was always welcome there now that they had reopened. I had only desired to adore that day of searching, and Saint Patrick’s turned out to be a place of adoration, and also of action—feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, teaching the faith and evangelizing. The tall church and rectory, and Father Alexander himself, also tall, energetic, and given to sudden depths of contemplation, put me in mind of Psalm 128: “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.”

Saint Patrick’s made me think of the predominant question in my mind when I first converted: What do you want me to do?

What I kept saying in those early days was, “I should go to Africa.” What I meant was, I should be where there are hungry people, sick people, poor people, so I can feed, nurse and clothe. Cristina would say, “You’re a mother. This is your vocation. God needs you here, in your marriage, mothering Flo.” There was never any question of me leaving my family. But I couldn’t help wondering if I was doing enough.

Everyone has a vocation in God. But for some non-believing writers vocation exists in a secular world. From childhood, I had not just wanted to be a writer; I was convinced I was already a writer. As a heartbroken young woman I saved myself by writing that first poem about my lover. I thought, by naming, I could own the world. Now I wondered if my vocation was to write about God.

There is a line in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy that hung in my mind through all that period. Sometimes I would go to Father Gregory’s liturgies in the small white church next to the castle in Santa Marinella, and the cadences and the words of the sung responses were embedding themselves in me:

     I will not tell the mystery to Your enemies

     nor will I give You a kiss as did Judas,

     but like the thief I confess to You:

        Remember me O Lord, when You come into Your Kingdom.

“I will not tell the mystery to your enemies.” I was already experiencing the wordlessness of faith. As an atheist I was argumentative. Tanked up on enough red wine, I could out-argue anyone over dinner. As a Catholic I quickly realized I didn’t need to do that: there were some mysteries only God himself could show to people. If they weren’t ready—if they didn’t have the ears to hear—it was useless to proselytize. And the truth may, after all, be the hardest thing to write.

In one of my favorite passages in Scripture Mary Magdalene sees the resurrected Christ and thinks he is the gardener. Why didn’t she recognize him? There’s no convincing explanation on the natural level. But, as Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth, she was witnessing a new phenomenon: the firstborn of the dead, a man who had suffered agonizing death, been to hades, and then to heaven, and then found his footing again on hard earth. His body, so normal with its sore feet and tired head, its sweat and ultimate anxiety and pain, was glorified. There are no words to describe this. We don’t even fully know what we are describing. Evidently, Mary Magdalene lacked the words. The evangelists balked at speaking for her. What we are left with is a lacuna that speaks of truth. Fiction could have written it—but it would never approach the reality. Language alone cannot contain the full mystery of God.

All of those mysteries I experienced through the spring of my conversion and thereafter—were they best left unwritten?

Then, a journalist from L’Osservatore Romano got in touch with Father Gregory: would the lady who converted like to write an article of 1,500 words for the paper? I would and I did. It was a much compressed account of what happened, but it was the truth. I sent it. Then L’Osservatore Romano went terminally quiet. “Maybe they’re reeling at the use of the words ‘vagina’ and ‘hooker’ in the opening paragraph,” I suggested to Father Gregory.

“Try the Tablet,” he said.

The Tablet ran the article as their cover story in January 2012. Catholics, of course, mostly liked it. My friends and family from the secular world were less impressed. For the first time, my uncle was unsure what to say about something I wrote—it confirmed in my mind that, in some ways, I was now talking a different language. “You’ve got the nine-yard stare,” he told me, irritably, when he came to see me in Santa Marinella. And, later, “People in Ireland say that anyone who converts must be an idiot.”

The vagina book had been, finally, shelved. I realized I could no longer write it dispassionately, and there were other things I felt pressed to set down far more urgently. With three of my books (only half of the last written as a Christian) now published, Father Gregory and I agreed I should shelter under the title of poet in residence of the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs. The hermitage was a place I could write without the consciousness of secular eyes on me; and where I could chart the terrain of those early months as a Catholic. This latter seemed important as the journal of a traveler who has never clapped eyes on a foreign country before.

As I prayed in those early days, Jesus in agonizing pain on the Cross seemed more vivid than some of my own memories. The impact of that historical event, the echo of that supernatural fact, pressed itself on my mind and heart, as though time and distance were temporarily thinned by grace. Through that time I was continually stunned by Christ, by his utter lack of resentment at my long faithlessness. I was wounded and speechless, as I had been that day of my first confession. Just let me look at your face; just let me love you, was the essence of my prayer, and “What do you want me to do?” I remember one Catholic student saying when I told her this, “Wow, you’ve got it bad.” We have to remember when we have it bad, because these feelings, so right and pure, get muddled and muddied in the daily tramp of life and all its obligations. History disappears down the long line of dates; the supernatural recedes into some distant sky. We have to record these sensibilities, though they are awkward to write and probably awkward to read, because words attempt to touch the heights of our own seemingly boundless feelings, and allude to where these feelings are finally met in God.

As I went on asking God what I should do, every day in the small white church next to the castle by the sea, Father Gregory celebrated Divine Liturgy alone. Alone, he vested in the sacristy, singing prayers. Alone at the side altar, he would prepare himself and the bread and wine, unseen by anyone. This hidden time, he said, was like the life of Christ before his public ministry. Alone he would say prayers of penitence and make bows. He would pray. He would take a small liturgical lance to pierce the bread, just as Christ’s side was pierced by the soldier’s spear. Only then would he come into the main body of the church, entirely alone. In the early morning, the sun would penetrate the yellow oval window over the church door, filling the building with honeyed light. Aside from the local priest and a few friends, no one knew he was there. Sometimes I joined him. On freezing New Year’s Day I would come early to sing, the whiteness of my breath forming with the unfamiliar notes. Sometimes on Sundays, on our way to Mass, Flo and I would stop by the white church and put our ears to the heavy wooden door and listen to the deep singing.

“Every time our Liturgy unites with the ongoing heavenly banquet, something changes here on earth,” Father Gregory would say.

“Who knows what grace overflows into the world from that valley, from those Rosaries in the evenings when the monks are swinging home from work,” Thomas Merton wrote during his early years in the monastery.

The bells for Mass clang chaotically at the tiny church down our street. Through the day bells at the other four functioning churches of the town ring out. And then there are the Rosaries and the Masses said and celebrated by the half dozen or so congregations of nuns in Santa Marinella.

I was beginning to learn about the vital life of prayer and the living pulse of the Church. I was beginning to understand that, as part of the hermitage, I had to learn to “be” and not to worry about “doing”.

When spring broke again, and ripened to a shimmering early summer, I stepped into the Church of San Giuseppe to find it decked with pink and white roses: May, the month of our Lady. The seasons meant something new now; the second year of my conversion the liturgical cycle entered my own rhythm. My first year as a Catholic, the feast days had an almost homogenous impact: that first “gorgeous blow” of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection remained with me, in almost equal proportion, through each day. The second year, the changing mood of the Church revealed itself to me. Lent and its sugarless clarity: my faults and wounds perceived in new ways (they seemed washed clean, but were more noticeable to myself). The vacancy of Good Friday and Holy Saturday with its awful intimation of a truly Godless world. Father Gregory rising before dawn on Easter Sunday to stride through darkness into the lit glory of the church. The petals of Corpus Domini with which the Carmelite nuns decorated the street. The roses for Mary. The purple altar and tender love of Advent.

Discovering the sacramental presence of God in the world was like gradually regaining my sight and hearing. Each bell was a new sacrifice. Each church concealed a beating heart. Each hour was a prayer: “Lord, open my lips and my mouth will proclaim your praise”; “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary”; “For the sake of his sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world”; “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace.”

As I woke up to the sacramental signs of God, I was also waking up to Italy: even the town seemed to harbor secrets. Italians are not natural sign-users; sometimes information seems deliberately held back. The low building at the end of the road, with no sign, turned out to be a swimming pool. Often a poster advertising an event would say what and where but not when. Or when but not where. There was no plaque on the elegant Liberty-style villa on Via Aurelia to say it was once a home of Pope Pius XII. The house of one of his monsignors, which looked like a chapel, was lost to shadow and damp behind ornate, padlocked iron gates. And off a mock orange-covered lane in the town, a nondescript door opened onto a winding white path that led directly down to the sea. There were many ways into Narnia.

It was Flo, at the age of three, who first told me about the Blessed Maria Crocifissa Curcio, founder of her school. She was taken regularly into the bedroom of a nun, she piped up one day. “What??” I demanded, and I extracted facts from a very nonchalant little girl concerning what she had done and seen. One thing I could be sure of: the “old dead nun”, as Flo called her, was indeed dead.

One very hot August afternoon, three years after my conversion, propelled by vague remembrances of Flo’s story and an interest in saints, I decided to find this beatified woman. I knocked at the convent door, and Suor Maria Assunta, a nun with a luminous face who, though old enough to be my mother, seemed so young I mortifyingly addressed her as “tu”, showed us into the bedroom of the “old dead nun”. It was just as Flo had dismissively described it—but with a Miss Havisham air of clocks being stopped, the bed made up as though still awaiting its old occupant. There were her books, all crackling with the life they had been so close to, which no one had dusted off or packed away in a back room. There was her syringe (she was diabetic) and her wheelchair. That sweltering August, with the school across the road closed for summer, the room seemed alive, and the street outside, eclipsed by this strange life, deadly vacant. I followed Suor Maria Assunta through a few doors and, in a nameless chapel, saw the blessed nun’s body, intact after fifty-six years, in a glass coffin entwined in gold roses and briars under the altar.

Why does no one talk about this? I wanted to ask Suor Maria Assunta. Where are the guidebooks, the lines of curiosity seekers and pilgrims? Where are the signs?

I told her, anyway, about my conversion (no one knew in the school or the community) and my longing for the Blessed Sacrament. “Now I only seek Christ,” I finished, in artless Italian. A thought sailed across Suor Maria Assunta’s clear face. She gave me Madre Crocifissa’s spiritual diary.

I was enthralled as any local historian as I discovered where those black shod feet in the coffin had trod. How she had walked the same roads by the sea that I walked every day, and prayed in the small Carmelite church that I had stopped into those spring mornings of 2010. How she had founded a school, built a convent and begun an international mission. As a young Sicilian girl she had struggled and fought to get herself educated, and then to pursue what she felt, strongly, she was called to do—to found an active Carmelite mission. The relatives and churchmen who opposed her over the years were a litany. But now, the roads of Santa Marinella, and indeed the world, were full of what she had done. Yet the spiritual diary was all contemplation—a passionate Song of Songs; a whirligig of interior locutions and visions. It was all about listening to God, praying and asking. It seemed she had never taken her eyes from his face. And, in the small Carmelite church where Christ came to me that spring morning, Christ told her, back in 1925, that he had brought her to Santa Marinella to pray for unbelievers and the unfaithful: “I entrust souls deprived of divine light to you. . . . Your prayer, your intimate pains, your tears must soften these arid souls.”

To the sisters, it was clear that I was one of those souls.

It seemed a given that I should translate the diary into English for Madre Crocifissa’s English-speaking nuns around the world. And also that Suor Maria Assunta should telephone me after that first meeting and ask me if I would help her to set up Adoration on Thursdays in her chapel. Madre Crocifissa was, above all, an adorer of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, adoring for sometimes many hours a day, even getting up from her bed, like the young woman in the Song of Songs, to find him at night in the chapel.

Adoration began with the new school year. In the bare white chapel, with white muslin curtains blowing in the breeze, I would at first have trouble even turning to my Rosary in that holy hour. And when I did recite the prayer, the words came slower than they ever had. The silence was expansive. It opened a door onto a quietness in the mind that allowed space for God. In the still warm autumn, there were hours when all that could be heard was the song of a blackbird and the hush of the sea. The thin curtains enlarged sunlight and stark black shadows of branches against the walls. It seemed as though there was nothing but fields outside, and Christ inside.

Suor Maria Assunta and I were both thrilled—especially when others came in to pray. Apart from the sisters, some mothers would bring in their children before school. Once, I heard a mother outside on her cell phone arguing loudly about five euro as her small curly-haired daughter came inside, marched down the aisle, kissed the palm of her hand and smacked it soundly on Madre Crocifissa’s coffin; then kissed her palm again, climbed past the altar to where Christ hung on a crucifix on the back wall and gently smacked her hand across his feet. As she marched back out she only paused to give me an old-fashioned look. One Thursday, a man sidled in, casting glances around at me and two nuns kneeling at the front. When he got to the altar he bent down and peered hard into the coffin at Madre Crocifissa, then beckoned frantically to his companion in the doorway, who took a photo. Once, a young nun came dashing in, red in the face and gasping with sobs. She slumped in the front pew before Christ and howled as a young girl does in the privacy of her bedroom. Mostly there was the smooth, efficient entrance and exit of white-habited nuns, like nurses taking turns at a bedside.

Cristina, at home in Boston now with five very young children, told me frankly how she envied my time with Christ—and I did feel guilty about the sheer luxury. The irony of the fact that as a young atheist I had worked, sometimes without payment, with the learning disabled, the demented, the schizophrenic and the depressed, did not escape me.

During those hours of prayer, I thought again of the patients I had nursed—Olga’s “Where is God?”, the desolation of the artist whose daughter committed suicide. Faith may not have reduced their pain, but it would have ultimately encircled it. It was that which would stop and embrace the artist, as she crawled from wall to wall as though nothing could hold her grief. Perhaps, ultimately, it did stop her. Perhaps Olga’s question was actually an affirmation of God’s silent presence.

I thought of Albert too—the Alzheimer’s patient with no identity; and Carlos, the man I had shaved and sung to who wasn’t being fed. I saw that flickers of life—Carlos grasping my hand; Flo batting in my uterus, smaller than an eye—were what had always held my attention. And these flickers of life are what we are largely trained by secular culture to ignore, or to see as disposable.

The Church taught what I had instinctively always felt as a writer: the smallness of a life does not diminish it; the brevity of a moment does not reduce its importance; death is not the end.

Like Madre Crocifissa (a great one for praying for those in purgatory) I began to pray for all the souls that I had nursed—and the souls of my family I had initially found so hard to pray for. For old suicides, for unconscious patients, for bodies I had washed. For patients whose bald blue eyes I had looked into and wondered if they understood me at all. I prayed in front of the body of a woman that did not rot, whose stockinged ankles and feet stuck out resolutely from under her long black habit. Her diary told me she had been confident she would end up close to God, in the ranks of the blessed. And her body, like a suitcase she had left behind for now, lay tended and loved, behind its façade of glass and roses.

As autumn turned to winter and the Christmas holidays, Suor Maria Assunta and many of the sisters went away. Maria Assunta told me Adoration would continue and I should ask other mothers to help keep it going. It wasn’t easy: many people had no clear idea of what Adoration was and clearly found the idea of sitting in an apparently empty chapel, alone save for a fifty-six-year-old corpse, baffling. I failed to find even one other mother to take a turn. The sisters, too, were fewer and therefore busier. When I stopped in to talk to the nun provisionally in charge of Adoration, numbers were very much on her mind. The nuns had to go to market, they had to do visits, they had to work in the kitchen; they already had their time, in community, to adore. Was there no one else at all I had found to help? I told her I had upped my hours on a Thursday to three. “This can’t just be about Sally and the nuns, the nuns and Sally,” she said gently, “it’s about evangelization, bringing other people in.” I wondered if she was right.

And what was to say that this Blessed Sacrament, here, should mean so much? San Giuseppe in town had hours of Adoration once a week—I could go there if this day of Adoration were to fold. But then—I flipped the other way—what if I took it on myself to stay all day on Thursday in the chapel? I was translating Madre Crocifissa’s diary, and I felt her insistence and delight that her congregation had initiated more hours devoted purely to adoring him.

As it happened, neither of these extremes was called for. I did my three hours through the holiday period and looked forward to Suor Maria Assunta’s return. By then, I knew what I felt about Adoration: it mattered that it existed—and it did exist. Even if the chapel were empty save for one person, it was an act of love and of reparation—large in God’s eyes and ineradicable. What do you want me to do? The ontology of that question was becoming clearer to me. I was beginning to see that prayer was also an industry of kinds—it was not confined to a head and an empty room; its effects were tremendous. What do you want me to do? To presuppose some heroic action was immediately necessary was to miss the point. To respond to God’s call is to do his will in the minute fabric of life. And that only comes through constant listening.

Suor Maria Assunta, a born adorer herself, agreed heartily with my new thoughts when she returned from Sicily. But she too had evangelization on her mind.

From the time we met, smooth-faced, innocent Suor Maria Assunta viewed me with a shrewd sparkle in her eye. She put me in mind of Laurie’s children back in South Dakota, who with lit sticks would write messages against the night sky. The fire of my conversion was what she wanted to use; I saw her writing madly against the blackness. Somehow, she said, I had to tell people about Christ, about Adoration—I had to fire them up with my fire. It was a shame, I pointed out, that after Sunday Mass, our Adoration in the chapel wasn’t always among the notices read out. Sometimes charity workers or project organizers got up to give a short talk about what they were doing and to ask for participation. “Maybe we could do that?” Her eyes ignited. “You can do that,” she said. “Write down, briefly, what Adoration is, and what it means to you. You can read it out after Mass.”

I set to writing, as concisely and simply as I could, what adoring the Blessed Sacrament meant. I emphasized that a person could stop in for a minute or ten minutes—it didn’t have to be an hour. I spoke about silence, but also about set prayer. I used a line from Dorothy Day’s diary: “If our faith were as a grain of mustard seed, we would be prostrate as we entered his presence!” I sent it to my husband at work to check the Italian grammar. He called me after five minutes: “Are you out of your mind?” He screamed. “Are you crazy?” I supposed that, after all, my ability to shock hadn’t deserted me.

Dismayed, I called Father Gregory for advice. “Well,” he pondered, “you’d be saying it in a church, so theoretically the people listening should be interested in what you have to say. It’s not like you’d be handing out leaflets at the co-op.”

When I next saw Suor Maria Assunta she had prepared my words in the form of a leaflet. She gave me a photocopied bundle and suggested I hand them out in front of the supermarket.

I pressed my lips together. “I don’t think my husband would approve.”

She looked at me with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. I realized that handing out leaflets, and even standing up in church, made me feel awkward. I had absorbed that old line, “I will not tell the mystery to your enemies.” It reflected the early persecution of Christians, and the fact that they were often viewed as cannibals because of the Eucharist. But now it reminded me that the leap from the unseeing world, where a signless door was just a door and God was just a hazy idea, to the work of facilitating an encounter with Christ was beyond my human capabilities. I thought of the eyes of one mother I had approached to cover an hour of Adoration, and her pitifully lame excuses as she backed away from me.

How to make people understand? Sandwich boards and megaphones, Facebook updates and blogs don’t do it. And God is emphatically not a God of coercion.

I carried on with translating the diary of Madre Crocifissa and writing poems for the hermitage. I told Suor Maria Assunta: “My evangelizing has to come through my pen.” Still, I doubted the wisdom of writing about prayer or my conversion any more than I had already in articles for the Tablet. I had Madre Crocifissa’s diary as a salutary example.

She had not wanted to write a diary, this chubby, practical woman, and only did so under orders from her spiritual director. She struggled with the notion of setting down the intimate details of her prayer life—which were florid indeed. As I translated, I became bogged down in the repetitive visions and locutions, the angels she consorted with, her hyperbolic and loquacious Christ. Steeped in the cult of the Sacred Heart, her Christ was a “prisoner” in the tabernacle who moaned and lamented about “ungrateful children”.

This subjective notion of Christ became hard to lug around day after day. I was experiencing (through the intimate exactitude of translating) how someone else—a Sicilian nun of the early twentieth century—perceived God. We are all, saints and sinners, colored and muddied by our culture and moment in history—not to mention our hang-ups and character.

Father Gregory was, as usual, a great spiritual support. He gave me Benedict XVI’s wise writing on private revelation and cautioned me not to believe, in literal terms, that everything Madre Crocifissa wrote was a direct, undiluted message from God. “Learn to discriminate what has been infused (from God) and absorbed (from culture).” But the trappings and almost ghoulish mentality of a devotion to the Sacred Heart still unsettled me (at one point she describes kissing his bloody wound).

I took these concerns to Adoration, and God somehow spoke to me about them. I came to sympathize with Madre Crocifissa: these exchanges with God can rarely be adequately expressed in language; we tend to resort to cliché. One day in the chapel when I was wound up about how she perceived Christ as such a whiner, God made me see how he draws what is good out of every sincere soul—but each of us needs to be spoken to slightly differently, just as a parent deals slightly differently with each child. Through the close dance of translation, I began to burn away her culture and timebound style of prayer and came to know her deepest fears and dreams. I had no doubt of her prayers for me, and slowly, falteringly I began to pray for her, across time, deep into the nearness of God himself. Our relationship was one more improbable synapse in a web I knew I would never see fully in this life.

One Thursday, Father Gregory came to the chapel, and I prayed hard for the hermitage and what direction it would take now that his doctorate was complete. He had long talked about lecturing at a university in Rome. I, of all people, knew what a good teacher he was, but I feared a regular full-time job as a lecturer would limit him. I felt he should be able to preach and teach people hungry to know about theology and Scripture, people who weren’t necessarily students already, people not simply working for credits. I didn’t see him marking papers; I saw him sharing his knowledge in his vocation as a hermit—someone alone who, through his solitary prayer life and study, would be able to help pilgrims and seekers, just as he had helped me. But he was asking me to pray that he would be hired by one of the pontifical universities in Rome.

“His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Psalm 1 always put me in mind of Father Gregory. I meditated on it and tried to pray for a job in Rome for him. Praying for something not in God’s plan, when steeped in his law and his gaze, is like trying to walk against a strong wind. I couldn’t make this petition. Instead I prayed that the hermitage would flourish and grow and help renew the Church; that he would, at last, find stability.

That same day Father Gregory made the decision to move back to Canada, where he could reside in his own eparchy and have the chance to preach and teach according to the hermitage’s charism. I was happy for him, and also brokenhearted to think of Santa Marinella without him. But the hermitage was to thrive in Canada. In his early messages back to me he talked of the hunger he encountered: “People are hungry—hungry for the Word of God, for sound theology, for truth; in the Western world, this is the hunger of the twenty-first century.”

That summer, the fourth since my conversion, I carried around the idea of a changed Santa Marinella. Father Gregory was gone, and Cristina and her family had moved back to the States. My life, generally, was changing. I was slowly becoming one of the Italian mammas at the primary school gate; I was becoming part of the Carmelite parish. But I seemed to have shed some of my old London friends too. I felt a little as they say soldiers do when they’ve returned from combat—how could people at home understand what I had been through? For a while, it seemed as if I had even lost my uncle, though perhaps the changes in my life were gradually becoming more acceptable to him. His old indiscriminate hunger for what I experienced, how I saw the world, had gone—but when, every so often, I told him about the African and Indian nuns singing the Alleluia unaccompanied at Mass or the body in the glass coffin, he would inhale hectically: “Sal, it sounds so exotic.”

Fabio, too, had become more accepting of my new identity as a Catholic, even proud. “She was sent to you by God,” he informed Suor Maria Assunta when I introduced them in the street one day. He was still not coming with us to Mass, but he was mindful of prayers before meals and far more respectful of God and of me. Flo would begin catechism that autumn and was brimming over with questions about “eating the bread”. “She has a profound understanding of the faith,” the nun teaching her would tell me, wide-eyed.

We spent our usual time in London, and then joined Fabio at the family home in Sardinia, where I met up with a new friend, another Catholic convert. Like other new Catholic girlfriends I half-jokingly, yet seriously called her “sister”; we used our time together as spiritual mini-retreats, plotting the best ways to be open to God. She had a family staying with her that summer. The woman worked in the field of sexual health and was busy thinking about prostitution, its legality and ethical rights and wrongs. She hated the Church. She was progressive and pro-choice. “I want to get you two together,” my convert friend said. “I think things are moving in her. She’s asking lots of questions.”

Every day, I went down to the beach and sat a few yards from my friend’s house at the edge of the sand. It was hot, but there was a constant wind, and I was happy to watch the others in the water and to pray the Rosary as I wandered, or simply to sit and look at shells. When the woman with the questions came onto the sand with her baby, I wasn’t in the mood for talking about sex or Theology of the Body or prostitution. She was big-boned and ultra-relaxed—as if she wanted to soak up every molecule of Mediterranean sunlight against the red mountains and bask in this ancient culture with its strange silences and secrets. We got chatting, quite naturally, and I ended up telling her a few, as I hoped, winning stories. I told her about the sister of a friend who was a drug addict and who had had all three of her children taken from her by social services. How I used to believe she should be sterilized to avoid another pregnancy. How, over the course of my conversion and her almost miraculous rehabilitation, she had begun going to church. “We call that grace,” I said. I talked about how prostitution, yes, was wrong. How the body is sacred and cannot be separated from the spirit. How sex taken out of its true context leads to pain, and sometimes to evil. How abortion is wrong. She listened politely and argued softly before drifting away to follow her toddler up the beach. What I didn’t know till later was what she said to my convert friend when she caught up to her: “Never leave me alone with that fundamentalist again.”

I sat on the sand, watching my daughter jump the waves with the old Spanish tower blurring in the hot blue distance behind her. Was that what I was—a fundamentalist? Had I turned around so massively? Was I now one of the crazies? But, as Fabio and Flo came out of the sea and we packed up the bags and headed slowly home for lunch, I knew I had never been more fully myself.

Four years on, I was still learning, but also settling down to life as a Catholic. I had long looked for a daily Mass I could easily get to, but they were all in the evening when I was needed at home. After the summer, back at Flo’s school in Santa Marinella, the cleaner beckoned me over and told me there was a Mass at a convent nearby at 8:45—a time at which I could easily attend daily. This is Italy, this is Catholicism—sewn up with valuable secrets. The town was blanched with cold again, and the silver-blue sea, so seemingly tame, calmly undid cracked walls with damp and salt. The old, worn convent, like everything else in Santa Marinella, is minutes on foot from the water. Its bald pale-grey façade looks both barely moved into and recently abandoned. The Romanesque arches are blank. They seem to await Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. I buzzed at the gate. After a very long wait, an elderly nun in a long white habit with a blue sash let me in and said, yes, there was a Mass and showed me through two doors. Down one passage was a hospital, down another that smelt of disinfectant and lilies was the most beautiful little chapel or church in Santa Marinella, the Holy Face in mosaic dominating the altar. I began to go there for Mass after dropping Flo at school, and my conversion found its swinging, physical routine in my day. Communion with God is never the same. Some days, with him in my mouth, my heart expands in my chest so much I think it will burst. Some days, my fretful mind sets barriers between me and him. Some days it is a simple matter of resting in him. Some days I wonder about skipping Mass if I have a pile of work on my desk that needs doing. I am always glad I went; more than glad.

The way that I see the world has indeed changed; Christ has embedded himself in me. My faith now, though, is more workaday—the Rosary can seem like a chore; some days I realize with a shock that I have thought of God hardly at all. At the same time, it remains extraordinary: Catholicism the only solution to the human condition; the only thing that keeps us from falling all the way down. Yet the vibrant colors of that first spring begin to seem, almost, long ago.

* * * * * *

Soon after my entry into the Church I was wrestling with myself—there were still things I needed to change in my behavior (there still are); there were still questions. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, eyes shut, in unremarkable prayer. I was walking through a dark, greenish wood, following a man I knew was Jesus Christ. He was some yards ahead, and the path was uneven and hung over with branches and vines, but I can’t say it was hard to follow him. For reasons I don’t know, I sat down. As I did so, he stopped, turned to look at me and waited until I got to my feet again before moving on. After a few more yards following him in this patchy darkness, I sat down again. He stopped again as before and turned to watch me until I got up. Then he carried on, and I followed him until after walking in silence a while longer I sat down for the third time. This last time he spoke as he stopped and turned: “If you love me so much, why do you hesitate?”

I looked up and opened my eyes. The voice was not an auditory hallucination, nor was it the voice of a dream. It was as if it came from out of time, from nowhere at all. Try as I might I could never get back into that wood again.

Whatever the anatomy of that prayer, its message is as simple and direct as the gospel itself. Without the encounter with Christ and the love that this inspires, no true conversion is possible.

Cantare amantis est. The lover sings, but also writes. What do you want me to do? It became clear that first of all I should write it, this story of a conversion. God’s revelation to me that spring was already a poem. I only needed to write it down and not attempt to explain its mystery. It is, in a sense, unfinished. It takes the unhesitating energy of that wave at its breaking point; it’s a love letter in response to love.