A Difficult Balance: Thoughts on the Intersection of Faith and Fiction

On a gray but mild New York City morning on the fourth Sunday in Advent, a friend and I took seats in a Catholic church—a Jesuit parish—at the corner of the West Village and Chelsea. I had converted to Catholicism in this church and served as a bridesmaid in a wedding here; my friend grew up Catholic and lived in the neighborhood. I arrived there just as lapsed and nostalgic for the liturgy as my friend, whose idea it was to come to Mass. It was my idea to observe it here.

Strands of white lights and feathery greens warmed the cold marble of the columns and the grandeur of the altar. “We should have come in Ordinary Time,” murmured my friend, acknowledging with a conspiratorial smile that we were no better than Christmas-and-Easter rubberneckers. And then we caught up a little. She asked me if I knew a young writer who had committed suicide a few days earlier; she told me of another suicide she’d received news of that week, a friend of a friend, a young woman she would see at parties and on the street. We exchanged a few thoughts about these events and then fell silent, for that was as far as that conversation could and should go, neither of these people belonging to us. We also may have been thinking that, in the end, God was no match for despair and did not want to speak aloud of it in this, his house.

Down jackets, jeans, and sneakers filled the pews around us, and soon the procession to the altar began. We buckled up; faced front. When the priest, having reached the pulpit, extended his arms in welcome, the sound of sleepers awaking, finding their feet, filled the sanctuary. Creaking wood, nylon whispers. The Lord be with you, said the priest. And with your spirit, we responded, and it occurred to me that some might have said I was here looking to score like an addict. Twelve years had passed since I’d converted, twelve years had passed since I’d attended Mass regularly or professed belief. But I had yet to relinquish myself to atheism, and what remained was a yearning to be struck blind or swallowed by a whale so that I would know once and for all that God was real. So I’d haunted churches when their doors were left open, lit candles, flipped paddocks, and gotten down on my knees. I’d begged God to show me he existed, because the still, small voice he was said to use was too weak a signal for my own confusions. I’d walked the city wondering whether my heart was restless, as Augustine says, whether it had felt broken for so long, because it did not rest in him. This was what my parents thought, and I’d been thinking lately that perhaps they were right.

Thoughts of friends and relations in great pain crowded my heart. I didn’t know any of the hymns and couldn’t follow the antiphons, so I stood silent as my friend gamely sung along. I noticed in the program that we would soon be asked to sing the chorus from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” instead of the usual alleluia after the reading of the gospel and sang a hymn of my own: Oh, New York! New York. Only in New York. But when the cantor opened her mouth, she gave voice to a humbled, servile Mary instead of those cold and broken words of Cohen’s. I am the handmaiden of God / I am the handmaiden of God / Do to me according to your word, she trilled. My friend, who loved Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young as much as she loved anything, turned to me with her eyebrows raised as if to say, Do you hear what I hear?

Bettmann/Corbis

During the homily, the priest spoke of the way things sometimes work out for the good not in a spectacular way, as we might wish...