The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic Read Free

played chess by mail, and went to cattle shows in Denver.) A man from AA sat with my dad through the night and day aheadwhile he suffered the DTs. A year later, after he had worked on an automobile assembly line in Kenosha to make money to bring back to us, my father came home, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we waited lined up—my mother, my brother, and I—for the stranger who got off the train.
    We did not talk about God in my family. We talked about going to church and Father Kadey and marching for Dr. King. For a while I had a best friend who was a Roman Catholic, and I went to church with her because I liked the doughnuts her father bought for us on the way home. The Roman church service was pretty scary to me—the bleeding hearts, the fact that I could not take Holy Communion, the sins, the ringing of bells, the tapping of the heart—but I could see that the family organized itself around the church and belief. My family did not. I think for them it would have been impolite or vulgar.
    When my father came home to us, he brought with him softball games, horses, an honest heart I could lean on, and AA. And his AA friends, who often gathered at our house and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes (I emptied the ashtrays into a silent butler), brought with them the thing they called Higher Power. They talked freely and openly about falling down drunk, about lying in the ditch, and about running out of any other option besides this Higher Power. If you had fallen off the edge, I understood finally, you could talk about God. Their stories were “grassroots religion,” a friend said, and that’s what it was.
    I left off going to church when I was seventeen and went to college. I stayed away for ten years. I was working as a journalist in San Francisco then, stringing for
Time
magazine; my friends were artists and writers. I liked my work. I liked my friends. My life made sense but not enough sense.I found myself one Sunday in a beautiful dark-shingled church in the Marina District in San Francisco, crying.
    My friends were leftists—some of them called themselves Marxists. Some were serious and thoughtful, others not. In general, Christianity was held in contempt or was not understood apart from the civil rights movement. So my decision to attend services at a pretty little church on Sundays was met with bafflement and condescension. “It looks like a hunting lodge,” one writer said as he surveyed my church. My closest friend at the time wrote me a long letter about how Christianity was nonsense.
    But human beings require a larger story to fit themselves into. I was fitting my life into the larger story, the larger map, of Christianity.
    I loved the liturgy of the Episcopal Church: the procession down the aisle, the cross held high, the kneeling at the communion rail. I loved the old words of the old prayers: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”
    I kept going to church, and I kept my religious views mostly to myself. When a woman in Berkeley complained that there were crucifixes on the walls of a Catholic high school where she had taken her daughter to visit as a prospective student, I did not say, What did you expect? I did not utter a word.
    Later, married to Vincent and living in Santa Barbara, I worked in the soup kitchen housed in my church. I kept watch with dying friends. My brother, Kit, died of cancer in his fifties, much too young.
    Finally I decided to write about my faith, my doubt, my struggle to understand these events. It was partly, I think, because of all those years of not speaking about it.
    Now people wanted me to come and talk about what I had written. I was surprised and gratified when a church or a university invited me to give a talk or a reading (me?), so surprised that I always said yes.
    I had become a religious professional without realizing it.
    Gradually a crack between what I preached and what I practiced appeared and