Ave Maria

My father, my earliest musical influence, is a wonderful Irish tenor. He loves to remind me that when I was two I would ask for "Ave Maria" as my bedtime song, and correct his versions: "No, the Schubert." He was "the one for the church" in his family, and at fourteen took the long train from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, to go to seminary. It turned out he was too free-spirited, and he was sent back home. ("I misheard," he likes to say. "I thought they said celebracy, not celibacy.") He has always had this fantastic combination of a sharp intellect for spiritual discourse and practice, and a flame for living big and defying the rules, which I obviously appreciate.

In my own work I spend a lot of time with religious communities. A few months of every year I go on monastic retreats, where I ground myself back into the strange and deeply complex, almost epigenetic relationship I have with faith.

This summer I walked the Camino de Santiago, the 500-mile pilgrimage that begins on the French side of the Pyrenees and ends at Finisterre, the coastline medieval pilgrims believed was the end of the world. The first part of a silent retreat or a pilgrimage is rarely peaceful: everything you have been repressing resurfaces, and you find yourself scaling the walls trying to escape yourself. Even so, I was shocked by how much rage surfaced in me over a month of walking. With no distractions from my own mental chatter, I kept circling how I have been wronged, how I have wronged, and how we have collectively wronged.

I lived with a kind of cognitive dissonance: beautiful evenings in the crypt hearing monks sing astonishing hymns of praise to "Our Lady," then walking through small towns built along the path of the Crusades, then into enormous churches where the only image of a woman is one weeping over her dead son. Meanwhile, on our screens, a genocide is being live-streamed. It is hard to know how to hold the sacred in a time like this. What is sacred, if not children, mothers, life?

The scale of human suffering is paralyzing, and all I could think to do was to ask Our Lady, the mother of God, to pray for us.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.