Called Out of Darkness Page 0,52

I'd ever personally heard described. They were cheerful and brilliant; the parents did not speak English and we communicated by gesture and sign.

The cantor had a black beard and he wore a yarmulke, and his singing had an unearthly beauty to it that I loved.

It was a tragedy to me when this family moved away.

My last night at their house was spent sitting in the doorway guarding it, as they were in the process of moving, and I spent this evening in conversation with a young man who knew the family, an immensely attractive and mysterious person who always wore a hat. I recall speaking of spiritual things with him, of my desire to be a nun. He expressed admiration for women who gave their lives to their religion. I explained that we weren't giving our lives to our religion, we were giving them to God. He showed a respect for this.

Indeed his entire manner was serious and agreeable. He explained to me why the family I so loved was moving to New York. "There are not many people like them here," he said, "but there are a lot of people like them in New York." I was happy for them, but I missed them. I never forgot them.

I wonder today what became of Clara and Benjamin, and the baby in the crib whose name I don't recall.

Let's come back to 1998. I'm in New Orleans. I'm a successful writer. I'm thinking all the time about the Jews, about how much in common that family had with the Jews of history, the Jews emerging from the pages of the history books I'm reading about ancient times.

Of course by this time I'd had innumerable Jewish friends, and of all my close friends, they had been the most spiritual and the most intellectually passionate. Though secular people in the main, they retained a theological way of looking at life, a deep moral pressure to do "what was right." They were highly artistic, and artistic principles were mixed in with their fervent attitude towards life. They seemed to have a vision of life that was religious, and at times even mystical, in that they believed in a value to art and good behavior which could not necessarily be justified by social custom.

What had my experience with Catholicism been up to this time? Just about nil.

For just about thirty years, I'd suffered such an aversion to Catholicism that I avoided any mention of it anywhere, including any sustained contact with anyone who was Catholic. I'd heard rumblings of big changes in the Catholic Church, horror stories of the loss of the Latin liturgy, of an English Mass. I'd heard that the great church council Vatican II was responsible for this artistic disaster. I'd heard that thousands of priests and nuns had left the church.

But I didn't really know what was happening in contemporary Catholicism any more than I'd known the latest church history in 1960.

In fact, during all these years away from the church, there had been only one film about Catholicism that I had watched over and over again.

This was a film that I deeply and painfully loved. It was called The Nun's Story and it was made in 1959. It starred Audrey Hepburn in an exceptional and subdued performance as a Catholic woman in Belgium who enters a semi-cloistered order of nuns in the hopes of becoming a missionary in the Belgian Congo. It is an austere and pure film to an exceptional degree.

It is entirely about the inner spiritual struggle of this one person, and her failure to become the religious she had hoped to become. It is devoid of cheap romance, or distracting subplots that might have appealed to a commercial audience.

In fact, it is such a pure film that it is almost impossible to understand how it ever got made. But it did get made, and time and again, I watched it, sometimes crying, grieving for my lost Catholic faith.

I felt I understood the struggle of Sister Luke in this film completely.

She was guilty of the sin we had imputed to Martin Luther. Because she could not be perfect according to the system, she left the system. In Luther's case it had been the church. In Sister Luke's case, it was the convent. Her tragedy was entirely a spiritual tragedy, and I never watched this film without realizing that it could have been my own story, and that perhaps it should have been my own story, that I should