Composing a Further Life

my father a determined atheist, institutionally at least) when I was fourteen. My mother believed that children should have some exposure not so much to doctrine but to worship and to the accretion of awe and devotion around ritual forms that would provide an empathic basis for recognizing and responding to faith later in life. This seems to be part of a larger principle that has been important to me, that instead of standing on the sidelines and studying, the way to learn is through participation.
    I had grown up going to church from time to time with my mother and more frequently with her close college friend, whom I called Aunt Marie and with whom I spent many weekends in my childhood. She taught me the Lord’s Prayer. More important, I knew that my mother had grown up in an unchurched family and made her own decision to be baptized just before turning eleven, and that she had maintained her membership in her childhood parish all her life. I also knew that my father had specified, when I was born, that I not be baptized. My mother had told me that the choice was one I should make myself, however, whenever I was ready, conveying to me her own seriousness and the sense that the choice was an important one. As a child, I developed a wide-ranging curiosity about religion, going to different kinds of services with my classmates and choosing topics related to religion for term papers, so apparently I had understood that this was a responsibility that lay ahead. There was a small reproduction of a Raphael Madonna and Child, in a gilt frame, on a bureau in my bedroom, which my mother gave me for some early birthday. After my parents separated and my father remarried, he brought his father’s art collection from England and hung a watercolor by William Blake,
Satan Triumphing over Eve
, on his living room wall. Satan, the fallen angel, still beautiful, wears a look of deep sadness.
    Still, I had only the vaguest idea what Christianity was supposed to be about, as I discovered with some surprise while dutifully reading a set of books in preparation for baptism. I knew the stories of Jesus’ life and sayings, but I had no notion of how these beautiful and moving stories (like the music and ritual of Sunday mornings) were supposed to be connected to the lives and choices of people today, or how Christians have struggled to understand who Jesus was and how His fate could have established a new relationship between God and humankind. I had become used to hearing the term
Son of God
and the words
redemption
and
atonement
without ever having struggled with their meanings. So I had homework to do. I suppose I was as serious about the whole thing as I was capable of being at that stage of my life.
    Two years later, I went on what was intended as a two-week visit to Israel with my mother, who had been invited as a consultant on the assimilation of immigrants, and I decided to stay for a year, learn Hebrew, and complete high school there. I noticed the disappearance of church from my life at Christmas with a pang of homesickness, but I was deep in the study of the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew literature for my Israeli matriculation exams. The old curiosity about anything to do with religion stood me in good stead as I worked my solitary way through fat commentaries and visited in households with differing relationships to Judaism.
The Book of Job
, the poetry of Haim Nahman Bialik, Hasidic tales, and the longings of the Diaspora haunted me for years and are with me still.
    My curiosity was still there when I returned to the United States for college at Radcliffe, which by then shared all Harvard classes. I studied Arabic and Islam and Rabbinical texts and wrote my general education papers on related questions, but put Christianity on a back shelf for five years. Eventually, after I graduated and was married, with a husband for whom Christianity was an important part of his Armenian identity, I decided that I had to figure out what, if anything, this church membership that I had chosen as a teenager might mean beyond pleasant customs shared at Christmas and Easter.
    I have no idea what triggered this process—perhaps it was the fact that Barkev asked me to make sure that, on the morning of our wedding, I took an hour to get away from the hullabaloo and sit in an empty church. Perhaps it was adopting the prayer said in Armenian by his family before every meal, a custom we carried into our marriage. What I decided to do was start where I