Composing a Further Life

had left off, with the Episcopal Church, and explore what would happen if I behaved “as if” I believed, going to church, taking time to think and read, and experimenting with prayer, as if I had faith in someone listening. Some instinct or some echo of my mother’s belief that participation was the place to start made me begin with practice rather than theology.
    So while I was working on my doctorate and in my first year’s teaching at Harvard, I went through what I think of now as the real process of conversion. Going through the motions gradually acquired deeper and deeper meaning. I became actively engaged, working with the student chaplain at Harvard and tending toward “high church” or Anglo-Catholicism in ways that made my husband fairly uncomfortable, but even so we began to go together to the Episcopal church in Peterborough when we were in New Hampshire.
    In 1966 we went to the Philippines, where I taught at a Jesuit university, and while there I fell into the habit of attending the campus daily Mass, had long conversations with Jesuit friends, and organized a retreat for women faculty. By the time we left, I was very close to becoming a Roman Catholic. One reason I did not was that the rector of the Episcopal church in Peterborough, Al Kershaw, whom both of us liked, had become rector of Emmanuel Church in Boston, a once wealthy but now dwindling church that he was struggling to reinvigorate. That opened a door to a church commitment that the two of us could share.
    We went to live in Iran in 1972. On Sundays I took our daughter, Vanni, with me to the Episcopal church there, but without the music and invigorating preaching at Emmanuel, Barkev had no interest, so the compromise that had taken us to the same church in Boston, albeit with differing understandings of what and why, didn’t carry over. Weekdays, I found my way from time to time to one of the two English-language Roman Catholic churches in Tehran, St. Abraham’s, run by three Irish Dominicans, one of whom was also bishop of Isfahan, his diocese including all of Iran, the other being mostly American military families. In 1976 I went to St. Abraham’s and asked to be received into the Catholic Church.
    I took Vanni with me because otherwise she would have had no religious context at all. I did my best to explain to her what was happening, but she was six, and we were in a Muslim country, where the differences between Christians simply did not loom large in people’s minds (and why should we emphasize them?). I did not see the transition as a rejection of a false or invalid form of Christianity. For me it was a movement from a side stream into the main flow of the river, deeper, more universal, but the same water of life. Because I felt that, on balance, I had benefited from the fact that my mother thought it important to give me some experience of church in childhood and then let me find my own way, I never pushed it with Vanni. As time went on, it seemed to me that those experiences simply didn’t “take” for her or that she had rejected them or found them irrelevant.
    In 1978 Iran was swept by revolution, and early in 1979 I came back to the United States with Vanni, while Barkev stayed on for another year as I tried to find a job and resume our American lives. I found a job as dean of the faculty at Amherst College, and Vanni and I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts. The story of what happened next, as I lost that job in our third year there, after the sudden death of the college president, Julian Gibbs, is told in
Composing a Life.
3 But another part of that story is that, on the day before Julian’s death, I rolled my car on an icy turn on the way up to New Hampshire, and after my dog and I had crawled out, basically unhurt, and I had inspected my bruises, gotten a passerby to call the police, and sorted out towing, I realized that at no time in that sequence had I turned to God either for help or in thanksgiving for my safety. This seemed to me to prove that I had never believed in Him at all. I think I lost faith not in God but in myself as someone capable of faith. I told myself I had been deceiving myself and others, and without discussion I simply dropped out. There is a fallacy in taking one’s own psychological state as either a proof or a disproof of faith, but I didn’t notice it.
    Right after that, the roof fell in, my job at Amherst fell apart, and I had let go of sustenance I needed at the worst possible time. I