Composing a Further Life

was away from the church for more than twenty years, often longing to come back, sometimes beginning to pray, and then saying to myself, “Who are you kidding, you can’t possibly mean this, come off it.” And quite unable to talk about it.
    I did fit into Jane’s model in the sense that one of the threads of my life that came back into focus as I grew older was my faith, which I had thought totally abandoned. As the twentieth century wound down, I had taken one small step toward return by starting to attend Quaker meeting as a way of spending that hour on Sunday mornings in the presence of God and open to whatever clarity might come. I was dipping my foot in the water, rereading things that had been important to me years before, revisiting the Episcopal Church, beginning tentatively to pray, becoming more and more clear that I would come back but not quite knowing where or how. In 2006 I went for surgery to remove a colloid cyst in my brain, and I thought surely I would be asked for a religious preference when I checked into the hospital and a chaplain would turn up and I would have a chance to figure this all out—hospitals used to be more leisurely—but instead I was on some kind of conveyor belt to the OR, finding my own words of faith and contrition as best I knew how. And then, after the surgery, still procrastinating.
    Finally, five months later, at the age of sixty-six, I met with one of the Jesuit religious counselors at Boston College, where I had a visiting scholar appointment that was about to expire. I chose that course, and indeed had embraced the connection to BC, because of the Jesuits I had known in the Philippines. Welcomed and reconciled, with a sense of the gentle but firm working of grace over a long period, I felt my understanding of what had happened and what I had been doing in the meantime shifting like tectonic plates as I regained a lost sense of underlying continuity. I also realized that my return must include a new degree of engagement, engagement in a parish community.
    When Jane spoke in more detail about her own journey toward Christianity, it seemed clear that for her the relationship between an internal pilgrimage and a supportive community had been hard to establish and was still in flux. “When my second marriage ended, my friends all said, ‘Stay busy.’ I knew that that wasn’t right,” she said, “and really for the first time in my life I was intentionally quiet. I kept working out because I knew the endorphins would keep me from completely going under, but I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t move, I could hardly speak above a whisper. If I moved, it was very slowly. So I was very still, and one day, I remember it very clearly, I thought, If God wants me to suffer, there’s got to be a reason. It was like, Who? Is that me? And the complexion of my pain began to change. I felt strongly that I was being called to go through this, and that there was a reason for it.
    “Then what began to happen was what I could only describe as coincidences. It was like pieces of a puzzle coming together, you know. A person that I had never met before that I absolutely needed to know would come into my life, or someone would give me a book, or … Bill Moyers quoted Einstein as saying, ‘Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.’ And I thought, I am being called to accept God.
    “Right then I met Ted, who brought me to Georgia. I had never lived in a place where people practiced a religion, ever. Only some of my Jewish friends in Hollywood went to temple and celebrated the Sabbath and so forth, but other than that … it was not part of my life, not part of my culture.”
    “Illiterate,” I said, referring to the loss of contact with any religious history and tradition that has become common in American and European society and that I had been protected against.
    “Yes, I was illiterate,” Jane said. “And now I find myself in Georgia! I wasn’t feeling the presence of God, but it became a sort of an intellectual thing. It was hard to feel the presence of God being in Ted’s presence because he drowns everything out—he is an atheist, or at least he was until recently. But I was being exposed to people that he knew in his business world, and I began to talk to them and ask questions. Then, when I was about fifty-eight or fifty-nine years old, I started to feel a call to faith, and it felt very strong, and it was this—I had this feeling of being guided.
    “I talked