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Books Three generations of women shaped by the church
ALTAR MUSIC
By Christin Lore Weber Scribner, 249 pages, $23
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By CANDICE A. SACKUVICH
Elise Pearson was a very soulful child who at age 4 adopted a
hollowed cottonwood as a surrogate for her own emotionally remote mother. She
had a childs main line to God through sound, and later through music. For
her, it was as if sound were the universal life force itself -- the
Godheads constant companion. Earth opened to sound like a lover.
Sound entered every cell, vibrating, setting in motion the circle of the
world.
In her first novel after publishing six nonfiction books, Weber
poetically weaves a tale of three generations of women whose passions are
warped and lives changed by the Catholic church. Elise tries to redeem the pain
of her forebears by sacrificing a brilliant music career to become a nun, but,
in the end, she realizes that what God wanted all along was their passion, not
sacrifice.
Perhaps to show how quirks in a familys path to the future
can dramatically change the destiny of the unborn, the story unfolds with
Meghan, Elises grandmother. As a young bride, Meghan reveled in the joy
of love and marital relations, even though the priest had cautioned her to view
it more as a duty than a blissful experience.
When her husband and infant son die in a fire, she blames herself
for ignoring the priests admonition, and spends the rest of her life in a
weird, sexless affair with a priest. After some years of listening to myriad
details about her sexual fantasies in confession, the priest becomes her
bridegroom of the spirit, so to speak.
Meghans daughter, Kate, also was a victim of the
priests holy advice. When she was a teenager, he placed his hand on hers
and advised of the evils of French kissing and the untouchable mystic
rose between her legs. He then heard her confession of all of her
indiscretions with her boyfriend, except the one that led to her church-induced
everlasting shame. It was a secret revealed only at the end of the book, but it
explains why Kate was such a distant mother to Elise.
Weber, a former nun herself who is now married, hints at first and
later says that Elise entered the convent to redeem the pains of the world she
saw through her family and return to the mother tree. She had truly been called
as a young child, when she had a vision of Jesus and Mary approaching her in
the woods, and she never wavered from that call through all the normal
temptations of adolescence. It was only a representative of Mother Church
herself who could yank the will of God out of Elise.
The person who took it upon herself to mold Elise into Sister
Michelle was Mother Thomas Ann, the novice mistress and Elises godmother.
She had been 30 years at the convent, since she was 16, not because of a
calling, but because it seemed the only place to send an abused bride who was
beaten on her unconsummated wedding night -- a matter of social
convenience.
There, Elise was at the mercy of the merciless, as God was
stripped from her at every turn and she had nothing left but insanity. At
first, she thought strict obedience stretched a lifeline across the chasm
of hell. By the end of the story, it seems the lesson was that strict
obedience was hell itself. Every God-given thing she had to sacrifice was asked
by Thomas Ann, who never had a calling to God and who had the darkest secret of
all. The scenario was reminiscent of military brainwashing to break a prisoner
of war.
After sacrificing her family, her close friend in the convent and
her music, Elises thoughts, it seemed, were dropping one by one
into her heart, catching fire, and turning to ash that was blown away by her
own breath.
After several dreadful events involving separation, religious
contradiction and suicide, Elise recovered enough to be able to leave the
convent in the wake of revelations about Mother Thomas Ann and against the
background of Vatican II. She realized she must reclaim her sacrificed music,
saying, I thought God was in the silence between sounds. But God is in
the sound itself. ... We look everywhere ... and all along, the beloved we
desired was right here, in what we are.
Candice Sackuvich is a journalist and former NCR staff
member who lives in Kansas City, Kan.
National Catholic Reporter, May 12,
2000
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