Nine Jewels of Night

PROLOGUE

What follows is a personal account of my search for a new expression of the eternal quest for truth. The story chronicles my growing restlessness to answer a spiritual call until on a gorgeous autumn day in my twenty-ninth year, I am converted by a series of revelations beyond the boundaries of established religions to the one reality at the heart of all religions, and to an entirely singular path of contemplation.

Leaving behind worldly influences, comfort, and convention, over the next thirty-eight years I practice this radical path of devotion, serving as a teacher and soul guide of the inner life. During this same period and as a mother of four children, I eventually become a professor of theology, building a bridge between classical accounts of the soul’s journey and the universal call of the spirit, later leaving academia to found an interspiritual seminary and monastic community outside monastery walls.

Of course, every age finds women and men of faith who risk reproach to venture into the unknown. Not content with mere appearances or half-truths that prey on the gullible, they search for the real, the ultimate concealed within the everyday. They have not torn their feet and spilled their blood to claim a prize or to lead others on the clear path. No, in the first instance, the longing was all their own: not a conscious choice, not even a thought in the mind, but a flame of passion burning in their souls.

Like them, I was not to follow the path of commitment to a stable ideal but to break loose and break free of every kind of stereotypical containment, to tremble and burn in my own fire. And it was then that I realized that my journey, and that of many other people, differed from traditional categories of spiritual growth. Over time I would learn how the details of everyday life was the stuff of mystical transformation.

Nine Jewels of Night is a testament of gratitude for God’s infinite mercy, and for the blessings I have received from innumerable people who entrusted their souls to my care. Despite my theological studies and spiritual training—what I have learned and still have yet to know—a shattering, life-changing experience of divine love informs all that I say and don’t say. While my language may be limited, and my heart may be incomplete, the Holy One is not.

Oh Beauty, how I do adore you! So weary am I and so habituated to the old ways. Grant me the courage to abandon all, to savor your sweet call that fills my whole being with the delicate ardor of love. Call me again and again and I will come. Ask me what you will and I will answer. Give me a task and I will fulfill it. Ask me to go hungry, send me away in thirst, I will not abandon you. It is your will that my love commands. It is your desire that my life is for.

Show me what you need and I will do it. Show me what you wish and I will find it. Ask me to give myself away and I will lay my heart upon stone tablets for all to tread. For you there is nothing I will not do. You, Beloved, who wants my freedom, who leads me through the valleys of despair to a Light brighter than any sun, you who have given me the gift of Love: what else can I do to show my gratitude?

Author’s Journal, 2002

PART I

LOW PLACES

BRING LIGHT

1

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I Counted My Solitude

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The clock read 5 a.m. Sliding out of the covers, I found pants and shoes at the foot of my bed and slipped them on. Reaching for the wool coat I’d left on my desk chair, I tucked my arms in and buttoned up. Then I tiptoed down the stairs, hoping our new puppy wouldn’t hear me and wake my parents, and holding my breath, soundlessly opened the door, passing into the still dawn.

Our old dog, Trixie, lifted her mustard-colored head, eyeing me sleepily as I stepped off the porch. Shaking herself, she trotted beside me, tail wagging, ears twitching, and then darted ahead to chase a baby rabbit zigzagging across the field. Beyond the boundary of lawn, where the tall trees began, I picked up my pace, turning with false bravado onto a dirt trail that led deeper into the woods. The sky, a star-jeweled dome above, was a swirl of midnight blue and pale yellow, alerting me that daybreak was not far away.

I made my way to the lean-to I’d built in the woods, without getting permission from my parents, and knowing my sister was too proper for such a venture. After reading about the exploits of St. Francis in the church library, I had decided to build a cave of my own, away from argument and noise, and spent weeks dragging materials to the site. I usually came after school to my hideaway, which I soon started to call a hermitage in imitation of Francis, and stayed for hours, my mother too repelled by the dark forest to venture after me.

But this morning was special. I was intent on starting a novena, a nine-day prayer of petition that the priest had talked about during his homily, for my grandmother who had cancer.

I passed the ancient oak tree, gnarled bark and broad limbs, and turned left at the moss-covered boulder that marked the way. Around the next bend, tucked under a rock overhang, was my shelter, constructed of stone and covered with an old plastic tarp. Bending down, I crawled in. Sweeping leaves out with my hand I found the tin box of matches and lighted the votive candle, my hand shaking. Eventually I settled down, legs crossed, back straight, silently watching the flame flicker and glow, overwhelmingly happy. I counted my solitude like other girls collected shells or tiny porcelain figurines. No one invaded my thoughts, telling me what to believe or how to feel. I was safe, guided by a living presence that suffused me with tenderness.

I could be, just be.

On the walk back to the house, I wondered: Did my parents know why I clung to solitude? It wasn’t my position to tell them and even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

Yet the disparity between the secret worlds I inhabited and what I was allowed to speak took its toll. I was kicked out of Sunday school for asking questions about logical inconsistencies in the Baltimore Catechism. When someone was criticized on the basis of morality or social custom, I retreated to the public library to test the truth or falsehood of the claim. At night I prayed my thoughts into secrecy: Dear God Please, don’t let me talk in my sleep so my mother won’t know what I am thinking.

I grew sullen and secretly rebellious. I had mysterious fevers and suffered with colds, propped up with four pillows and Vicks VapoRub smeared over my chest. Even these maladies led me deeper into solitude, deeper into my nature.

Once, at five years old, I’d come down with a severe case of chicken pox and was on fire with a high fever. On the second or third day of being confined to bed, in the evening when the television was turned off and the house quiet, I was twisting around in my sheets unable to get comfortable. A faint breeze was rustling the curtains on the window next to my bed. Reaching for the glass rosary on the nightstand, I poked my head out of the covers. Soundlessly, an immense figure of light as tall as the ceiling appeared in the corner of my room. A glowing, pulsating vibration that was wise and calm and protective expanded in the air the way helium filled a birthday balloon. Robes shimmered blue and gold. Eyes, deep brown, looked into me with piercing gentleness. I was transfixed. Instantly a sweet feeling of comfort filled me, an electrical current humming at a precise rate.

The Special One spoke: You cannot die. You have work to do. We will be with you. I wonder if I heard these words as sounds, with my ears? Or were they inner words, transmitted silently? How long did the Special One stay with me? I still can feel the clock ticking, 2:15 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3:05.

Lulled to sleep by the soothing vibration, hours later I woke, sunlight on my face. The Special One was gone. Yet, throughout my childhood and into my late twenties, whenever I was sad or lost, joyful or serene, the energy returned to remind me I was not alone.

I heard things no one said and saw things everyone hid. The Special One whispered through the veils: Remember, Remember.

The visitation from the Special One heightened my sensitivity. I became more silent, an observer. Yelling, loud noises, punishment were unbearable. I sought refuge in books, at night reading under the covers by flashlight. Rising before dawn, I spent hours alone jumping rope or hanging out with my dog.

How tender is a child’s spirit, living between worlds, not yet fully established in the earth realm, not yet fully torn from the divine heart!

My vulnerable status escalated when that same year, 1952, my father was hired to build a hospital for the Mexican government and our family moved from Long Island to Mexico City. Driving around the central zocolo, on our way to a tourist attraction at a local church, I couldn’t take my eyes off vendors in tattered clothes pressing greasy bags of fried worms against our glass-protected faces. On street corners, women dressed in vibrant swirls of color picked lice out of their children’s iridescent black hair. I caught glimpses of a beggar missing a leg holding a tin cup. Rail thin children, with no shoes and darkened by soot, plied unsuspecting tourists for money, crying, Dame un centavo! As my father turned a corner, extricating our car from the tangle of donkeys, automobiles, and buses clogging the roadway, my heart constricted in my chest as a businessman in a tan suit kicked a rag-covered body on the sidewalk. Too much tequila, someone said.

Finally at our destination, I fled from the car. Clutching my mother’s hand, I descended beneath the church to an underground crypt, overwhelmed by cloying moisture dripping off the walls. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I became paralyzed with fright. Cooped up in rows of glass cases were skeletons of priests dressed in black vestments, peering with their blotted out eyes on our sorry lot of tourists. Boney relics of the faithful lined up on shelves in liquid-filled jars and tiny golden boxes sent me bolting up the stairs into the sunlight.

Not long after, between my fifth and sixth birthdays, an awareness of our economic and social circumstances formed in my mind, and although my parents urged us to be model foreigners, the disparity between our lives and the majority of Mexicans affected me deeply. I felt ashamed for having an overabundance of food and nice dresses. I started to help our housekeepers, Marta and Silvia, who couldn’t have been much older than teenagers, with their chores. I saw sadness in their eyes. Perhaps for this reason I was embarrassed to accept their kindness and refused to let them bathe or dress me.

Mexico introduced me to suffering. It was then that I began to recognize the bond between souls, how sorrow and love were shared equally in the spirit. I grew serious, troubled by the cruelty I witnessed in the streets and among my schoolmates. In a way, I became a critic of my parents’ world, an outsider in my own family.

Portends of our Mexican adventure quickly became evident: my sister, Carol, contracted typhoid fever; Pop was plagued by nosebleeds and fainting spells; my parents narrowly escaped death, hit head-on by another car while negotiating a mountain pass. I became frighteningly sick with dysentery, losing weight precipitously and spending much of the next year under medical care.

* * *

Back in the States, we rented a house in the predominately Jewish community of Long Beach, Long Island, where I attended first through fourth grade. I played dreidel with my friends, ate latkes and matzo ball soup, and took advantage of extra school holidays during Passover and the High Holy Days. While priests and rabbis may have fostered segregation, we kids simply lived and played together, moving seamlessly between cultures and religious practices.

Eventually, my parents saved enough to purchase land, and we moved further east on Long Island to Suffolk County. Old Barto Road, where my father built our home in the middle of forty acres, extended from Montauk Highway through the property of a mysterious neighbor and dead-ended in marshlands coming off Great South Bay. Separated from us by tracks of the Long Island Railroad was a burned-out house that reminded me of gloomy Miss Haversham from Great Expectations and raised the hair on my arms whenever I approached it. Deeper into the forest, headstones overgrown with poison ivy and thickets of weeds marked the site of a colonial family’s cemetery.

When I wasn’t at school or reading, I followed trails through the woods, crouching by the stream’s edge for a glimpse of a doe’s night eyes. Quivering lights across the water’s eddies or maple leaves rustling in the morning’s cool wind quieted me. Abandoning myself to nature, I found solace with my more-than-human kin. I felt cellular bonds with stately oaks and white tailed deer. I spent hours rambling through storied dwellings built of bark, limb, and leaf by burrowing critters—hedgehogs, possum, and beavers. When the wind blew northwest off the bay, the spicy scent of sassafras trees enticed me under their canopies. I loved those days, living not by the yardstick of this world, but in a dreamy, timeless domain.

Little by little, through my daily excursions into the woods, I fell in love with solitude, suddenly aware that it was my vocation and not merely an escape from pain.

Through this irresistible longing for communion, I discovered a living theology within the cellular and spiritual energies that made me, reminding me of our undivided origins in the mother womb of spirit. In the beginning of creation was not a punishing god or a painful exile, or even the word of god as it was written in the Gospel of John, but intimacy. This was not the genesis story I had been taught in Sunday school but something wholly other. Here began my search for the one reality at the heart of all religions.

A few weeks after my ninth birthday a quote by Albert Einstein in the Sunday Herald Tribune attracted my attention: I am truly a ‘lone traveller’ and have never belonged to my country, my house, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of these ties I have never lost a sense of distance and need for solitude—feelings which increase with the years. I carried that column in my wallet until it shred from wear years later.

* * *

When I was not alone in my room or wandering the woods, my mother was nearby, often yelling, scaring me to death with her emotional intensity. And yet her spirituality helped shape me as well. An avid student of the psychic and spiritual, she accepted every faith and championed the latest social outcast: gays, artists, raunchy comedians, or the poor. She also disdained religious politics that crippled the whole person, the vow of celibacy an example of how out of touch The Church was with the human condition. You can’t put a lid on your emotions and not expect to explode one day! she’d say. No doubt her parochial school experience (she was beaten with a ruler because she was left-handed) contributed to my mother’s pledge never to send her children to Catholic school. Her early life was scarred, as well, by the divorce of her parents, unheard of for an Italian family in those days.

Her father’s refusal to support the family left psychic wounds, which she worked out in the perfection of her children. Carol and I were taught to be independent and strong-minded; we had souls that needed tending, an obligation to something greater than childish concerns. The more rebellious daughter, I was the usual recipient of instruction in public rectitude. Once, when I was four, I forgot to answer the phone in the proper manner, Who is calling, please? Quickly reprimanded and sent to my room, I never made the mistake again.

In spite of my mother’s upbringing or perhaps because of it, style was as important to her as good manners and a healthy dose of humor. Tall and slender with a movie star’s face, her only physical flaw was her baby hair, which was infant fine and refused to grow below her ears. She carried herself with an imperial air and smoked with a cigarette holder like Bette Davis in a film noir. She washed laundry or swept floors dressed in a caftan, high-heel slippers, and one of her favorite turbans—a pink or green (she had several) confection of silver dollar–sized circles made of some type of gauzy material.

Pursuing her from room to room as she folded clothes or put on makeup, I plied her with questions. Why do you know so much about God? I listened with rapt attention to her stories about the White Light of the Holy Spirit or the apparition of her long-dead grandfather standing beside her bed. Never shy about her connection to the supernatural, she would ask the waitress (or grocery clerk or butcher) taking our order: What’s your sign, honey? You’re an Aries? Oh, the best sign, mine too! God was a good friend.

I don’t know if her good friend approved of the stories she told about me as a difficult infant who cried too much. Sandwiched on the sofa between Aunt Linda and Uncle Tom one afternoon when I was about eight years old, I knew what was coming and shrank into the cushions. She was telling again how she broke my will and turned me from an unruly infant into an obedient daughter.

One night, she said leaning forward, "when Bev was about three months old, her crying was driving me crazy. Determined to break her of the habit (crying? hunger?) I took the Reader’s Digest off my nightstand, leaned over her crib, and hit her over and over, screaming, ‘Go to sleep, Baby! GO TO SLEEP!’"

Thomas Merton once conjectured that his monastic bent was the result of a stern mother. I’ve wondered if the same were true in my case. Was my need for solitude survival or salvation? Many years later I will realize that silence was more than an escape from the quivering tenderness of childhood—it was beckoning me toward a limitless horizon, toward God.

* * *

Like many first- and second-generation Italian-Americans, my parents wanted us to be assimilated, modern Americans. We routinely were cautioned about gavone who greased their hair and wore gold chains or belonged to the underworld and in every way gave the noble Italian culture a bad name. Our family was dignified and discreet. We scrubbed our almost-spotless house before the cleaning lady came so she would know we weren’t slobs.

Saturday was cleaning day. Carol and I vacuumed and changed sheets while Pop tended his roses. As soon as Mom left for the grocery store, my sister and I would dash around looking for burns in the carpet caused by glowing embers falling from my father’s pipe. We warned him when smoke was wafting out of the pocket of his sports jacket, and tried to shield him from the fit my mother would have if she were to see the burned rug. While we worked, Pop turned the stereo up to full volume, better so we should hear the popular Mario Lanza belt out Neapolitan tunes. (I still can’t erase O Sole Mio and Funiculì Funiculà from my brain.) On our knees, scissors in hand, we cut carpet fibers from behind the couch and glued them over the singed offense.

My father was baptized Guglielmo Lanzetta; everyone called him Bill. The third son and first child born in the United States to Vincenzo and Maria, my father revered his parents. Arriving in Ellis Island in 1905 during the great wave of Italian immigration, Vincenzo worked as a stonemason while Maria mothered thirteen infants, of whom only six survived into adulthood. My grandmother died before I was born and I only knew grandpa in a spare way because he spoke almost no English.

His parents’ immigrant experience of hard work and personal sacrifice was ingrained in my father’s personality. A lifelong champion of the underdog, Italian or Jew, Chinese or Irish, American Indian or African American, Pop had a motto: Do the right thing; all life deserves respect. I still can hear him rooting for Black leaders as we watched a newscast on the civil rights uprisings, saying, Give ’em hell. Aside from these rare bursts of emotion, Pop was a quiet, thoughtful man, handsome in an understated way, who enjoyed reading the morning paper while dunking bread in coffee, and the occasional good round of golf.

Usually up before dawn, except on cleaning days, Pop and I would make toast and then head for the garden to prune trees or plant tomatoes. On occasion we would drive the thirty miles to the Shinnecock Indian reservation, where I learned that much of eastern Long Island had been the tribe’s ancestral lands. A student of history, Pop wanted me to understand the injustices suffered by the Shinnecock nation during the white settlers’ expansion into their territory. But it was Pop’s reading of their creation story that I loved most: the goddess who descended from the sky was their mother; it was she who caused the land to form on the back of Great Turtle and filled the sky with birds, the bays with fish and mollusks.

Pop and I shared other adventures. A civil engineer, he taught me how to estimate material costs for bidding on construction contracts. Adept in calculating cubic yards of concrete and lineal board feet of two by fours, I accompanied him to job sites where he showed me off. I loved to wrap my arm around his sleeve as we walked to the beach or strolled the boardwalk. His sole desire, or so it seemed from my child perspective, was to make us happy. Perhaps it was his humor that won over my mother, the elegant and beautiful Evelyn Acampora, even after he presented her with a twenty-five cent cookbook on their first date.

Though spirituality was important to him, my father was no churchgoer. Yet the Catholic faith in which he was raised permeated his life in mystifying ways. Two stories he told still give me chills. In the first, Pop was seated in the back pew of St. Mary’s of the Isle Church waiting for mass to start. All at once he had a vision of Jesus standing in front of the altar in long, flowing robes with one arm outstretched, pointing directly at him. Their eyes met. He never spoke in greater depth about this vision except to say that it made a lasting impression.

Many years later, when Pop was dying of cancer, he told me another story. He was a teenager rushing down the sidewalk, behind schedule in his job of distributing shopping leaflets. Pop remembered an old man wearing tattered clothes touching his shoulder and asking for help. My father told him he had no time to talk, but sixty years later, as we sat arm in arm, he wondered, Bev, was that old man Jesus in disguise? Was he asking me for help, and I turned away?

We had to drag Pop to church on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, yet he lived its true meaning: to be simple of purpose and pure of heart. His whole life was bent toward the good: family, work, integrity. Concerned for the disenfranchised and poor, Pop was uninterested in material goods for their own sake. It was always possible, he said, to achieve spiritual well-being and financial security without compromising one’s principles. My father was a gentle person, who by his actions ushered love into our lives.

If I had followed the path of my ancestors and behaved as my parents wished, I would have turned into a good housewife and mother, polite and intelligent. Perhaps I would have had a late-life career. If the world’s happiness were all I desired, I never would have left home in search of the divine realm. But I felt a different pull from the beginning.

* * *

Of my four grandparents, I knew only my mother’s mother well. Like a small, delicate bird with a broken wing, Nana, as we called her, came to live with us a few years after my sister, Carol, was born. I recall sitting on her lap, an embroidery hoop stretched over the blue-stenciled x’s on a linen napkin. "Here’s how you make the first stitch, up through the left corner of the x and down through the right. Good, filia mia (my daughter), you see how it goes?" I stroked her soft hand, rested my cheek on her ample bosom concealed behind a lace-trimmed buttoned-up blouse. I watched her make cavatelli. Laying a long white strip of cloth on the mahogany dining table, she sprinkled it with flour and rolled the sticky pasta dough into a thick sheet. "Pinch off a piece, dolly, press down and flick like this with the thumb. Bene. We let them dry and cook later."

I prayed to take away her sadness. Raised as a traditional woman, my grandmother’s marriage had been arranged between the two families and blessed by the local priest. In her wedding picture she was radiant in a satin gown with a wreath of flowers in her hair, clasping a long veil. When my philandering grandfather divorced her, a light in her heart died.

Within a year of our moving to Old Barto Road, Nana was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was fifty-eight. The lively red and white bedroom we shared was turned into a grim hospital ward. I moved my books and pillows in with Carol. A tremendous sadness settled on me. I wanted to make amends for her sacrifice. At night I read books on cancer and vowed to find a cure. I contemplated and just as quickly abandoned the thought of becoming a nun. I didn’t know why I was drawn to the idea. Perhaps a call was stirring.

Every Sunday, Nana took me to mass, dressed in hat and gloves. When it was time for communion, I lined up behind the other supplicants and waited to receive the body and blood, the papery wafer dissolving on my tongue, the droplets of wine burning my throat. Walking back to my seat, head bowed, thoughts evaporated in a timeless eddy until the aroma of incense mingled with my senses, and I was raised above myself heady and faint. Then, unbidden, the words came: I want to know you. I want to be like you, God.

When Nana was too weak to take me to church, I retreated to the secret altar I had constructed of round stones and pine cones. Kneeling on the moist, cold earth, I made the sign of the cross—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and breathed the luscious silence into my lungs. For a moment, I felt myself transported to a side chapel at Mary Immaculate, wafts of incense stinging my eyes and making me cough. The soulful Madonna looked down on me. She knew where I ached.

The worry brought me back to the present, to the melting snow wetting my knees. I placed my palms together and prayed: Dear God Please don't let Nana suffer. Please don’t let her suffer.

Nine days later Nana died. My mother’s anguished cry fell into my soul. I wasn’t allowed to see my grandmother’s body or attend her funeral. You’re too young, I was told. Ten years old, a new hole was punched into my heart.

The next weekend, after my mother returned from the burial at Pine Lawn Cemetery, I asked her to take me to confession. She drove in silence to Mary Immaculate and once there, waited for me in the car.

I opened the door to the confessional booth and knelt, the musty order of incense and dank cold overwhelming.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Yes, my child. What is your confession?

I haven’t been to mass in nine months. My grandmother was dying.

You haven’t been to church in almost a year? bellowed the shrouded figure on the other side of the