Stay in My Heart

On a spring day seven years ago I was driving across Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn feeling unusually right with the world. I felt peaceful and uplifted because I had, a few days before, settled in my mind a difficult, painful question: I would eventually leave my husband. We had children in grade school; I was scared of everything; I didn’t know how or when. But after years of tortured thinking on the subject, I had given myself permission to do it. I can still see the sunny day, my beat-up car, and the avenue. And then came something inexplicable and much more intense: a rush of elation, warmth, and contentment.

The feeling was so powerful and discrete that the first thing that came to my mind was conception. My children were both conceived in vitro, and after many years of assisted fertility I had developed the faculty of just knowing when I was pregnant. After implantation procedures during my quest to have a third child, I could feel the golden ball of a living embryo inside me. On one occasion, I’d even felt the instant I miscarried, a sharp metaphysical pinch, accompanied by a falling sensation, sorrow. My elated feeling on this spring day was wider and more transporting than pregnancy, but the glow was similar. It was much more than any life decision could account for, and it persisted throughout my drive, and then through the next days and weeks, a pleasure deep in my bones, a sense of inner peace and presence that I could check on at any time. Are you still there? I’d ask, and he answered, Yes, still here. Mathematically it was just outside the calculation window that I could actually be pregnant, but eventually I took a test, which of course was negative. Looking back I realize that the test was the first step in driving away the feeling, which I knew was irrational even as I enjoyed it.

I know now that this experience was God coming for me, but I didn’t recognize it. And so several years later, God came again.

The following things are true: I have always been interested in religion, and I never imagined I could be religious, specifically not Christian, especially not Catholic. As a child, I was obsessed not with growing up, but with becoming vaguely, romantically good in the sense of morally triumphant. My parents were scornful avowed atheists, so my path to goodness was education, and then the right career. Good was all the things religions weren’t: liberal, open-minded, tolerant, generous toward difference, educated, focused on practical ways to make our world better. (You might become a Supreme Court justice, my mother said. You’re so smart and you like to argue.) I became a writer and journalist—a bad idea, now that I understand how most people succeed in this profession—and then, somewhat bitterly, a hostess and mother, which was better. By my early forties, my goals had been adjusted to doing okay at what was directly within my control. My world, like that of most secular people, was full of reasons to despair, and I couldn’t really argue, but I also couldn’t help but see the beauty of it.

For years I have been writing for the website of the Paris Review a series of essays in which I cook from classic literature. I select food scenes from great novels, make up recipes for them, cook and photograph them, and then write about the meaning of the food in the work. The process is equal parts criticism and mysticism: I always learn something about the book through how the food turns out.

For my column I’m always looking for books in translation, written by authors who represent different food cultures. In spring of 2021, a few months after—finally—making the formal separation from my husband, I came across Kristin Lavransdatter, a novel set in the Middle Ages and published in the 1920s. Its author, the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, was an adult convert to Catholicism, and the book reflects her religious concerns. That part wasn’t important to me—my youthful interest in the subject had long been abandoned—but I found the book to be an absolute masterpiece. Undset responds to Joyce and modernism while commenting on feminism and womanhood—all in a medieval tale. I came up through women’s studies programs. I read endless iterations of A Room of One’s Own and “The Yellow Wallpaper” and other rejections of the stultifying roles of women, at the same time that my teachers and fellow students decried the lack of women’s voices and women’s experiences in literature. For any of these courses, Kristin Lavransdatter, which leans into, not out of, women’s biological reality, should have been a foundational text. Among its many other virtues, it is the only great work of literature I’ve come across that makes the ghastly mess of sequential childbearing a pillar of the narrative.

Kristin, daughter of Lavrans, is a beloved child of a good family in medieval Norway. She throws over Simon, the stable, kind, salt-of-the-earth man to whom her father has betrothed her, in favor of handsome, spirited, and imprudent Erlend, with whom she falls in love. Kristin violates God’s law and the customs of her community in order to do this, and she suffers greatly for it. Erlend is a bad father and a bad householder, though the couple’s passion for each other never abates. The story’s drama lies in the question of whether Kristin did wrong. This question had personal resonance for me. I was doing something that felt deeply wrong—breaking up a marriage with children—for the selfish-seeming end of my own happiness. People say there is no stigma for divorce anymore, but that’s not how I felt. And though as a secular reader I tended to reject aspects of Kristin’s dilemma as narrowly religious, Undset handled the material so skillfully that the religious precepts began to make sense to me. After a vicious battle with the people who love her, Kristin wins permission to marry Erlend, then gets pregnant before her wedding day, betraying her father and shaming her family and community. After the birth of the child, a priest instructs her to atone for her sins by going on a barefoot pilgrimage, with a nursing infant at her breast. By today’s standards, this sounds like prudishness and cruelty. But I understood the complexity of Kristin’s wrongdoing, and even grudgingly admitted the wrong.

Undset drew on Norway’s pagan traditions, and one sequence of the novel involves Kristin’s childhood encounter with a wood nymph. She is touched by a pre-Christian, wild sexuality, which does not let her go. It’s this strain of her nature that is responsible for the fall with Erlend, and the tension between it and her Christian impulses is at the heart of the book. Kristin’s dogmatic commitments were irrelevant to me, but I grasped what Undset was trying to do: reconcile sexuality, in its full glory, with Christianity. And not as a remedial problem for one misguided woman, but for all women. I had the usual suite of secular prejudices against religion in general, Christianity in particular, and Catholicism especially for being anti-sex, so I was surprised to discover that such an attempt had even been made.

Undset’s dazzling vision, expressed through Kristin, was that full commitment to earthly marriage is also full commitment to God. This vision embraced sexuality but was the opposite of the modern ideal of free love, which can be anything and everything, including despair. Undset shows the romantic kernel of a man and a woman and a fertile union, carried on through time, growing to encompass other lives, knitted through sexual intimacy. She presents sexuality as not usually a sin, or mostly a sin, or always some form of participation in the Fall, as I assumed Christian writers believed. For Undset, sexuality is regulated because it is sacred, and it is sacred because it is a signpost pointing us toward the best expression of our humanity. Kristin’s commitment to Erlend was the more difficult path, but in the end her insistence on a burning romance is what saved her. She did right.

Even without believing in the religious aspects of Undset’s vision, I found that it brought many of my experiences into focus—especially in showing how a love story continues past the birth of children. Kristin’s kind of love was not what I had experienced, but it was, I thought, the ideal. I was even more struck by Undset’s idea of the Church as an aid in this project. Religious people, places, and traditions are not there to condemn Kristin for breaking the rules—though she has broken them. For her sins, she is mostly punished by life. The religious people, places, and traditions are there to meet her in the pain of her struggle and offer things: forgiveness, wisdom, tradition, community, advice, punishment when needed, endless fresh starts. I had always imagined the Church as a distant and cruel regulatory body, and suddenly I saw it as Undset did, as the place you turn with the whole unregulated mass of your life—as the only place large enough for it.

When working on my essays for the Paris Review, I spend weeks taking notes, muttering to myself, and dreaming. It can be done in a mother’s spare time, between running errands, making dinner, walking back from school. In one of these moments in the spring of 2021—it must have been around Easter—I wrote in my notes: If this were what the church is, I would want to join. This is a church I’d be a part of. I didn’t believe it for a second, but, I thought, if only. And I would. My struggles were different from Kristin’s, but they felt equally impassioned, forbidden, vexed, right-but-wrong. I longed for help with them.

And then, the miracle: Later that night, while lying on my bed, reading with my son, I felt what I’d felt before: a startling, sudden, complete, inrushing sensation of presence, but this time I recognized it. I felt the same joy and glowing peace I had felt before, and was weak and dazzled from the shock of it. This is God. Do I actually know this? Do I actually believe it? My mind touched the edges of the experience only delicately. It did not feel breakable, but I didn’t want to break it, either. The first thing I said was Please stay. I had some stray, distant thoughts, including, Am I going to have to become religious? (Still with some bewilderment and horror.) Which religion? What am I supposed to do with this? But I was also filled with peace and certainty that the what-next would work out. For months I told no one, walking around secretly elated while pursuing my daily business, pressing my hand to my heart, wide-eyed, amazed, praying constantly but just the one prayer, or perhaps two: a wordless summoning of appreciation, and also the words, God, please stay in my heart. I didn’t know any real prayers, but I thought there would be a grace period. I had time to learn.

I have since become a part of the church I discovered through Kristin Lavransdatter. I was baptized and confirmed on Easter of 2023. I chose Catholicism at first on faith, because reading Undset had brought me to God, and Undset was Catholic. In the early days I was even open to other traditions. God had arrived, but which God, perhaps, was to be discovered. But luck—or Providence—had already started throwing Catholic priests at me. Just before my conversion experience, I’d attended a garden party in Brooklyn at which Fr. Paul Anel was a fellow guest, the first party I’d ever attended that included a priest. Fr. Anel was an unusual priest, having a specific mission to artists. And then, a few weeks after my conversion experience, I received some fan mail from a Jesuit, another lifetime first. In my early days, he was a sounding board for my Undset-inspired thoughts on sexuality and Catholicism.

In the moments immediately following my conversion I had another conviction, nearly as strong as the faith: Oh, of course, I asked. I thought I’d heard or read somewhere that prayers will be granted if you ask correctly—I remembered the phrase Ask and ye shall receive. I have since been told that this is not good theology. Grace is freely given; no human can do anything to get it, and obviously no human deserves it. Still, there was an inner alignment, aided enormously by luck, that seems to have allowed me to see what was being shown to me.

I have been told by Fr. Anel that the personal revelatory experience is not a desirable foundation for faith. Feelings are weak, he has explained, and they can change. You must choose the Church based on your observations and reason. This was not welcome news to a person whose heart was filled with a euphoric sense of divine presence. But I’ve since realized that without knowing it, I’d gone the reason route first. Sometime in the Covid era, I’d shrugged and decided that Christianity was the only system that offered any hope, despite the fact that it was inaccessible to me due to my lack of faith. Well before my conversion, I had thought that I’d be willing to embrace things I don’t “like” about religion for the greater good. I’ll trade you abortion rights, I thought, for a world in which people try to practice the Christian ideal of wise husbandry. I’ll trade you anything for a general attempt to love thy neighbor.

The other sense in which my “reason” had chosen God was a mystical one: Around this same time I had become a regular tarot card reader, and had become convinced that the deck responded to my queries in ways that could not be explained by coincidence or the open-ended nature of the symbols (the usual dismissals of tarot). This was a small but vital shift from the way I’d thought before. I had always been open to the idea of there being “something more” to human existence than science could explain, but the tarot, through daily, practical application, showed me it was true. (If you expect to prove this by science, don’t bother—as many readers know, if you misuse the deck, it starts giving you sarcastic answers.) Reason bade me say goodbye to rationalism.

Equally important were some decisions that incidentally lifted away layers of sin from my daily life. Having children, and then devoting myself to the daily labor of putting them first, has made me a better person. (I didn’t realize it would be like this when I set out to breed—in fact, I was determined to preserve everything I liked about “me” as if there were no children present.) I also gave up pornography after separating from my husband, having become reliant on it during my unhappy marriage. From a secular perspective there was nothing really “wrong” with it, but I could never suppress my conviction that I was “energetically,” as I put it, participating in the degradation and soul-death of the people involved. I knew I should stop, and so one day I did. When I look back at the me before motherhood, or at the me who was clinging to pornography as a narcotic against loneliness, I see myself as blind in the first case, and bent and cramped in darkness in the latter, obsessively doing things that hurt me.

I believe now that these forms of accidental Christian right-doing helped me recognize the gift when it was given to me. In between my two experiences, I turned my feet to a path I didn’t consciously see. I picked up Kristin Lavransdatter at random, and I was clearheaded when the moment came.

I still pray God, please stay in my heart, but less often now. I have learned other prayers, and I’ve developed an almost daily involvement with my priests, my new friends in my parish community, Catholic writers and dogma, the rosary, and more, which are all helping me to discover and lead a Christian life—or to try to do so, of course; it’s not easy. It is, however, the Church I was looking for, and where God dwells.

Valerie Stivers writes for Compact and the Paris Review.

Image by Suzy Hazelwood, public domain. Image cropped.