Night's Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story

By Sally Read

Staunchly atheist Sally Read converted to Catholicism in the space of nine electric months. In 2010, Read was heralded as one of the bright young writers of the British poetry scene. Feminist and deeply anti-Catholic, she was writing a book about female sexuality when, during her research, she spoke with a Catholic priest. The interview led her on a dramatic spiritual quest that ended up at the Vatican itself, where she was received into the Catholic Church.

Unsurprisingly, this story is written in the vivid language of poetry. Read relates her encounters with the Father, the Spirit and then the Son exactly in the way they were given to hertimely, revelatory and compelling. These transforming events threw new light onto the experiences of her pasther father's death, her work as a psychiatric nurse and her single years in Londonwhile they illumined the challenges of marriage and motherhood in a foreign country. As she developed a close intimacy with the new love that erupted into her life, Christ himself, she found herself coming to embrace a faith she had previously rejected as bigoted and stifling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781681497266

Book preview

PREFACE

I have changed the names and the details of the patients mentioned in this book to protect their privacy.

The reader will note that this is the story of a conversion, not an entire life. Any people close to me who have not been mentioned here, or who have been mentioned only briefly, should not feel this is indicative of their importance to me. I do not forget the fact that many people supported me during my conversion with their prayers.

It is also worth mentioning that those close to a convert have to undergo a conversion of sorts themselves—change is rarely easy, even if it is for the better. Bearing this in mind, I would like to thank my family for their support, particularly my husband and daughter, my mother and my uncle Kerry Lee Crabbe—especially for his enthusiasm for this book.

I would also like to thank Melanie Mulroy for journeying with me, in the year that she too entered the Church; Marie Cabaud Meaney for her invaluable help in all matters; Penelope Hewett Brown; and Catherine Pepinster, who encouraged me as a Catholic writer from the start. I will always be grateful to Monsignor Charles Morerod for his kind assistance. And to Cardinal Georges Cottier, who passed away this year, for his warmth and generosity. May he rest in peace.

Last, but also first, I would like to thank Father Gregory Hrynkiw for giving me more than we can ever know.

I would also like to acknowledge the rights holders of the following works.

Aquinas, Thomas. Compendium of Theology. Translated by Cyril Vollert. New York: Angelico, 2012.

Curcio, Beata Maria Crocifissa. Ricordi, Biografia e Diario Spirituale. Santa Marinella, Italy: Congregazione della Suore Carmelitarie Missionarie di Teresa del B. Gesu, 2011. Citation translated by Sally Read.

Day, Dorothy. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008. Used with permission.

Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom used with permission of the Liturgical Commission of the Synod of the Ukranian Catholic Church.

Divine Mercy Chaplet used with permission of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the B.V.M.

The Divine Office, vol. 1. London: Collins, 2006. Used with permission of A. P. Watt.

Eliot, T. S. Animula, Burnt Norton, and Ash Wednesday from Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, 1963. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

_____. Collected Poems, 1919-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991. Used with permission of the Washington Province of the Discalced Carmelites.

Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 1990. Used by kind permission of SPCK.

Read, Sally. Broken Sleep. Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2009.

_____. The Point of Splitting. Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2005.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. Vintage Classics edition reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Rout-ledge Classics, 2009. Excerpts from pages 88, 89 used by permission of the publisher, Librairie Plon, and Sylvie Weil.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Used with permission of Penguin Publishing Group.

1

The Father

An Irish nurse taught me how to wash and wrap a corpse. She shut the door of the room and spoke in a low voice as though the man on the bed was asleep. She spoke about the dignity of the dead. After months of charts and lectures on blood cells and free radicals, this sounded intangible and mysterious. As I stood, hushed, in the middle of the room she snapped, Take off his Band-Aids. Then she rolled her eyes when I gasped at the black blood that leapt out from one I peeled back. She was infinitely gentle with the dead man, though. She called him by his first name, with all the naturalness and polite merriment she used with any living patient. A mermaid tattoo stretched from his elbow to his wrist. It sat there on the wrinkled skin, discolored and faded, like the very old and irrelevant thought that it was. Sponge him, she told me, get off all the blood stains, and dry him well. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you leave him damp. Check his teeth are real; if they’re not, take them out. Take his watch off and bag it. I was frightened. This was my first dealing with death. I kept expecting him to grab me—so, really, it was life that made me jumpy. The Irish nurse taught me to wrap him in a sheet. We turned him heavily on his side, and as we did so he gave a heartfelt sigh, and I scuttled like an animal or a child. Ah, she said, undisturbed, yes; they fart too. When we got to wrapping his head I almost could not bear to cover his face, the mouth which had so recently been full of breath and words. He seemed still brimful of life—in the air he expelled, but also in the residue of character and thought that hung in the room. But I drew the sheet loosely over his stubbly face, and sealed it with Sellotape; his heavy head fell against my chest, where I had no option but to cradle it before setting it down, carefully. The Irish nurse tidied the room, and drew open the curtains onto cool and sane daylight. Now we open the window to let his soul fly, she told me in just the same tone as she had given all the other instructions. The roar of traffic was mighty, the sun hectic in the shimmering green chestnut leaves. It all made the man smaller; he was no longer dominating the room like an outsized rock. How could this detail of the soul have remained in a modern London hospital, I wondered? There was no God above. The soul was long out of fashion.

* * * * * *

I was brought up an atheist. At ten I could tell you that religion was the opiate of the masses; it was dinned into me never to kneel before anyone or anything. My father taught me that Christians, in particular, were tambourine-bashing intellectual weaklings. As a young woman I could quote Christopher Hitchens and enough of the Bible to scoff at. My father would happily scoff with me. He was a large, powerful man, a fag in one hand, glass of red wine in the other, and was never short of an opinion. His laugh barrelled loudly around his chest and left him gasping, mirthfully, for air. He could shout loud and long too. He enjoyed a good row, he said. He was a man who would boldly cross the road and knock on the door of a house if he heard a fight and children crying inside. He believed in looking after the weak—it was imperative, to himself as well as to me, that he was never numbered among them.

When I worked as a volunteer with learning-disabled adults and then enrolled as a student psychiatric nurse, he mockingly christened me Saint Sally for a while. But the altruism I felt surely came from him: his redoubtable instinct to protect the vulnerable.

At the age of twenty-two, I moved into a bleak high-rise nurses’ residence off Holloway Road in North London, where I would spend hours sitting on my desk, staring at the back view of London’s skyline—Saint Paul’s, blurry and grey for those who knew where to look, grubby-looking tower blocks, the red light of Canary Wharf in the far distance, planes crisscrossing the skyline. In the foreground, the old Royal Northern Hospital was becoming its own ghost story. Upturned wheelchairs lay in the gardens; broken glass was shattered over the paths. Doors gaped open and old files and handwritten registers were there for the taking. From my window up high, I wrote, I read. When I laid out the dead I made notes. (The laying out of the man with the Irish nurse would become a poem.) When a seventeen-year-old with a roof tile embedded in her skull was pronounced dead in the emergency room, I wanted words to give form to the frightening swathes of shock that reverberated through the staff room and student flats. I wanted to give the victim what screenwriters call a back story; I wanted to own and give form to the chaos of sudden death. When my flatmates organized a boozy party that lasted all night, and screeched with laughter about the dead man they had dragged onto an X-ray machine that day, I felt lonelier than I ever had before. I was green, they mocked. I would soon harden up.

I can only have been in my second or third week as a student on the general wards when I looked after Carlos.

Carlos was a Portuguese man of about fifty-five who had suffered a major stroke and needed total care. He couldn’t move or speak and had no awareness, I was told, of what was going on around him. Shortly before I arrived the medical team had decided that artificial nutrition being given him by an intravenous line should be interrupted—that is, he shouldn’t be fed. When I arrived he had just been put on a simple IV solution, and I was told that within a short time he would be dead. I remember a numerous Portuguese family, but it’s only his wife I can picture clearly now—chubby, the creases and troughs in her face filled with tears that ran in sloping horizontal lines down her cheeks. Carlos had smooth olive skin and black hair, and small intense black eyes. During his managed slide into death, I had to wash him and shave him and change his pajamas each morning. It was those things I liked learning how to do most of all: how to make sure skin—often brittle and shiny as onion peel—didn’t redden and break; how to pull a man’s skin taut as you pulled the razor across so you didn’t nick him. I washed this man’s face and watched his black eyes look hard into my own. I spoke to him, and wished I knew Portuguese. It was hard to know what to say, but I would tell him about the weather outside, how busy London was, and if I had seen his wife. How much he heard and understood I can’t say. I would think: how terrifying it must be to listen to this young English girl make small talk as you slowly starve. I would cover his face with shaving foam and begin the long delicate work of getting at all the black stubble. I began to sing as I did this job, because coming up with the small talk was hard. I sang Hey Jude because the Beatles were as universal as I got back then. I would sing it as a lullaby, round and round in the quiet privacy behind the green curtains. He would look very hard into my eyes, straining it seemed. I would hold his hand and tell him not to worry. He gripped me, hard.

Carlos, I would whisper, if you can understand me, squeeze my hand again. I waited two seconds, three. He never took his eyes from mine. I thought I could feel his effort. He squeezed my hand again.

By the next ward round I had spoken with a junior doctor about this, and the old consultant with his half-moon glasses had been briefed. I waited at Carlos’ bed with his family for the tide of doctors, therapists, and nurses to swarm up to us, with the faintly festive air some ward rounds carry with them. The consultant looked over Carlos and asked me to recount what had happened. He listened to me and flicked over a file as I spoke. I sensed he was humoring me. He was kind, but by something in his manner and the way the medical students were theatrically swallowing smiles, I knew he didn’t have to listen to me. He was showing everyone what a magnanimous man he was. It was a teaching opportunity. No, no, no, he said, finally, the grip is a reflex. Like when a baby grips your finger, you see? It doesn’t mean his brain is meaningfully active. No change here. He walked off, taking the crowd of doctors, therapists and students with him like a sea

Reviews for Night's Bright Darkness

[David Walker · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The first third was palatable then I had the feeling I was just along for the ride. Skimmed the rest to the end. Don’t think I missed much.

[judithrs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Night’s Bright Darkness: a Modern Conversion Story. Sally Read. 2018. Read, a promising young feminist, British poet, has written a good conversion story. She grew up in an atheistic family and had no interest in God or in any form of religion. When her daughter was three, she decided she’d write a non-fiction book and decided to collaborate with a physician friend of hers on a book about the vagina. One of her tasks was to interview all types of women: gay, straight, Muslin, Christian, etc. In an effort to meet a nun to interview, she contacted a friend of a friend, a Canadian Byzantine-rite priest who had been exiled from the Ukraine. They began an email correspondence. Read’s anger and hostility at the Catholic Church didn’t seem to bother Father Gregory, and they discussed all manner of issues with the Church. The more they emailed and talked about God, the more restless and unsettled Read became. She attended a baptism in St. Peter’s Basilica and could not reconcile the beauty she saw there with the horror of the priest abuse scandal. Her atheism and hatred of all things Christian was at its peak, but her ability to write anything was gone. In desperation she turned to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, a book she’d always found some comfort in. In it she read the vicar’s comments about God, and this was the turning point, the moment she began to get a glimpse of God. From there she began to talk to Fr. Gregory, read books he suggested, and eventually be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church.