Faith, or at least the desire for faith, is part of the reason my mother responds so viscerally to Sally’s bad news. We’ve joined a new church, Saint Michael and All Angels, an Episcopal congregation whose ritual goings-on are as near to Latin Catholicism as the absence of a pope will allow. We have been various sorts of Protestants: Presbyterians in Tennessee, according to family alliance, Methodists in Tucson later on because there was a church nearby, mild and tepid with its grape-juice-and-cracker Communion and suburban angularity. For years we’ve been nothing at all.

But now Saint Michael’s is a school of ritual, liturgy, and style. The priest of the church is a handsome and flamboyant political activist, with a flawless sense of aesthetics: the church is adobe, sand pink, all curves and archways, set in a grove of twisted old olive trees out of van Gogh. Every Sunday the vaulted apse is pierced by Bach fugues on the organ, and clouds of frankincense billow from the swung silver censors. Father Fowler collects antique vestments, so each Sunday’s procession displays this season’s beaded and embroidered albs and surplices. The statues are Mexican, antique, the flowers arrayed in bronze and lustrous black pottery: perfect, for what my mother wants, which is something like the abdication of self in ritual. A form of simplifying oneself? Here it is possible to step out of the contradictions and doubts, the tensions that make things shatter from within like my unfortunate bowl. Here she can immerse herself in what she can actually believe in, which is beauty.

Father Fowler himself, with his groomed white beard and raptorial dark-eyed gaze, is something of a beauty, a fact lost on neither my mother nor myself. He gleams with the allure of conviction. He projects a fierce quality of certainty.

I am, indeed, smitten by it all, if not quite convinced, since at fourteen I find it difficult to embrace something my parents like. But it’s all undeniably gorgeous, and I am captivated by the confrontational edge of the priest’s politics. He works for Cesar Chavez’s grape boycott and organizes picket lines at Safeway. My mother seems essentially indifferent to his moral messages (the necessity of confronting our racism, civil rights, charity), but utterly enraptured by matters of style. She covers her head, when she enters the sanctuary, which Episcopal women are not asked to do. Her collection of mantillas swells. Piety, in fact, seems a kind of performance; new phrases pepper her vocabulary: Lord help us and save us, Saints preserve us. It’s as if she’s doing a kind of imitation of someone more certain than herself, someone whose faith emerges from a history so deep and continuous there is no question of choosing whether or not to believe. Such women, the women whom she’s decided to be, in her lace headpiece and her discreet crucifix, don’t have abortions, and neither do their daughters.