From ages 3 to 14, I went to school down the street from a cathedral — not just any cathedral, but the biggest cathedral in the world. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine loomed over Morningside Heights, over the coffee shop that served the best corn muffins, over the bookstore I basically lived in, over the playground my brother and I went to every Friday. It seemed like an almost mythical place — home to brightly colored peacocks that roamed the gardens and a waterless fountain with giant crab claws rising out of it.
It was a popular destination for field trips; I think we went at least once a year. The first time I remember going was in first grade, a month or so after my grandmother’s funeral. I started to cry the minute I got inside the cathedral, overwhelmed by how large it was, the smell of the incense, maybe just the fact that it was a church. My teacher took me outside to sit on the steps and I almost immediately calmed down.
The summer after fifth grade, my dad went to Venice to represent an artist at the Biennale, the art festival that appears every other year. The rest of my family turned a work trip for my dad into a vacation, taking a couple days on either side to explore Venice and the surrounding areas — venturing into the Doge’s Palace and seeing the famous Juliet balcony in Verona. And we visited what felt like every church we happened upon, which, in Italy, seemed to be every couple of steps. As my parents ooh-ed and aah-ed over the frescos, I looked around the dusty arched rooms in confusion — not one of the paintings made sense to me.
My mom tried to explain — pointing out halos around images of Jesus and Mary in order to help me identify them, and taking the time to tell me the stories she had grown up hearing every Sunday — but I was not impressed. None of the stories seemed to make any sense. As an 11 year old, hearing about someone walking on water or splitting the sea felt like I was being lied to. One time, a priest came up to me to remark on how “the Spirit was moving through me,” and I’m almost certain my parents had to drag me away before I started ranting about how they had been lied to as children.
To make matters worse, it was becoming increasingly clear that I was allergic to incense, as every time I stepped into a church, I would start sneezing.
Although both my parents were raised Catholic, neither of them identify as one now, and they didn’t raise either my brother or me to be religious in the slightest. However, they were deeply interested in the cultural aspect of religion, including art and traditions, and made sure to pass that down. I had books on religion that I devoured voraciously, poring over pages depicting Hindu weddings and what Christmas was like in Australia. To this day, my family eats seven different types of fish on Christmas Eve, a southern Italian Catholic tradition. And yet, at 11 years old, I was wholly opposed to the idea of religion, so sure of my position in the way only an 11 year old could be.
However, religion and the idea of divine beings seemed to be everywhere I turned. My summer camp made us recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, sing “Taps” at night and say grace before meals — and it wasn’t a religious camp. My sixth grade humanities curriculum revolved around the study of religion, exploring everything from Buddhism, to Scientology to Native American and Ancient Greek mythology. In seventh grade, I went to a bar/bat mitzvah seemingly every other weekend, a Christian wedding and yet another Catholic funeral. None of it stuck. I was irritated by the very mention of religion and confused about how so many rational adults who I trusted to guide me through life could believe in something that seemed so wholly irrational.
And yet I kept coming back to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It acted not just as a cathedral, but as a museum, with all 14 bays in the nave holding items and artworks related to causes ranging from sports to labor to music (Duke Ellington’s grand piano is a particular favorite). I was enthralled by the swooping ceilings and the artworks donated by famous New York artists from multiple decades. My fifth grade assigned reading book was “A Wrinkle in Time,” written by Madeleine L’Engle, who was entombed in the cathedral and had worked at the Diocesan House in her spare time. My art teacher had us study recycled art through Xu Bing’s suspended phoenixes, so intricately fashioned that one might think they would break from the cables and fly straight through the famous rose window. My classes went on our yearly field trips, and I dutifully filled out my assigned worksheets. I ran through the cathedral’s gardens and admired the peacocks and played basketball games in its basement. In a city filled with magnificent museums and other cultural centers, here was one just down the street — it became one of my favorite places to visit, if only just to witness its grandiosity.
***
During my junior year of high school, I signed up for as many AP humanities classes as was humanly possible; I was incredibly stressed, but the tradeoff was getting placed into Mr. Thorp’s 6th period AP Language and Composition class. Mr. Thorp was a Herman Melville devotee who papered his classroom in posters of classic authors and essayists, and spent all but one period a day running the yearbook and school newspaper. He spoke the way Harvard English professors speak in movies, and spent hours on specific passages in “Walden” until we had memorized all the different literary devices Thoreau had used. I won’t say that Mr. Thorp was the best teacher I ever had, because he wasn’t, nor was he my favorite teacher, but he fundamentally changed the way I write and introduced me to my favorite author.
The first time I got handed “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion, I was about equally excited to read it as I had been to learn about the religious stories behind the frescos in the Italian churches — not particularly enthusiastic. Mr. Thorp graded our reading comprehension not by short quizzes, but by our ability to produce a sufficient amount of what he called “marginalia,” or annotations in the margins. It was time-consuming. While I did read more critically than I might have otherwise, in looking back on the marginalia I wrote in a sleep-deprived frenzy on the subway home from basketball practice, it is primarily identification of rhetorical devices — not ideas for what those rhetorical devices meant in their respective contexts, or even my own thoughts on the actual substance of the essay itself. I attempted to make one annotation per paragraph, or at the very least, three per page to secure the ‘A’ that I was convinced my grade point average desperately needed.
My marginalia on “Goodbye to All That” escapes the margins. I had so much to write that it bled into the text itself, spilling over into the leading. So much of it was underlined in red pen, the color I reserved for emphasizing things that stuck with me. In a class where we primarily read old white men writing about the 1800s, here was a woman talking about being young in New York City, albeit the New York City of the 1950s — something was finally resonating. Didion’s essay was the most realistic portrait of New York City I had ever seen in a piece of media — not glamorized or romanticized, while also not overly critical. I pored over “Goodbye to All That,” soaking up its passages, internalizing its wisdom, recognizing her masterful usage of the first person “I,” and internally rising to the defense of the city I loved when she began listing out its defects.
As soon as I was done with “Goodbye to All That,” I moved on to “On Keeping a Notebook,” and then gave in and bought “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” I flew through it, reading and then rereading lines that struck me, and bracketing my favorite passages. All of a sudden, the concrete plan I had at 16 to become a lawyer became infused with the dream of traveling and writing about it, getting to sort myself out through text. I turned from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” to “The White Album,” and then to Didion’s great white whale: “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
“The Year of Magical Thinking” works primarily within Didion’s response to her husband’s death — the ways in which she sorts through her grief, her search for the answer to the age-old question: How do we go on living when someone we love dies? It’s a beautiful and emotional tribute to her life with her husband and their daughter, and an extremely heavy read. It’s been touted as a literary masterpiece over and over again, and was even adapted into a one-woman play.
And in chapter four, four sentences in, Didion writes “I had arranged for (her husband’s) ashes to be picked up and taken to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,” and right next to it, in the margins, I have written “check for him next time.”
It sounds calm, measured, a casual reminder to the self; but it doesn’t accurately capture my feeling in the moment. Didion’s work had been life-changing for me — I told everyone I knew to read her books, lending people my battered copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” left, right and center. When she died in late December 2021, I was devastated. I had wanted to send her a letter telling her how much her work had meant to me, how it had fundamentally changed the way I viewed literature and the books that I chose to read, and that chance was gone. Rationally, I knew that I probably would never have sent that letter, and even if I had, the chances that she would have read it were extremely low, but at that moment I wasn’t feeling very rational. She had managed to make me feel connected to something during an extreme time of isolation and what had I done to repay that?
So I didn’t feel calm when I wrote that note in the margins of chapter four, I felt giddy. Maybe a younger me had seen her walk by while admiring the phoenixes, or more accurately, maybe she had seen me admiring the phoenixes. It made that connection I felt to her more real, more tangible. I already had made it a point to go to the cathedral at least once per school break, if only just to soak in the architecture — that time I found her husband and daughter’s plaque. Her name was not yet inscribed, but flowers and lit votive candles crowded the floor beneath it, evidence I wasn’t alone in my pilgrimage.
***
In “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A (M.-L.),” a profile of a member of the American Communist Party in the the 1960s, Didion wrote that she “appreciate(s) all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
I had learned about religion, or “faith in God,” as Didion put it, as an opiate of the people while reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” and had tacked it onto the very long list that I was compiling in my mind of reasons why religion sucked. I had never considered faith in history to be an opiate in quite the same way.
I decided I was going to pursue a history major in college around the same time I read “Goodbye To All That” for the first time, but I had loved history for a long time before that. Many people believe that science and religion are opposed, but I would argue that it’s actually history and religion that stand at opposite ends. History is rigid in its rules, preferring to say “I don’t know” than interpret less than rock-solid evidence (although that’s changing). Religion, conversely, draws on stories passed down, traditions continually practiced, and attempts to have an answer for everything. What Really Happened, the area that I have always been most interested in, exists in the gray between the two.
My faith in history was grounded in the fact that it never professed things that it couldn’t prove, but as I started thinking about how lives are preserved, I realized how incomplete that was too. How could I expect to recreate someone’s experience, even when given a diary — a record of their own feelings in their own words? I kept a diary too, and it certainly was not an entirely accurate and complete account of everything that was going on in my life. And that was to say nothing about the many accounts of history that had been studied as fact just to be proven false. If history was untrustworthy, and religion was untrustworthy, where did that leave me?
***
Something I have always envied about people who are religious is their conviction that everything will be okay in the end, that something or someone is watching out for them. I am jealous of the peace that surrendering one’s destiny to something omnipotent can provide, that peace that I feel like I lost at a very early age — the age at which we stop believing our parents are gods and switch over to the opiate of our choice.
“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man,” Didion wrote in her monumental essay “On Self-Respect.”
And it was true, I had lost that conviction that everything would turn out alright, although I’m not quite sure why. Like Didion, I was a happy kid who had a pretty incredible childhood. I didn’t have a major tragedy affect me at a young age. I succeeded at most things I attempted. I did well in school, I participated in multiple extracurriculars and I always had a detailed five-year plan for my life. I was terrified of what the future held, and in all honesty, I still am. I’d be hard pressed to find a week where I haven’t had some sort of total freak-out about what job I want to pursue and in what field, where I want to live, where and what type of graduate school I want to go to, how I’ll pay for everything, etc. I haven’t had a solidified five-year plan for a while now and it causes me undue anxiety the moment I think too hard about it.
And yet, despite being so anxious about the minutiae of everyday life, I couldn’t care less about the bigger questions. Where do we go after we die? Don’t know. Doesn’t worry me. Is there actually a God? Don’t know. Don’t think I ever will. Not too preoccupied with it at the moment. I’m less interested in proving something, one way or the other. I don’t think I’d like either answer.
***
This past December, on the anniversary of Didion’s death, I made the 12-block walk uptown to St. John the Divine. I bought a votive candle for $5, wrote my message to her on it in Sharpie, placed it in the holder by her family’s plaque (now inscribed with her name as well) and lit it. And then I returned home to start my yearly re-reading of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”
Friends of mine have told me that I worship Didion, but I’d like to think that’s not true. Partially because I think it’s factually incorrect (I don’t agree with everything she writes, nor do I attempt to emulate her in my personal life) and partially because the idea of worshiping anything still makes me uncomfortable. Even drawing the comparison between how I feel about Didion and the body of work that she has created and how others treat their religions, divine figures and/or holy texts puts me on edge. I have great respect for her as a writer and revere her writing, but to frame it in a religious light feels inaccurate, both in the sense of the word, and how I’ve chosen to orient myself in life.
I’m still less than neutral when it comes to how I feel about organized religion, but I’m on my way to getting there. I’m no longer totally convinced that religious groups have it all the way wrong, and that the opiate of faith in God is a bad thing. I also no longer believe history and science are infallible, and that they deal only in facts.
I don’t believe in Didion’s God, but I do believe in her writing and its ability to touch people, myself included. I don’t believe that we can communicate with the deceased, but I light a candle in her honor — because she believed in doing so. I refuse to choose between my inability to know what happened 2,000 years ago, and the many traditions with Catholic origins that my family still performs today. I want to exist in the middle, the gray area, the margins, the only type of reality I know to be totally, 100% true — because I’m experiencing it.
I won’t pray in St. John the Divine, but I’ll keep going back.
Statement Columnist Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu