It is 4:00 a.m. I am 78 years old and have been ruminating on the mysteries of love and faith. I am remembering my Catholic childhood, dutifully learning the questions and answers of the Baltimore catechism, dutifully hiding the disorder in my parent’s marriage and my bruises from my dad’s strap, knowing there was something deeply wrong with my uncles having to pull my drunk seminarian cousin away from my 10 year old body, starting to question the unquestionable rightness of segregation to my deep South family. Hearing and over-hearing about my brilliance, my extraordinary IQ, my reading before 4 years old. And yet, and yet, never questioning the mysteries, the rightness, the beauty, the wonder, the love conquers all of my faith, of the Catholic Church. I remember when I could learn and experience all of the wrongness without it polluting the rightness for me. Those days are long gone. Those precious days of faith like a child because I was a child, although an intelligent, questioning child – a child who could retreat into an empty church, kneel in a pew on a red velvet kneeler, beneath a soaring ceiling, before a distant gilded altar, and feel comforted and quieted, like a weaned child on a mother’s breast, although I did not then know that psalm and had not yet read the Bible independently. Now I sit propped up in bed because my lungs fill with fluid because my heart is failing and I await the surgery that will repair my failing physical heart and wish for the spiritual surgery to repair my torn asunder soul.