It was my desperate need for — no, obsession with — beauty that brought me falling to my scabbed pink knees in prayer for the first time. My heart was swept away by the height of the curved stone ceilings and their arches, and the way the organ moaned into the vast space, filling it like an ocean. It sounded, or so I thought, very much like the way my blood sometimes sounded in my head as it pulsed. At that time, I knew that the man with the ribcage like little crags in a little mountain, who stretched himself out on a cross with thorns across his agonized brow, was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Lord and Savior. And the gentle woman draped in cloth (which looked so light and soft though it was made of stone), her head tilted in pale mourning and love, was Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary.

But which angel was that winged man, frozen in the sweeping motion of a nearly-suspended flight? And who was that crowned woman with a restless infant at each breast? Who held the tablet of words I couldn’t yet read?

The priest presided over the service like a judge, rising out of layers of white fabric. The strip of cloth that hung over his shoulders was a brilliant scarlet and hemmed with golden thread — what I wouldn’t have given to feel something so beautiful against my own dirty skin. He told us who God was and what He wanted, and it was all rather complicated to my head, made as it was out of fish guts and mulched hay. I’d thought maybe God was the light bathing us through the colored panes — green, pink, blue, yellow — of the titan windows. Were these the colors at the beginning of the world? I liked to think that the world began this way instead of in darkness.

After my first prayer, strange dreams crept into the hay to sleep with me at night. I threw myself so wildly in my unconsciousness that I had to put my meager bed back together every morning. My sisters thought I must have fallen in love with someone’s untouchable son, I was so dazed and absent in their eyes. But it was only that the colorful light had painted itself on my eyes, so that all waking moments came in a shimmering haze of blue, pink, yellow, and green. The interplay of light over the milk pail or the dying hearth or the tilled earth made me smile to myself as much as it caused me to be unsteady on my feet. I was no longer sure where the ground was in relation to my body; I often felt I was falling, and sometimes I was, and in those latter instances, I always realized too late. It was a sign, and I followed it to the convent with a solitary purpose: to seek God and ask Him — since he was the only one there when it happened — what color was the world when it began?