When I was a young child, I was playing in the garden behind my bedroom in our adobe house under Sun Mountain, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was looking at the purple grape hyacinth flowers which I found magical, as they truly did resemble miniature bunches of grapes. Then I saw feet. Two large feet in brown leather sandals with particularly hairy ankles. I followed the feet up, and I saw a long white glowing robe. Then the face of a bearded man who looked down at me, smiling. I will never forget that glow. His entire being glowed, with a light I have never seen since.

When I told people what had happened in the garden, they said that I made it up. But it was as real to me as the piñon juniper trees outside, as real as the water I drank, as real as the red brick floor under my feet.

Years later, when I became interested in religion as a teenager, I didn’t feel that Catholicism was something “for” me—it belonged to other people, who had been born in it. As a child, though, I prayed every night, though no one had ever taught me how. Mostly it was out of fear. Please don’t let them know how bad I am. In museums I would see a painting of the Annunciation, or Saint Bernard and the Virgin, or Saint Lucy with her eyes on a platter, and I would be gripped by emotion so strong that I couldn’t move.

I would not admit this love for many years, not until I found myself living in Greece, on the island of Corfu. Corfu is primarily an Orthodox island, but because of the four-hundred years of Venetian rule, there is also a well-established Roman Catholic community, with a beautiful church in the center of Old Town. The building itself has been through a lot—she was built around 600 A.D. by the Byzantines, then survived various invasions, then she was Orthodox, and in the Middle Ages made a Latin Catholic church. She was bombed by the Germans, once more rebuilt. You can see her scars and the fragments of her architectural past; pieces of her ancient pediments with Latin inscriptions and ruins are on the floors in the side chapels. The paintings are a mix of Catholic and Orthodox iconography. There is a large, almost black crucifix on the far wall above the altar.

Sometimes during the period when I found myself living on Corfu (before I was a Catholic) I would go and kiss the burgundy slippers of Saint Spyridon, the seventeen-hundred-year-old relic of the bishop who is the protector of the island. Spyridon scared away the plague twice: once, while he held a crucifix, the disease shrank into a human-sized demon with black leathery wings and the face of a monkey, and the saint demanded that it leave the island for good, scratching a cross into the stone of the Venetian fortress in submission on its way out. You can still see the mark.

The story of how I became a Catholic, a story that involves four men, including three priests, each from a different church, is a strange one. It is probably unimaginable almost anywhere except on Corfu, where it is almost impossible not to wind up visiting churches, as I did one winter. Finding the Greek liturgy inaccessible, I ended up drifting to the Anglican one, where I loved the service. The priest, an Englishman who had probably meant only to greet a newcomer, walked up and introduced himself. I told him I was just trying things out, and he replied by asking me whether I would like to be baptized in the sea on Easter. Without much thought, I said yes. Later he told me that he had never offered anyone baptism, that he had always let people come to him.

The fourth man in the story was a married Greek with whom I had just begun an affair. I justified it to myself in a number of ways: I was getting over a painful breakup, I felt lonely, I desired to feel chosen. But I was also deeply ashamed. The affair was already tearing me apart, but after I decided to get baptized, it was agony.

As Holy Week drew close, I made a commitment to stop seeing the man before Easter, but the looming end, the time stamp, made desire for him all the more strong. April arrived. The man took me to an abandoned Orthodox church in the countryside, on a hill, far from town. The church was a reddish pink, surrounded by white oaks, and you could see the aquamarine sea down below. When I was with him, everything else fell away. He told me that the white oaks are the trees that speak. Being with him was intoxicating.

But I still had a conscience. Being away from the man always broke the spell. When I got back to town, I was very distressed. I felt alone and there was no one I could talk with. In the evening I went out looking for a priest. There are priests everywhere in Corfu: bearded, wearing long black robes, crosses around their necks, eating ice cream, drinking café freddos, laughing, talking with other priests, or their families. (The first time I saw a priest walking hand in hand with a child I was horrified, but then I learned that Orthodox priests are permitted to have families.) But I didn’t see a priest that night. So I walked up to a little church I had passed by before. The black iron gate was open to the garden in front full of red geraniums and magenta bougainvillea. Inside, the priest was surrounded by people. He saw me come in, and he motioned for me to wait. After a few minutes, he came over and smiled. I asked him if I could talk with him. He said yes, come back tomorrow at noon.

When I returned the following day, he was with a group of school children, showing them how to make crosses with palm fronds. This was a few days before Palm Sunday. I waited for an hour, in the entry room with a large painting of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and of the icons of the saints for his church, Saint Paraskevi and Saint John the Evangelist. I thought Saint Paraskevi was Saint Lucy, because she was depicted with eyes on a plate. But Saint Paraskevi (paraskevi means “preparation” and by extension “Friday” in Greek, suggesting preparation for heaven and for the Sabbath) is also a patron saint of eyesight.

After the crowd of bubbling Greek children made their way out of the church to awaiting parents, the priest beckoned me. He apologized for the delay, and led me back through the dark church covered wall to wall and floor to ceiling with colorful painted icons with gold halos to the little kitchen at the back. He motioned for me to sit on a bench across from him. Father Zenobius had a long dark beard and large, kind brown eyes. “Tell me,” he said, looking at me with compassion. I burst into tears. I wept and I wept. He sat there patiently, letting me cry, waiting for me to speak. I will always remember his long silence, how willingly he accepted the duty of bearing witness to my pain and sorrow. Finally I told him the whole story. His English was quite good, and when he didn’t understand something, he asked for clarification. He told me that in Greek the word for sin means to “miss the mark,” as in archery. He said that sin dirties our souls, and that we want to make them clean for God. The man I was seeing was a “closed door,” the priest said, knocking on the wood wall for emphasis. He told me that even if somehow the man and I could be together, it wasn’t clear that I would even like him. “Maybe if you could be with him, he would drive you crazy, his socks all over the floor.” He told me the relationship was a fantasy and it was a sin. “For you, for him, for his wife. You must stop.”

Paraskevi is another church that had centuries of fires and damage from various conflicts, another that was bombed by the Germans. I looked up at the immense painting of Christ’s face on the ceiling, looking at us from above with both a look of love and an imperious air of judgement. I resolved to stop seeing the man, and I told this to Father Zenobius. “Good,” he said, “That is the first step of penance. Do that, and God will be with you. He will help you to clean your soul.”

For the moment, however, I remained an embryonic Anglican. Attending their services every Sunday was lovely. I enjoyed singing with the elderly British and South African expats, and (though I was not baptized) I was encouraged to kneel and take the communion tortilla and a sip of sweet wine.

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Every year thousands of people come to Corfu for Holy Week. In the year of my baptism, Latin and Orthodox Easter co-incided. We were all in preparation together. I knew nothing about what Palm Sunday was or Maundy Thursday. In the evenings I went to the Orthodox services at Saint Paraskevi. The only light was from beeswax candles and an oil lamp pending from Christ’s heart on the ceiling. (Father Zenobius told me that in Greek oil and mercy come from the same root.) The church was filled with Corfiots, reading from their liturgy books, swaying, crying, coughing, crossing themselves, taking phone calls and rushing outside. There were many elderly people, but many young people too, babies in arms and in strollers, little children running around and playing on the banisters. The air was filled with thick incense. The cantors on both sides of the altar chanted the liturgy in Koine Greek, the language of the Gospels, their voices weaving back and forth hypnotically.

I made other preparations. For my baptism I went out and bought a white linen dress. Buying an article of clothing for Christ felt very good (normally I dislike shopping). I also bought a black linen dress for Good Friday and spring onions to take to the Anglican Last Supper. I had never felt more like I was living as I was supposed to live. On Palm Sunday, I drove to a monastery in northern Corfu. It is a stunning thirteenth-century Byzantine monastery, constructed after a monk saw the Holy Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) amidst cypress trees on the craggy cliff towering high over the crashing turquoise sea far below. There are stray cats and, much to my delight when I emerged that Palm Sunday from the outdoor bathroom set aside for tourists, a donkey. I was strong in my resolve not to see the man again.

On Holy Wednesday, late at night while I was in bed reading about the Last Supper, I heard a loud bang come from below. I put on a robe and left my apartment and went downstairs. The street-level door was broken, off its hinges, lying on the ground. I am still not sure what happened; the wild boys who liked to gather in the little plaza outside my house would get rowdy sometimes, yelling and cursing and throwing water balloons, but they had never done anything seriously destructive. I realized that anyone could walk into my apartment. Corfu is very safe, but it’s still a city. Being a woman alone, I didn’t feel comfortable. I called my landlord, but he was out of town for Easter.

So I called the man. Making it clear that I wasn’t going to be intimate with him anymore, I asked him for help with the door. He readily agreed, and the next day after propping it up temporarily he told me that he would be able to fix it properly the following day at noon. I found this distressing. I had intended to spend my first Good Friday in fasting and prayer, meditating on Our Lord’s Passion.

The man returned as promised. The sky was an eerie yellow, and it was trying to rain, an unusual thing for an island with robust rain storms, but that day, there was too much to cry for. I abandoned Christ to die while I sinned.

The man left, without having fixed my door. I put on my black mourning dress and went out into the streets to the Epitaph processions. I went to the one for Saint Paraskevi, awkwardly figuring where I was supposed to stand after making a few mistakes. Before the procession began, people waited in a long line to kiss the Epitaph in its beautiful golden box framed in orchids and roses, then each took one rose petal. I joined the crowd as they followed behind a band playing a pounding mourning dirge through streets lined with rose petals. I felt the banging of the drums in my entire body. People bowed their heads and wept and in the sway of penitents, I felt the weight and horror of my sins and wept with all the Greeks. That night, the city went dark.

The next day was Harrowing Saturday. At eleven A.M., Corfiots throw red clay jars out of their windows to shatter on the cobblestone streets below. This is to imitate the earthquake at our Lord’s death. People eat blood-red Easter eggs, as a reminder of the miracle said to have taken place when Saint Mary Magdalene went to preach Christ’s resurrection to the Emperor Tiberius. The saint held an egg in her hand, and the emperor told her that a man’s rising from the dead was about as likely as the egg’s turning red. The egg became scarlet right in front of the emperor, and he ceased his persecution of the Church. On Saturday night, everyone in town holds a candle lit from inside Christ’s tomb, the holy fire flown to the island that morning, held in the hands of an Orthodox bishop.

On the morning of Easter Sunday, I was baptized in the bright blue Ionian Sea, underneath the magnificent and immense fifteen-hundred-year-old Byzantine fortress. The sun sparkled; I died and was reborn.

After being baptized I didn’t see the man for days. But then I missed him and when he reached out I thought, How wrong can this be? The Anglican clergyman hadn’t said anything about sin or the reality of heaven and hell. From the Orthodox I was told that hell was like a hospital, not eternal torment. So I justified it: We’re all weak, we’re all sinners.

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One night, after I had guiltily spent the morning with the man again, I was walking around the city after dinner. Many of the churches on Corfu are open all day every day, and often well into the evening. I went inside the Catholic Cathedral of Saint James and Saint Christopher and found myself looking up at the old wood-beamed ceiling and then at the black crucifix on the far wall behind the altar, flanked by six candles in ornate silver candlesticks. This was where I met Fr. Angelo. I told him I had been baptized in the Anglican Church but that I wanted to become Catholic. He wrote down his cell phone number. “My English is not good,” he said, “but I speak Italian, Greek, Spanish and French.” We ended up speaking in Spanish.

Fr. Angelo gave me a blue rosary. He also allowed me to receive Communion while I was being instructed in the faith. Before I met Fr. Angelo I knew almost nothing about the sacrament. I thought the tortilla we ate at the Anglican church was just a nice tradition.

After I began to receive Communion, I permanently broke things off with the man. Not guilt, not fear, not overwhelming shame, not the terror of our being discovered stopped me. Not the fact that it was breaking me in body, mind, and spirit. Not getting baptized, not talking with an Orthodox priest whom I came to love dearly as a friend. Not my own conscience, which was getting trampled every time I saw him. But the Eucharist stopped me.

One afternoon, I found myself feeling great regret about my past. I looked down at the tattoos on my wrists I got decades ago. On my right is a gear, as in, we are all cogs in a wheel. On my left is an old book stamp of a fleur-de-lis. I don’t actually like tattoos. That day, I looked into getting mine removed, but the process releases heavy metals into the body. In the evening, I had heard, there was going to be a Saint Anthony procession. It was difficult to find the church dedicated to Saint Francis, one I had never seen before but had walked past a thousand times. It’s up stone stairs off a narrow pedestrian street, and the roof of the building is so low that you don’t even know a church is there. This church is eight hundred years old, and only celebrates Mass twice a year.

That evening it was very hot and humid. Being in the church felt like being in a sauna. I sat down on an ancient wooden pew and looked at the floor. To my right, the old quatrefoil black and white tiles had a floral pattern in the exact shape of the gear on my right wrist. On the left side, the pattern was a fleur-de-lis.