Celibate: A Memoir

With unsettling candor, poet Giura (What My Father Taught Me) relays her reluctance to accept a lifelong calling to give herself to God and end an obsessive love-hate relationship with a Catholic priest. A thematic triptych of need, jealousy, and invisibility emerges early on as Giura’s younger sister’s birth usurped her mother’s attentions and divorce separated her from her angry, distant father. At age eight, she “felt a tug on my heart” upon seeing the Catholic religious order depicted as “a giant circle of love.” Dating as a young adult only widened the divide between divine and secular love: “I had no idea I was wounded... I attracted emotionally unavailable men like my father.” At age 26, while witnessing a moment “so pure and happy” between a parish priest and a disabled child after Mass, she experienced a physical and spiritual attraction to Father James Infanzi, “a young Cary Grant”; their conversations quickly gave way to kissing and sex. At the same time, she joined the Sisters of Charity, despite her increasing revulsion at the idea of becoming a nun. Giura’s naked honesty can come across as self-obsessed as she eventually leaves the Sisters in order to chart her own path of spiritual celibacy. Though Giura writes that “I let go of [James] to God,” the ending feels unsatisfying. But the meat of this work—Giura’s struggles with her relationship with God—is complex and emotionally wrought. (Oct.)