I SANG TO SURVIVE.”

same. The pathos of Norma’s plight, Bellini’s divine sense of line and melody, and the transcendence of the vocalists were beyond anything I had ever anticipated. My budding obsession with opera and classical music could only grow from there.

Four years ago, I effected a sort of escape from the restrictive cult, throwing belongings into my truck and driving to Philadelphia where kindly folks let me sleep on their couch til I found a place to live. Crumbling belief along with deep questions about my gender identity and sexual orientation made the culture and faith untenable for me. In leaving I paid a cost, losing nearly everything I owned and facing rejection and censure from family and friends. As I cleaned houses and apartments in Philadelphia I sang hymns from my childhood most of whose lyrics I no longer believed. I sang arias from operas that I knew only vaguely and art songs that I learned in my spare time. I sang to survive. One day a client who was an excellent musician came to me and offered to help enroll me in a Philadelphia music school that gave voice lessons to adult students. I loved studying there and those lessons became a springboard for my continuing education.

Last summer I gave a concert to help raise funds for my enrollment at Westminster Choir College. I sang two arias from Handel’s Semele. I sang Schubert’s immortal Die Forelle and Who Is Sylvia. And I sang hymns and songs that I had sung with my family when I was a child. There was something deeply healing about singing an aria by the forbidden Handel alongside Copland’s beautiful arrangement of At the River. Ten years ago I could never have believed that I would now be enrolled in a great music school studying voice performance as a soprano. My twenty-year-old self would be confused and secretly delighted at the woman I am today. And he would have been in awe of the music that I am now surrounded with daily.

A few weeks ago my Westminster classmates and I made the Princeton University Chapel echo with songs of Christmas in our annual amalgamation of service and concert called Readings and Carols. Thousands of people showed up over the two nights the concert ran to hear us perform old English standards, choral classics, and yes, hymns I remember from somber Sunday services now lush with brass and organ making the huge cathedral reverberate in gorgeously reclaiming glory. Although there is a sense of embarking on a new world full of music, I also feel that the circle was somehow completed with that experience. The voices of the audience mixed with those of the choir, the mellow brass, and the unmatched organ among the stone domes of the chapel ushering out the years of repression and welcoming what I can only hope will be years of musical abundance and celebration; and yes, healing.