Customer Reviews

Altar Music: A Novel

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ALTAR MUSIC is a love song to the unbroken spirit of the survivor. Weber's characters each become a theme in the melody that fills this book with the music of its title. The story touches the old ways, denial, sacrifice, emotional starvation for the sake of salvation, taking a hard look at this form of religiousity through the eyes of the character Elise, Sr. Michelle.

Weber's prose defines Elise's pain and spiritual starvation vividly. The Author's use of metaphor and the poetry of her image, music transforming from desire to completion, gives insight into the minds and hearts of the three women who sacrifice their womanhood on the Altar of Religious Patriarchy: the maiden-Elise, the mother-Kate and the crone-Meghan, who are this works main characters. As we see the in the story the transformation of Meghan from maiden to mother to crone and keeper of secrets, and Kate's transformation from maiden to physically cold and spiritually frozen mother, so we experience Elise's climb from the trap of institutionalized religion. Her heart's blood is spilled in her gaining of maturity through the heroine's journey. She enters the soul's underworld a naif and returns a knower.

This story contains a wealth of wisdom and insight into the human spirit. I could not put it down.

I was swept away by this story. I felt the winter icy cold and the mosquito-rich heat of summer, the scratchiness caused by a woolen habit and the fevered touch of a would-be lover.

But most of all, I felt the author's love and compassion for her wonderfully-realized characters---all of them striving to find meaning and happiness amid the surprises, disappointments and tragedies of life in northern Minnesota.

To me this book is an ode to the unquenchable but expensive hope that leads us to struggle for freedom.

Thank you, Christin.

I was spellbound by the gorgeous and poetic writing of the author, but by two-thirds of the way through was very weary of almost everyone in the book having the very same subject of conflict... sex and horrid guilt about sex within the Catholic faith which resulted in frigid wives, child molestation, priest's drooling over detailed confessions, wedding night brutality, a predatory nun, little girls playing doctor and confessing it. I was so relieved to have the heroine's main conflict to be about self expression versus convent suppression (not sex). I am sorry an editor didn't notice this. Even with this, it is a beautifully written book.

After finishing Christin Lore Weber's first novel, I was both stunned by the beautiful writing and unsettled by the book's content. The novel chronicles the lives of three generations of Roman Catholic women living in MN who have very different experiences of faith and love.

Reading the novel was a bit difficult for me. It was very easy to be enraptured with Weber's lyrical writing, but her look at the sexual lives of these women was so overpowering that it finally became tiresome. I could not help feeling that Weber was beating the proverbial dead horse, coming back again and again to the theme of sexual repression. Certainly women are sexual creatures, even Roman Catholic ones (gasp!), but they are much, much more than that.

I have not yet decided if some of the scenes in the book play on stereotype or represent truth as Weber knows it. I refer specifically to the love affair between the priest and a woman, and the nun who preys on the young women entering the convent. In some ways this book showcased much of the dark side of religion, with special attention to how it stifles the individual's passion; on the other hand, it is a sort of victory song for the women who manage to retain their identity, albeit as confused and perhaps broken versions of the spirit they once contained.

The book was bewildering, but that is perhaps Weber's intention. Perhaps the truest statement she can make is that sex, sin, faith, and love are intricately bound; and that severing any one of these ties can have monumental consequences.

St. Augustine in his Confessions speaks of the "filth of concupiscence". He felt that sexual union in marriage was not sinful as long as the act was to beget offspring, and hopefully would be managed without "lust". Unfortunately his views permeated the Catholic Church up until modern times. This novel explores the psychological negativity of such a view as experienced by two of three women. The three women are in successive generations of a northern Minnesota family. The grandmother and the mother, influenced by this sexual theology become, to their regret, sexually cold individuals. Elise the granddaughter seems to sublimate her desires and joins a convent.

The book portrays life as a postulant and novice in a religious order, the boot camp, so to speak, of training for the religious life. Can one really become an empty vessel to be filled with God's grace and love? Can you really conquer your will and desires, and become as nothing so that God can take over? The new nun expects not only to achieve personal perfection, but also to find perfection in her surroundings. These expectations seem doomed, for our human nature is probably not suited for sainthood. The three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience make tremendous demands that can be overwhelming. Is it possible to forever deny physical desires as well as to deny the rest of our self-interests?

CLW is not trying to write a sexy novel. She is writing a book about the physical as well as spiritual needs that hold sway over human bodies. Does religion provide adequate answers on how to deal with sexuality? I find nothing wrong with this theme, and found Ms Weber's exploration of this topic to be intriguing. A good book with an unusual setting.

Christin Lore Weber has written several previous nonfiction books on feminist liberation theology, and I loved each of them. I was a little nervous about a first novel, but I needn't have been. Weber's prose style is achingly gorgeous, a great pleasure to read.

In the movie "When Harry Met Sally," a male character greets a female character's description of the classic film "An Affair To Remember" with the comment, "That's a chick movie!" <i>Altar Music</i> is a lyrical, beautiful "chick novel" -- written by a woman in language and ideas that speak directly to women's experience. For me, it was as if I had spent most of my life living in an alien land, and suddenly stumbled across something in my native tongue.

Roman Catholic apologists may find ideas to dislike in this book, particularly those who believe that only men were created in God's image and that the Magisterium is right: in front of the altar, only a penis can represent God's divine Penis. And some male readers will find themselves fleeing to the safety of Alastair Maclean or John D. MacDonald. Let them. This novel is about women's relationship with the divine between (roughly) 1930 and 1965. I loved it so much that the minute I finished, I turned back to page 1 and read the whole thing a second time.

Every woman who has experienced both sacrifice and forced denial on the human spirit will be able to identify with the characters who invite you into their world, only to wrestle with you like the biblical Jacob and the angel. You come away bruised, but you are also touched with healing. They claim your attention as well as your breath. While the story takes place in a convent, Ms Weber has been able to universalize the experience in such a way that it matters not whether you know anything about convents, nuns, or Catholics. If you have ever dared to love, this story will speak to you.

thinking that this book will be something your young daughter, Grandma or mother will enjoy. The title is extremely misleading, unfairly so. Like the formal review above says, this novel has some scenes in it worth of the best American Erotica award. I was shocked and could have done without these trashy scenes. I'm sorry but the author could have gotten her point across, about what makes these women shut down emotionally ater their experiences, without this kind of filth. The title, the relious notes in the book, it all just doesn't mesh with erotica. It cheapens the book and it's topic somehow. I would expect this from a trashy romance novel, but from a book entitled "Altar Music", with religious themes, written by a former NUN. I just felt very misled by this book, and I stopped reading ater the first third. DO NOT get this for Grandma, you know what I mean. I'm not a prude and I was offended. The erotica was absolutely not neccessary. I question the writer who feels she needs this in her toolbox. I question the reader who needs this in their plotline for "understanding". As for me, no thanks.

I am also from MN and have known many religious, from the early 60s through today. During the time represented by this book, those in religious life did not have many options and they were required to give up their life's passion to learn self discipline and "empty" themselves. I remember a young woman, a concert pianist, who was required to give up her music for a time. I saw her come into a darkened room and lay her hands on the keyboard cover for a few moments, then quietly leave. You could sense her dispare. These are not the things that those in the religious life speak of to friends and relatives. I believe the book is a beautiful and couragous look at the toll that was taken in some of the young women who gave their lives to God in this way over the centuries. Don't judge methods over 40 years old by today's standards.

Spirituality, sensuality, a cloister, the world; these are the sides of a prism through which we see the lives of three generations. Altar Music, an incandescent yet dark view of religious fealty, is a chronicle of crippling belief and inherited pain as well as a paean to the indomitability of the human spirit.

A former nun, Ms. Weber writes with courage and understanding as she limns the forces that shape her characters. Her prose, which seems to possess a natural lyricism, is made even more affecting by her choice of music as metaphor for life.

Meghan, the family matriarch, is married to Willie, a dreamer and clerk at Fouts Grocery. He is ebullient, loving; he demonstrates a largesse he can ill afford by buying a piano for their baby daughter, Kate.

At first, Meghan tries to obey the dictates of her priest by restraining herself during sex, even insisting "that their bedroom be dark during the conjugal act." But Willie's pleas win her over, and she decides that "it must be a better thing for a woman to love completely, with her body and her soul."

But, when the difficult birth of their son, Michael, leaves Meghan unable to bear more children, she believes she is being punished for her disobedience. Since there was now no possibility of conception, "God had exacted sexual abstinence for the remainder of her life." Later, while Meghan and Kate are at a religious retreat, their house burns taking the lives of Willie and Michael. Widowed, financially strapped, and doubly chastised by God, she becomes a housekeeper for the local priest.

As years pass, she keeps a concerned eye on Kate, now grown and married to Michael, another Michael, "as if the Lord played tricks; or maybe life just circled round and round, laying in your lap the very things you've loved and lost."

Kate, too, feels she has sinned and must atone for a premarital night of abandon with Michael. So, she inures herself, as she is to later say she hardens her heart, to Michael who "spent a lifetime remembering that night her passion flowered and was lost." As a child, Elise can little understand a mother who holds herself aloof, a woman who keeps her emotions securely tethered.

Elise, is gifted, a child prodigy who studies piano with Sister Mary at Our Lady of Peace convent. The girl finds surcease and release from a world she finds puzzling in the music that she comes to love. Nonetheless, the beliefs and fears of her grandmother and mother reach their apogee in Elise. At the age of 18 she leaves her wounded family to join the convent where "She took the fixing of the world upon herself."

Allowed only infrequent visits, Kate feels further estranged from Elise, and totally alone when Michael dies. Only with his death does she realize that she had not been rejecting him but, through all the years "it had been herself she had rejected."

Convent life is not what Elise had expected. She is deprived of her music, what had once been called a God-given talent, told to relinquish the friendship of another novice, Suzanne, and directed to sacrifice each thought and deed; in other words, lose every vestige of herself. In addition, she is nearly pulled into a lesbian relationship with an older nun. When Suzanne takes her own life, Elise questions what she has been taught and the tenets of her faith.

Elise's spiritual journey is an arduous one, related with skill and compassion by Ms. Weber. Although the narrative does tend to bog down in the ruminations of Elise, Altar Music allows us to share her struggle. And, it is in the sharing that we may be moved to reassess the core of our own beliefs.

- Gail Cooke