Of Identity, Faith, and Love

by Sara Davis Buechner

 As difficult as it is for me to define the music I play in words, so it is with religion. The two are deeply intertwined within my soul, and the expression of both is something that takes me into a realm far different, far higher, than the ordinary experience of daily life. It’s fair to say that my life would, indeed, have no meaning without music, and thus I may say also of a life without God, without spirit, without a daily soulful prayer to the Creator. Since earliest memory I have had the need within, to make a joyful noise unto the Lord.

As a young child, the most joyful times in my life circled around the music played on our home piano, the Mozart Symphonies that came into our living room on the radio, the classical records my mother bought for our RCA turntable, and most of all the piano lessons taken on the lap of one of the most spiritual and loving human beings I know, a then-young Hungarian refugee named Veronika Wolf. 

Lucky enough to dodge bullets, barefoot, running across the Hungarian border with her parents as the Soviets invaded Budapest in 1956, she ended up in Baltimore as a student and part-time piano teacher. She and her parents were conservative Jews, and their deeply-ingrained religion left a powerful mark upon me — not in terms of the religion itself, but in the way that Judaism informed their lives and was integral to their very being — you saw it in their faces, heard it in their quietly thoughtful voices, sensed it when Veronika talked about the sanctity of Mozart’s music. My own parents, Catholics then, did not live with their religion that way. Mostly they complained about the length of Sunday Mass and the hypocrisy of this priest or that. Eventually they left the church, when I was 6 years old. Later they forced one of the most extreme tortures imaginable upon me, Unitarian Sunday School.

Veronika Cohen was the first person to enter my small suburban world who was from a wholly different milieu — a different continent, country, language, outlook, life view. Her rich Hungarian accent was a challenging spice to the lily-white enclave of northwest suburban Baltimore where I was raised. Her weekly entrance into our home forced me to acknowledge and respect people of profound difference. And as well, to honor the wholeness of someone with an alien core. That was easy to do, because it was obvious that Veronika was a beautiful, musical soul, and a sincerely devout woman.

What, indeed, was my own core? Besides the music and my love of life itself — warm summer picnic afternoons, playing with my orange tabby cat, cuddling my grandparents, reading books by the pile at the library over bowls of sugary cereal — there was another facet of my life that was certain. I was female. It was sure to me as a youngster, as sure as my name was David (a name I liked, ironically), as sure as I knew that music was beautiful, and as sure to me as the profound power of God beating within my heart. All those things were not even felt, or sensed, and certainly never learned. They just were. I was made by God to be female, and to be a musician.

I was perhaps four years old, just before beginning kindergarten, when I picked up one of my favorite books taken out of the Pikesville Public Library, Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeleine, and took it to show my mother in our kitchen. I pointed to pretty little Madeleine in one of the drawings, in her bright yellow raincoat and matching hat. “Mommy, can I have a hat like Madeleine?” I asked? “Why no, honey, that’s for girls,” came the reply. It was only confusing to me; after all, I knew I was a girl. But somehow, there I was in the kitchen, wearing boy’s brown shoes with thick laces and heavy corduroy pants. Hmm, my brain rattled around. I took my book back to my room and continued reading.

My mother had to process other awkward moments with me — at the local art museum, where I pointed to a huge Rubens portrait of a royal Dutchwoman in frills and gold, and announced that I wanted to look like that when I grew up. And at dinner one night after watching the Donna Reed Show, when I told my mommy that she looked prettier than Donna Reed; but I hoped that I would be as pretty as Donna Reed too, when I grew up. That comment got my mouth washed out with soap.

Upon the entrance to kindergarten, the gender walls rose higher than I could fathom or climb, and soon enough I was made to learn that most certainly I was a boy — a boy who loved girls, loved their company and played with them exclusively, who envied them their Girl Scout outfits and gossip and dolls and long hair, their sensitivity, their gracious hands and smell, their values and games and loves and dresses and adventures.

– – –

It took me thirty years to return to that childhood place of integrity, as a repressed adult. I was thirty-seven years of age on the late autumn day in New York City — November 27, 1996 to be precise — that I lay my heavy body down on a large rock in Central Park as I crossed from the East Side to the West by foot. How tired I was that day — tired of a life of wrestling and denial, a life of psychotherapy and self-hatred, a life of insecurity, alcohol and pills, a life nearly ended several times in an overdose of booze and drugs. And in the tiredness of that day, I heard, as sure as the sound of a cicada on a summer evening, the voice of God within.

“Do you want to go there?” God asked me.

God was asking if I had the desire, the fortitude, and the determination to make the journey across the gender divide.

“Yes, God, I need to go there,” I replied, straight up to the sky, speaking clearly to the clouds as I used to do in the backyard of our Baltimore home.

I was, indeed, and finally, going home.

In the tumultuous two-and-a-half years that followed, I changed my name and wardrobe, grew out my hair, submitted my face to follicle extermination. moved apartments, switched my hormonal make-up and way of living completely. But the only turmoil that I perceived was the movie of horror and response that took place around me. Friends abandoned me, lovers left me, concert dates evaporated and I lost my teaching job. But within my body there was complete calm, and I never wavered, not once, in my newfound determination. Because the journey within was integral to myself, and it was a journey made not alone, but with God, who had asked me to follow the map.

– – –

In the midst of the therapy, hormones, painful electrolysis, professional blacklisting and family banishment that accompanied my gender transition, I moved to the Bronx of New York — a place I knew little about, and where no one knew me, either. Was it by chance that the apartment building I found on the Grand Concourse faced directly across the street to the beautiful St. Philip Neri Catholic Church and School? I think not.

I began to attend Mass, irregularly at first, finding comfort in the rituals and readings from the Bible, and the beautiful voice and welcoming spirit of Father Hyacinth from Nigeria (the assistant Priest). In time I screwed up enough courage to see Father Hyacinth personally, for a deeply-needed first confession. I didn’t know how to give a proper confession, but I did my best.

“Father, please forgive me, for I have sinned,” I said. Then I recounted the fact of being in gender transition, and the hurt feelings and words of a beloved partner who had experienced real trauma because of my decision — we broke up, and she accused me horribly, loudly and publicly, of being a pervert. But I had no more anger towards her; truly, I only felt awful that I had hurt her so badly. I began to cry, spilling it out to the Father. I had no idea what he would say.

“Since you have not had First Communion,” he said, “I really cannot grant you forgiveness. But you do not need my forgiveness anyway. You have spoken to God, and He hears you. And God has forgiven you already, a long time ago.”

I told Father Hyacinth also, that I had often felt like I was a freak of nature, and not able to fit into the world around me. That I had attempted suicide with pills a few times, and that the idea was yet not far from my mind. The gender transition had pretty much destroyed my musical career at that point, ruined my name and reputation. Having won a top medal at the International Tchaikowsky Piano Competition in Moscow, I was making $600 a month teaching piano at a children’s school. Many were the days that I had no energy even to rise from my bed and face the world. Ending it all might bring me to God, at least.

“But your body, too, is not even yours,” Father Hyacinth told me. “It, too, is a work of God. Your body is a temple of God, and you must not destroy it.”

I had never given that a single thought in my life, that I too had been created in God’s image like every living thing around me. And that I really must attend to my own well-being, as much as I did to the piano students in my care, or the neighbors I greeted each day, or the cat in the corner bodega whom I petted every afternoon and fed some treats. I had not paused, in many years, to take stock of who I was and to admit that, yes, I was a good person who tried hard to do well, and that I was worthy of love — and loved, by God.

The mercy of God, the love of Jesus and Mary, erupted within my heart at Father Hyacinth’s words, which I shall never forget. And a lifetime of guilt — for my confusion, for my self-hatred, for my ashamed cross-dressing, for my sexual confusion and searching which hurt others — suddenly appeared to me, just as human as any other mistake made by a human whom I would love without qualification. A child forgetting a homework assignment, a piano student getting lost in her piece, a carpenter breaking a piece of wood.

I was no more a confused monster in my mind — I was human, and loved by God, and becoming whole. And to this church, this place of Father Hyacinth, I had come, and been shown mercy of an order beyond words.

I began to take Catholic classes on Sundays after Mass then, and within a year was ready for my first Communion. At our last class, the Priest told us to bring our Baptismal certificates to verify our birth into the Catholic Church. Mine, of course, was a certificate for David Buechner, a name I hadn’t used in a few years by then.

Another crisis, but one that taught me even more about the Catholic spirit. I asked my dear friend Teresa, who was the leader of the church choir, to come with me on the day I presented my Baptismal certificate. She was an old friend of the Priest who had conducted our classes, and assured me all would be well. I was doubtful, but hopeful. And indeed a surprise awaited me.

I explained my history to the Priest, who did not bat an eyelid as he looked at the certificate and then entered my name for the next week’s communion: Sara Davis Buechner. No words were spoken. I suspected perhaps that he had broken some kind of church law. But the sturdiness of his demeanor and hands told me, also, that is was not the first time he might have looked beyond rules of law to follow the real guidance of the merciful Jesus.

I wore a beautiful white dress on my Communion Day and posed in front of the St. Philip Neri altar with Theresa. It is still one of my favorite photographs of myself ever taken. I have never looked more fully, felt more fully, complete — as a person, as a woman, as a follower of Christ and the Catholic faith.

– – –

I am a Catholic, perhaps one that our Pope and Bishops does not acknowledge or accept, but it is to the words and teachings of Jesus that I look for guidance and in so doing identify myself as Catholic. Just as I identify as a woman, and a musician. These are essential truths of self-identity to me, not choices. And I am, moreover, grateful for the facts of who I am. Each element of my personality has brought me extraordinary beauty and a meaning for living. To be of the female, to be of the sound of the cosmos, to be of the body and blood of Christ — all, for me, to be manifoldly blessed and loved. And in my person and music, may I share and encourage that love in all whom I come to know.

Sara Davis Buechner

February 2013