Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing. - Mia Farrow

Well, I didn't lose my faith in God and in my own commitment to what I think my religion means to me but I did lose faith in Rome. I was horrified that the Pope at the time of the Rwandan massacre— this is a Catholic country, Rwanda—made no attempt to go there and to halt the killing. And I mean, who among us would not have tried? And on the contrary many of the perpetrators were actually sheltered. So I disengaged with my faith at that point. And then when I went to Darfur some 10 years later, by then I had cast away any allegiance to Rome and I saw -- you know, if only we'd had a Pope like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, who was engaged on the issues that concerned the most needy of humanity.

If you're brought up a Catholic and you've had 13 years of convent education with nuns, there's no way you ever get out from under that. I've accepted that fact about myself so there are certain things—like my lost saint—that sometimes are not so lost.

I get it now. I didn't get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible...and enjoying everything in between.