I married a priest, by the way.

An Episcopalian. I found her irresistible because she was the most peaceful and certain, the most called person—and thus the most incomprehensible—I had ever met. (And because she was hot.)

When Dana was 10, her cousin ran away for two weeks. Several days into the search, Dana underwent a clarifying moment. As she sat with her aunt and uncle, beholding their terror and grief, words suddenly appeared in her brain, sure as Scripture.

I will never cause such pain. I will be...good.

Not just to act, but to be good, from within. An astonishing ambition, because merely "acting" good is not good at all, but goody, a justification by works rather than faith. And this girl—who came from an unchurched family, and who quarterbacked her school's football team (in Texas) until the seventh grade, at which point officials decided this was an unholy thing—was no goody. Yet from age 10 on, Dana did it: inhabited a childhood, then a teenhood, then an adulthood, that were the photographic negatives of the 'hoods in which I'd chosen to grow up. A real choirgirl, Dana.

During our first few years together, a presumption emerged to explain how a skank such as myself could sustain a commitment to a woman of the cloth. My contradictory needs to be good enough for her on the one hand, and to corrupt her on the other, created a tension, the story went—a tension from which a strong and sustaining current flowed. ("Baby, you put the ho' in holy!" I told her on the day of her ordination; "I will pray for you now," she responded with a kind smile.) According to this story, my loogie-hawking ways were not only permissible but imperative—our relationship would wither without them—and I found a certain spiritual affirmation in the frequent observation of friends that "he married a priest, yes, but he's still a pig."

But the one day, the choirmaster of her church, a trim, sharp-eyed man with a shaved head and a look of intense bemusement, put a hand in the small of my back and spoke in a confidential tone.

"Andrew," he said, "I would like you to sing in the parish choir from now on. I feel it will...enhance your worship."

A shrill reflexive thought: My worship—ha!

Another: Don't get sucked in, dude.

Then this: "Sure. Tell me what to do."

Where did these words come from? I have no ambition to sing. In fact, I've always loathed the sound of my own voice, both singing and speaking. No character, no muscle. Whenever I hear it on tape, or played back over an answering machine, the timbre sounds clotted and froggy, as if a gremlin has distilled all my existential discomfort and tightness to a gluey sediment, then painted it onto my tonsils. I feel I'm listening to somebody trying to pass himself off as smarter than he is. Such a tight-jawed voice. A pre-infarction voice.

And when, by way of my wife, I'd duly begun attending church, I'd discovered a truly peculiar something: The incantations of the liturgy (Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds, Lord's Prayer, psalms, etc.) sounded both more sincere and more meaningful if I delivered them in somebody else's voice. Out of "my own" mouth, "And on the third day he rose again" bore a damp fatigue. I might as well have been reciting the ingredients off the back of a shampoo bottle. But out of, say, Christopher Walken's mouth, with his odd emphases on conjunctions and articles (with an extortionist's irritability: And forgive us our trespasses"), they became electric and new. How odd: I could attain sincerity—could overcome my journalist's refusal to take anything at face value; to approach anything with straight-ahead, earnest belief—only with somebody else's voice. Even the old prayer for faith inspired by the Book of Mark ("Lord, cure me of my unbelief..."), which I began invoking before going to bed at night, passed more meaningfully through my soul when uttered in the voice of a goitrous plumber.