The Chord of Longing explores a musical scholar's search for meaning, love, and acceptance through decades as a single mother, a Marxist, a musician, and finally, a member of a monastic community. In frank and honest language, Mother Felicitas explains how that long search led her through extraordinary pain and difficulty, profound questioning, and finally toward everlasting and perfect love. The title is based on a chord of yearning--the famous chord that begins Wagner's opera, Tristan and Isolde. Writes the author: "This chord's dissonance, this tension, demands to be resolved." It is the perfect metaphor to describe her own quest for resolution, beautifully described in this personal tale of tribulation and transcendence. Mother Felicitas Curti, OSB, PhD in musicology and scholar of Gregorian chant, lives in a small monastic community on a remote island in Washington State tending an herb garden and spreading joy with her violin playing and musical teachings. The path that took her to this Benedictine community and spiritual fulfillment is both rocky and remarkable. She was a rebellious child, bohemian teenager, and, in her twenties, a political revolutionary, publishing articles in radical socialist papers and journals. In her thirties she explored the New Age culture while raising two sons and teaching music history and theory in college. Always, she was questioning everything, especially herself. Her passion for a more just society and for an abundant, pure love guided her even as her life began unraveling around her--a life she examines with an open heart and unfl inching eye in her riveting memoir, The Chord of Longing.