She was one of those rare singers who could mesmerize audiences with acapella songs.

At age 23 in 1990, when her song “Nothing Compares 2U” made her famous, she had what many refer to as a beautiful Irish face despite the fact that she had shaved off all her hair.

Bald, ‘impossibly pretty’ women are hard to come by. In her case, being bald enhanced that prettiness, yet this look fell apart as she aged. At 56, at the time of her death, her femininity had disappeared and, still bald, she looked like a man – a man in black horn rim glasses, nondescript . . . a retired shoe salesman or somebody you might spot on a bus with an armload of groceries. As they say: Doing everything she could to make herself ugly.

Why?

Rule #1: Forget logic and reason when it comes to Sinead O’Connor. She was bipolar, manic depressive, spiritually confused and a contrarian down to her bone marrow. When a music producer suggested that she grow her hair long rather than continue with her Joan of Arc-at-the-stake buzz cut, she doubled down and shaved her head completely bald.

“I’ll show you, buster!”

The Dublin-born singer was one of five children. Her mother, Marie, physically abused her, stayed in bed all day, took drugs and never did the family wash. Sinead told Dr. Phil in 2017 that the woman was “pure evil” but had she not died in a car crash in 1985, she (Sinead) would have been there to take care of her and show her some love –  monster or no monster.

Photographs of Sinead as a little girl show an extraordinary, fragile face in the mystical tradition of Saint Therese of Lisieux.

Towards the end of her life, O’Connor stated that she couldn’t wait to get to heaven to see her mother again.

In O’Connor’s case, a saintly attitude like this – love your enemies, turn the other cheek – also came with a heavy sadomasochistic bent.

O’Connor’s troubled life – she died a few years after converting to Islam – can best be understood through her relationship with her mother.

At 15, she was placed in a Magdalene asylum for shoplifting and truancy.

As the writer Jean Genet noted in, The Thief’s Journal, if you constantly tell a small child that he/she is a thief (in Sinead’s case, worthless) the child will grow up to become a thief.

At some point, Sinead had “All Things Must Pass” (a George Harrison song title) tattooed on her neck, something immature teenage girls or boys (with a spiritual inclination) might do to show that they are “deep.”

Her sanity was seriously questioned in 1991, one year after “Nothing Compares 2U” (in memory of her mother), when she boycotted the Grammy Awards even though she was up for record of the year.

Her most infamous stunt, the ripping up of a large photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, put her in the news cycle again after a fallow period following the release of her one-hit wonder.

Post SNL she was booed at a Bob Dylan concert. Madonna mocked her, Frank Sinatra called her “One stupid broad” and The Washington Times said she had “The face of hatred.”

The photograph of John Paul II that she shredded on SNL once hung in her mother’s bedroom. In a sense she was ripping up her mother as well as John Paul II when she preformed for the TV cameras, though her official excuse was that the Pope was guilty for ignoring reports of clergy sex abuse.

Later, she would apologize for shredding the photograph of the pope.

“I’m sorry I did that, it was a disrespectful thing to do,” she told the BBC. “I have never even met the Pope. I am sure he is a lovely man. It was more an expression of frustration.”

The lovely Irish lass emerged once again, this time as a penitent — the little girl who gets beaten by her mother and who is then forced to apologize for making her mother angry.

“Sinead is not the tempering type,” her longtime musician friend Bob Geldof stated. “In that, she is very much an Irish woman.” An Irish woman who suffers from occasional bouts of mental illness, bipolar disorder and (the required) suicide attempt, but still somehow someone keenly interested in the transcendental — why we live and why we die — and, above and beyond, in the materialistic and mundane. This explains why Sinead eventually had herself ordained a priest in an independent Catholic church by a “bishop” and became Mother Bernadette Mary.

‘Bernadette,’ of course, is the namesake of the saint who received visitations from the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. The Catholic imagery here is so thick Sinead even began to wear a Roman collar and a large pectoral cross.

But no matter how many crosses she put around her neck, she could not escape looking like a WICCA priestess or an adherent of Aleister Crowley.

Apologies about the pope photo notwithstanding, she still hated the institutional Catholic Church.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2010, she said the Vatican was “a nest of devils and a haven for criminals.” (Ironically, you’ll find many Traditionalist Catholics saying similar things today.)

“Do we need a f–ing pope? Why do we need a pope? Christ doesn’t need a representative,” Irish Central reported her as saying.

Now, even if one had issues with the belief that the Bishop of Rome does in fact hold the Keys to the Kingdom, the nasty-girl-in-the-back-of-the-bus way in which Sinead expressed her thoughts would certainly disqualify her from being taken seriously in theological circles.

On-stage charisma, while getting you fan clubs that perceive you as sexy, does not equal theological brilliance.

Sinead explained how in August 2018 she wrote an open letter to Pope Francis asking to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

“I have several times requested from the Vatican a certificate which I could proudly display to my grandchildren to prove that Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II excommunicated me for being ordained,” she stated.

Sister Bernadette Mary was married four times (Sinead once admitted that she was “a handful”) and had four children from these various unions, including son, Sean, who committed suicide at age 17.

Before the birth of her first son, Jake, her nihilistic advisers tried to convince her to get an abortion, but the singer refused. This shows a respect for life and an authentic spiritual grounding despite the trouble Sinead had when it came to Christianity.

The loss of son Sean crushed her spirit but by then she was already well over the ordained priest thing. Been there, done that.

Besides, Sister Bernadette Mary was far too SNL-sounding (much like the Church Lady).

Far better to reach into the upper stratosphere of controversy, such as she did in 2014 when she backed Ireland’s Sinn Fein and called for Gerry Adams to step down.

Or when she came out in 2000 as a lesbian, later revising that to ‘bisexual’ because ‘lesbian’ seemed too narrow a path to maneuver.

In her last incarnation, she would become a Muslim, taking the name Shuhada Sadaqat.

Renouncing her Catholicism, she wrote,

“This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant….. I will be given (another) new name….”

O’Connor claimed that she was always a Muslim but just didn’t know it, even when she was Mother Bernadette Mary.

When asked how that was possible on an Irish late night show, the singer replied, “I started studying scriptures from different religions, trying to find the ‘truth’ about God.”

“I left Islam until last because I had so much prejudice about Islam. But then when I started reading, and I read just chapter two alone of the Quran, and I realized, ‘Oh my God, I am home.'”

Although she had consultations with Umar Al-Qadri, the chief Imam of Ireland, her conversion was simple and rapid. Islam was just her latest personal transformation, albeit a little deeper in terms of substance, but essentially along the same lines as shaving her head, ripping up a photo of the Polish modern pope, or refusing to attend the Grammys.

Islam, as far as I can tell, was her final stunt to shock a mother from whom she never got attention.

Post-conversion, the singer uploaded videos of herself in a hijab singing the adhan, or the Islamic call to prayer. (If only she had stuck to The Angelus.)

In 2021, the New York Times published an interview with O’Connor. The piece begins,

“Sinead O’Connor is alone, which is how she prefers to be. She has been riding out the pandemic in a tiny village on an Irish mountaintop, watching murder shows, buying fairy-garden trinkets online and mainlining American news on CNN. On a recent overcast afternoon, she had a navy hijab arranged over her shaved head and a cigarette permanently installed between her fingers.”

Her funeral procession in Ireland attracted hundreds of mourners, the majority of them women.

Photos show women O’Connor’s age and younger, weeping or about to weep. Some have their fists raised in feminist salutes. A fair number of women in the crowd resemble Gloria Steinem.

Plenty of woke types can be spotted, too — men with shaved heads and Michel Foucault sunglasses — and younger women in serious buzz cuts. Strangest of all: elderly, indigenous looking women who look very much like church going Irish women in photos from a 1953 issue of National Geographic.

Perhaps these old Irish ladies were remembering Sinead as Mother Bernadette Mary rather than as Shuhada Sadaqat.

O’Connor songs played over loudspeakers during the long funeral procession.

Muslims worldwide were annoyed that O’Connor’s Muslim identity and name were not given prominence in obituaries.

But O’Connor’s Muslim identity was more or less a Disneyland construct, in which Jesus, Moses and Mohammad all got along and conferred agreeably in some kind of make-believe Mister Rogers utopia, a non-existent utopia where even queer Muslims can celebrate diversity and say:

“Sinead inspired queer Muslims globally through this simple act of love and defiance. She redefined conversion and didn’t fit the neat boxes of religion and theology. “

The above quote, which I found on the web, was titled: “O’Connor wore a rainbow top with traditional hijab on ‘Good Morning Britain.”

While Sinead may have been a beautiful soul (to that I say, rest in peace), in the end she was merely a singer with talent, and only that.

She was certainly no philosopher, or someone to emulate when it comes to searching for spiritual truth.