Single-Minded: An Independent Journal of Fact and Opinion

Trying to quit religion is like trying to quit smoking. You'll go along for months at a time without thinking about it and then a wisp of smoke trailing behind the guy walking in front of you on the sidewalk will slip past your nostrils and light a fuse straight to the brain where a string of synapses detonate and you find yourself thinking about Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco.

Religion . . . the same thing. Your sailing along in a sea of existential serenity and then you find yourself caught up in the excitement of wondering if maybe just maybe God really does care. For isn't that the question at the heart of it? The small puzzle that my Jesuit teachers used to refer to as Deus absconditus, the hidden God, the God who seems to have been missing in action since the 13th Century.

No matter who you are, no matter what you think about religion, there is always that small part of you that longs for a sign that God is active in the universe, that He knows who you are, and that He is an active participant in what happens to you. It really is all about you, me, us, them.

The impetus for this meditation was two movies I rented recently: 'The Green Mile,' a modern masterpiece both in film and prose, and 'The Third Miracle,' a confused muddle of a film. But both films dealt with the miraculous, the occurrence outside the laws of nature, the gold standard of proof that God is here and now and listening to our plea that attention must be paid.

Do you believe in miracles? I'm afraid to, and I'm afraid not to. If I was confronted with direct personal incontrovertible evidence of a miracle I would be forced to rethink my entire agnostic mind set. If I was confronted with direct personal incontrovertible evidence that miracles could never happen, I would be forced to confront once and for all the fact that we had it right all along in the 'Nam when we used to say: ''What does it all mean? It don't mean nothing.''

I find myself not quite ready for either eventuality. Were I to be faced with a direct act of God, a Divine intervention as it were, then I would then have to ask where was God throughout the 20th Century, the bloodiest by far of all our centuries. Why let the Jews die? Why let the Tutsis and Hutu's hammer each other? Why let even one child have a hand cut off?

And yet maybe even an inattentive God is better than no God at all. Maybe I don't really want to think that it doesn't mean anything, this daily struggle to do the right thing. Maybe I want to know that it really is about more than just me.

Being an eternal optimist, I hope for something more than just me, I'm just not sure what, exactly. What I think is out there is some sort of destiny that responds both to the sum of our collective actions as well as to the acts of an individual. I believe that humanity is being pushed and pulled through some sort of progressively unfolding plan. Not a plan in the sense that the outcome is known but rather a plan that has many possible outcomes depending on what we do.

This is the only way that I can reconcile free will with the notion of some sort of purposeful primal cause. We are like a ship carried along on currents through fair seas and foul winds. The course the ship takes is the sum of the crew's efforts, but individual acts -- successes and failures -- can drastically affect the day of arrival in port.

Tom Rush put his finger on it with these lyrics:

Sweet life's a sparrow lost at sea,
In dark of night with far to go

Dreams are ships that sail away,
And we are only cargo.

September 10, 2000