God

Cynthia Frances Doe was a friend to me. She poured herself out with abandon and never kept account. She wasn’t one to call in favors after she bestowed them. I don’t believe she ever thought of the kindnesses she did as favors, regardless of personal cost. Her middle name was Frances, I discovered, but only when I saw it on the prayer card printed for her burial. Cynthia would have been delighted to know she shared the name with my maternal grandmother. She knew how much I loved the woman I grew up calling “Sissie,” how the love she had bestowed on me as a child had shaped my heart and soul.

“A really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa,” Reed College professor Kathryn Lofton said of Oprah Winfrey in a May 2006 USA Today article written by Ann Oldenburg. In the piece, headlined “The Divine Miss Winfrey?” Oldenburg hailed the über-talk show host as “a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.” A year earlier Westminster John Knox Press had published Maria Z. Nelson’s “The Gospel According to Oprah.

If only everyone were as rational as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, no one would believe in God and the world would be a safer place for us and for our progeny. Or at least that's what these authors of bestselling books that dispute the reasonableness of religion and a belief in God would have you think. And so would other atheists, like Brian Sapient and Kelly (one name only, like Pink or Cher), co-founder and core member respectively of their five-member "Rational Response Squad," or "RRS," for short.

O n Sunday, in Berkeley Breathed's comic strip "Opus," Michael J. Binkley, one of the characters, remarked to the strip's penguin namesake, "Man, here's a surprising trend: Atheist books are suddenly best-sellers!" "Maybe not so surprising," Opus replied. Surprising or not, it's true. As Bradley Shingleton pointed out in the winter issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, "the two top-selling volumes among 'religious' books in November 2006 were actually atheist manifestos," according to Publisher's Weekly.

If only "The Nativity Story" were all good news. After all, how long will it be before someone gets the chance to tell this story in Hollywood again? This is one of those times I wish — really wish — a screenwriter and director could be given the chance to tweak a few weak points in the production and do it again. Say, maybe, before next Christmas. Not a chance. I know. I can live with it. I saw the film, which opened in theaters last Friday, and enjoyed it enough that I plan to see it again this coming weekend.

We might see the world draw with a breath of bright hope if the whole of its people were to take to heart the spirit of Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan this weekend. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish observance of the birthday of creation, is designed to give us a second ? or even a 5,767th ? chance to clean up our act. Its two-day span begins this year at sunset tomorrow, the beginning of the first day of the seventh month of Tishri on the Jewish calendar in the year 5767, and will end at nightfall Sunday.

Had Eric Mataxas written his book "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask)" four decades ago, it might have saved me a lot of grief. Not that I was afraid, mind you, to ask the questions I had about God. I was a kid. I didn't know any better. Ask I did. But when I asked my mother, she'd suggest I ask my father. When I asked my father, he'd tell me to ask our Episcopal parish priest. The parish priest would mutter and sputter, repeating phrases I'd memorized from the catechism.

"Do they exist?" That's the first thing people usually ask Manoj Chalam about Hinduism's gods. There was a time Chalam was an agnostic but now when someone asks him that question, he says, yes, yes, the gods exist. They have power; they have power he has witnessed. He tells a story of being drawn to a nameless village in India seeking a scroll bearing his name. Along with his name, he'd come to believe, it would contain a record of his life. The scroll was written by one for whom there is no illusion of time.

Like a gangrenous limb, they had to be removed. Nineteen pine trees, 15 ficus and two of a variety unfamiliar to me. They were crumpling sidewalks, gutters and curbs, and choking and crushing sewers. Homeowners, including me and my husband, had been forced to call Roto-Rooter every three months for years. Most of us have had to replace our main sewer lines at least once. The rutted sidewalks were inviting falls and broken bones. The august trees, more than 30 years old, had to come out. I know, I know.

I've heard many a Christian remark on the occasion of a moral failing, "Well, I'm no saint." But as Christian scripture would have it, they are nonetheless. The Greek word hagioi, translated as "saints" throughout the New Testament, refers to the whole of God's people, the faithful -- before the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ and after. In this sense, "saint" is a state of being -- of living in God's grace through faith -- not a state of attainment. With the approach of All Saints' Day, I began to read a book I recently got from Paraclete Press titled "The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition."