The experience of devout faith is naturally very different from the inside. Relieved of the lonely burden of individual choice and decision, shielded from anxiety and ambivalence, released from the need to reflect from scratch on every moral quandary, confidently oriented in all aspects of life toward steadfast, clearly enumerated metaphysical truths — living and thinking and acting from such a standpoint can feel like its own form of liberation.
But what about a third group — the one in which George Scialabba is an unhappy member?
This group is filled with people who are unceasingly restless for God, whose deepest and highest hopes point toward transcendence of the merely mortal world, but who either never manage to acquire faith — or, perhaps even worse, enjoy it for time but then lose it.
They, too, are secular — but secularists haunted by the shadow of the absent God who once made life fully comprehensible and worth living.
“The pieces of his life never came back together,” reported the doctor. Because pieces were all Scialabba had left when the perfectly beautiful whole revealed by Opus Dei Catholicism was shattered by his loss of faith.
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