Perhaps I could find a different way to fear God. Some churches I ruled out right away. As a teenager, I wanted to be a nun, but really, the Catholic Church is not for me. There are generations of Protestants in my family, and I fear their angry ghosts. So I considered the Anglicans and the Quakers, though I’d make a poor pacifist. I wasn’t waiting for a sign, exactly, but I thought it might be nice to have one. But as of this writing I have had no “road to Damascus” moment. No blinding light appeared on my street. I did not feel led anywhere, not by a mysterious guiding force, and not by my own mind.

I wanted to see a thing unmistakable as the handiwork of God. I listened for the still small voice, as Evangelicals like to say, and I heard nothing but shattering silence. So I listened to that instead. And I never went back to church.

When I learned my young friend had died, I went for a walk. There was nothing else I could do. I could not light a candle for him in church. I could not berate God for the random cruelty of the event. There was nothing except myself, alone on a walk through Brooklyn. It’s not so unusual to be paralyzed by unbelief in a moment of grief. The nearest comfort I found was in other people: my partner and another friend, who asked me to tell her all about the one who’d passed. God may yet reveal himself to me. Unless He does, all that waits for me in the dark is other people trying to find their way out. There is no Screwtape. We’re it. That is what I heard in the silence.