‘Okay then … I have a cousin named Susan back east. Very much an evangelical, the whole works. Why did my cousin become Born Again? Her husband – a very successful, very angry lawyer who hated his job and hated even more this very cushioned suburban life he’d created for my cousin and their two children – got into a rage one night and stormed off. Their two little boys were at the Boy Scouts. He told my cousin he would pick them up. She thought that was a good thing; that he might cool off once he was with his children. He picked up Charlie and Jack. He started driving home up Interstate 95 between Fairfield and Westport in Connecticut. He put his pedal down on the floor of his Volvo. He reached 110 miles per hour. He deliberately crashed into the wall separating the highway from a big gas station. They were all killed instantly. My poor cousin went into what could be best described as freefall. Because as she confessed to me some days later – when she was being held in the wing of a big psychiatric hospital in Stamford after attempting to overdose – the last words she said to him, at the height of their fight, were: “Then why don’t you just fucking kill yourself?” Understandably she fell apart thereafter. She’d had a small but successful accounting business. That completely went under in the turmoil that followed. She hit the bottle. She became dependent of all sorts of pharmaceuticals. She got done for DUI. She was a catastrophe. Four years after her husband did what he did – right about the time that she had to sell her house to stave off bankruptcy – one of her former accountancy associates brought her to this church in Fairfield which was into charismatic Christianity. At the end of the service everyone visiting the church that day for the first time was asked to stand up and tell the congregation a little bit about themselves. When it was Susan’s turn the whole terrible story came pouring out. The crowd loved it. Tragedy, insane guilt, a cry for help from the abyss … and she was surrounded by a couple hundred people who all believed in the power of on high to precipitate redemption. She fell on her knees, hysterical. She accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior. She found a community who were going to pull her back into their version of Happy Life.’

She paused for a moment, her face scrunched up, as if she were displeased by something. Then: