“My dad believed that,” Zoe said softly. “He told me to think of all the world’s religions and faiths as a stained glass window glowing with every color in the spectrum. Many colors, but only one sun. God made us all different colors and God speaks to us in many tongues.”

“Your father was a wise man,” Morgen said. “We are finite creatures grappling with the infinite. Our questions are what matter. Questions and not answers matter because the answers are never whole, always limited by our physical senses. And they’re never all true since human ‘answers’ to the secrets of the divine are always colored by culture, society, expediency, prejudice, greed, and every other deadly sin.

“Despite all this, people must believe. Faith in things we do not see is what feeds our creativity, lifts us to feats that cannot be explained by natural phenomena, and enables us to transcend our physical world.” He leaned closer now, elbows planted solidly in the middle of the table. “People must believe, and they must believe in the truth. We can be the instrument to bring that truth to them.”

Morgen wiped away the beads of perspiration that had broken out on his forehead. “The church today is founded in great part on a lie. In the long view—in the length of time that can only be measured by historians who won’t be born for perhaps another century or more—in that long view, the truth will make for a stronger faith. But we and those who come after us will suffer for the sins and indiscretions and fears of those men back in 325 A.D. The alternative is to continue to let fascists and dictators and ambitious men use the truth to blackmail the future.”

He slumped in his chair, visibly exhausted.

After a minute or so Seth got up, walked to the fireplace, and used the padded mitts to bring the coffeepot to the table. He asked Morgen, “Would you like some?” Morgen nodded weakly and Ridgeway filled his cup. After filling Zoe’s cup and his own, Seth returned the pot to its warming shelf.

Morgen had rejuvenated his flagging energy enough to sit up to the table, although he leaned on it like a man clinging to the last piece of floating debris from a sunken ship. They listened to the wind whistle, to the wood knots snapping in the fireplace, to the almost impalpable sounds of human beings breathing, moving.

Seth finally broke Father Morgen’s silence.

“I just don’t understand how you can know all of this … go through all of this and still remain a Catholic, much less a priest.”

Morgen studied Seth’s face, then gave him a rueful smile. “I have been through many crises of my faith, as I sense you are now experiencing,” the old priest began. “But I believe faith in God supports us, sustains us—”

“But the notion we have of God is so corrupted by the politics and expediency of organized religion,” Seth replied contentiously. “The notion is corrupt and the existence is totally suspect.”