O’Hara spent a century pulled in one direction by a perceived intellectual necessity for atheism and in another, not quite opposite, direction by the emotional necessity to recognize that there was more to the universe than was presented by the evidence of the senses and the operations of logic. The experience with the eveloi helped her reconcile the two intuitions. She wrote about that in one of her last columns, a month before she died:

“They decided to let us live. Otherwise, what was the most important gift we received from the eveloi? Not admission to a community of strange-looking creatures from various planets; we would have discovered one another soon enough. Not even transshifting, since we’re allowed to use that only at their whim.

“What the eveloi did was give us an actual physical manifestation of God, an It rather than a Him, that demonstrably did have our fate in its hands—or its tentacles, anyhow—but which did not desire worship or even attention. Having allowed us to survive, it became benign and aloof; we are free to love it or hate it or ignore it.

“I confess to being surprised, and obscurely disappointed, that no one has yet cranked up a religion to celebrate the goodness and mercy of these cosmically vicious fiends. Maybe people are reluctant to draw their attention. The history of religion would have been shorter and simpler if God kept materializing and poking a finger into your brain.

“The philosophical advantage of having an actual physical Godlike thing to stand in awe of, and to keep out of the way of, is clear. New religions, and the old religions that survive, tend not to feature Gods who will hurl you into Hell for eating with the wrong hand. Instead they spend their efforts in ‘good works’ and the investigation and celebration of mystery, both activities easy to endorse.

“I never wanted to believe that awe in the presence of beauty was simply a response to cultural programming, or that all love could be traced to the gonads, or that truth was meaningless outside of social context. But I would take all three bleak simplifications before I would accept beauty and love and truth as gifts from a sometimes be-nevolent God. Without the white-bearded authority figure hovering in the wings, mystery is as comfortable and prosaic and wonderful as science—and as useful, when you get around to sorting out really basic whys and where-fores. At my age, you find yourself doing a lot of that.”