HIS MOTHER was a practicing Catholic, his father a nominal Protestant; as a result he was brought up Catholic and religion was not discussed at home. His mother taught him to say prayers but only as a ritual. The world seemed to work without God’s intervention, and although he did not depend on God he occasionally called on Him to avoid danger or discomfort. If, say, on going to bed he thought he might wake in the night and be sick to his stomach he would ask God to keep it from happening. Or he might ask his mother to agree to give him ten cents next morning if it did. Either measure helped him go to sleep. He had no problem with the idea of God until he went to school and nuns raised theoretical questions about dogma as if to answer them before they occurred to the students. If God knows all things, a nun said, does He know what we will do? The students all said yes. How can we have free will, then, the nun said, since if God knows what we will do before we do it we can’t do anything else? No one could answer the question, and he found that the nun’s explanation was like a magician’s trick: he knew it was an illusion but couldn’t figure it out. How can it be, the nun said, if God is all good, there is so much evil in the world? The answer—that man brought it on himself through the misuse of free will—was not satisfactory. Why did God give man free will if God knew man would misuse it? He asked the nun, adding that he would not have. But you are not God, the nun said, as if this were an explanation. He invented other questions for the nuns: Two infants are being taken to the church to be baptized; one dies on the way, the other on the way back; the second goes to heaven, the first does not. How could an all-just God have arranged things that way? When pressed like this the nuns would say the matter was a Mystery; one nun used the word Mystère, explaining that it was French for certain profound and beautiful turning points in theology. He and the other students were required to spend many hours in church; the ceremonies bored him, as did the prayers and hymns. To amuse himself he studied the profiles, half-profiles, and backs of heads of the girl students, who sat together on the opposite side of the church. By long practice during masses he trained himself to separate the fingers of his right hand alternately two-and-two, then one-two-one; he also mastered the exercise with his left hand, and eventually could perform one separation with one hand while performing the other separation with the other hand. None of his friends could duplicate the feat. On the black leather cover of his prayer book stamped in gold were the words GOD’S CHILD. The D in CHILD was worn away, and sometimes he entertained the thought that the D had been an L, thus implying that God was afraid of him and he was a rebel on the order of Lucifer but more dangerous. In condemning sin the nuns pointed out that sin was contrary to Natural Law—that is, bad in itself; an even greater reason for avoiding sin, they said, was that sin made God suffer. He found this difficult to understand: if God was all-powerful, all-knowing, etc., presumably God was happy, or should be. If he were God, he reasoned, he either wouldn’t let sin bother him or would make men virtuous. He continued to raise objections in high school, so that one of the Jesuit priests proposed that they meet twice a week to discuss faith and morals. After four months of meetings he struck on an argument against faith that the priest could not refute: it was agreed that to commit mortal sin it was necessary to believe in mortal sin, so that from the point of view of making God suffer he was less offensive than most believers and the priest should not try to change his convictions. The priest discontinued the interviews but asked him to say one Hail Mary a day, promising that if he did “grace would come.” He promised that he would, but he didn’t. When he was first married he argued with his wife against the existence of God. Neither convinced the other. Eventually she came to agree with him, but by then he didn’t care about her beliefs. In his thirties when he thought he was going to die, he addressed himself to Jesus: I want your help, he said; I don’t want to have anything to do with priests; you and I know about priests. He wonders now whether in fear of death he again would pray and hopes he would because it would be a comfort. He is drawn to politicians who claim to believe in God because he has come to think that the historical excesses of the century could not have been committed in a religious time. He will be drinking in a bar with a friend, who has revealed to him many intimate autobiographical details. On impulse he will ask if the friend believes in the divinity of Jesus. The friend will say, “I don’t know you well enough to answer that,” from which he will infer that the friend does. As he watches contemporaries die he will see that nuns make the best nurses.