Poor Isaac.

I was anxious because of the formality he was trying to force, and so I blurted it out. "Okay, but I don't believe in God." My mouth is my worst enemy when I am embarassed. It is a mutinous bastard, completely liberated from any inhibition that would like it to just shut-up.

And he looked at me for a minute, processing. Looking for the right slot to file away the new information. He teased me about it, my face went as red and hot as a matador's cape, and after awhile he went back out. Left me alone with my thoughts, feeling insecure as ever about my doubts, about my weaknesses.

Later he came back, and I could tell he had been thinking about it and that part of him felt bad for the abuse I had suffered by his taunts. (Didn't stop him from twisting the screw just a little more though, but only at first.) He wanted to relate to me, wanted to understand, and so he tried by explaining the foundation of his beliefs to me. He said, "I just think about shit like waterfalls. There is no way that man could ever make something like a waterfall."

Mercifully the phone rang, and when I hung up the subject had changed.

But I can't get the vision out of my head. I can see him contemplating the holy beauty of nature while he's sitting in his pew Sunday mornings, arm around his wife, everything being right with the world. I can imagine him giving thanks for the mountain bike trails, the getaways to the ocean he takes every year, for his daughters and for a life that is honest, good, whole. The picture I have of it makes my joints weak it is so convulsively beautiful. I lock it away deep inside, in the hopes that some of his faith might leak into my bones, like some kind of divine osmosis.

But the doubter knows it won't. The doubter dwells on the story of Job and Abraham and wonders who the hell would want to believe in such a petty, insecure God. The doubter thinks about the paganism of a Catholic service and how it is a sin to not believe that the communion wafer is actually the honest-to-god flesh of christ. The doubter is too occupied with her skepticism to notice the small miracle that is a waterfall, that is the silence of a dense and lonely forest.

So she invests her faith with Marcus Aurelius and waits for some kind of sign, some kind of proof. She is almost completely convinced that it will never come.