By Brad Miner

I grew up in a secular household. What's worse, my parents demanded I attend church - a Methodist church - for Sunday school and then confirmation, which I did. This all happened a long time ago, and my memories are fading. But I cannot recall my parents ever coming to church. Not on Sundays when I sang in the children's choir or even on the day I was confirmed.

They had pushed me toward the Christian faith, but they had neither preceded nor followed me. This is by way of saying my parents considered Christianity a path to respectability and not the way to eternal life. On Sundays, they played golf. I took this lesson into my teens and twenties.

After college, I began to take an interest in religion, and I liked talking about it. Dad grew weary listening and asked, "Are there golf courses in heaven, Brad? If you can assure me there are I'll make a profession of faith."

We were both exasperated.

Two weeks later, Dad died suddenly. He was 54. I was 23.

That very night, I was in another city at the home of a college friend's mother. My buddy and I returned from a night on the town, and I retired to the guest bedroom and quickly fell asleep. Sometime later I awakened.

Although the bedroom was on the second floor, I could see a shadow moving outside the window. Suddenly, the shadow burst into the room, silently but forcefully, as though a vacuum were being filled.

I had the feeling of an animal presence hovering over me and of its cold nose touching my forehead. I was frozen with fear.

Just as suddenly, the presence fled.

A telephone rang in the house. My friend's mother knocked on the bedroom door and entered.

"It's your mother," she said. She plugged the phone cord into a floor jack and gave me the receiver.

"Mom?"

I looked up at Mrs. B.

"The line's dead," I said.

She took the receiver, placed it back in the base, and the phone rang again almost immediately.

"Hello. Yes, here he is."

My mother was calling to tell me my father had died several hours ago.

"Your father is gone," is what she said.

Only a few people came to Professor Miner's funeral. He had many devoted friends, admiring colleagues, and devoted students at The Ohio State University, but a blizzard had brought Central Ohio to a halt. Twenty-two inches of snow will do that. My intrepid maternal grandparents (he 79 and she 85), who, after retirement, had traveled by automobile to all the contiguous 48, couldn't make the hundred-mile drive to Columbus. Grandpa tried, but the Highway Patrol made them turn around.

My older brother and his family waited a day before returning to Chicago. I left soon after for California. My mother headed to the liquor store.

In California, I converted to Catholicism.

There was a sexual revolution out there. There was one back in Ohio, too, but it was more alluring on Pacific Ocean beaches. And, even though the sound of wings awakened me from a nap one day, and I'd found myself ringing the doorbell at a Catholic rectory, I kept on going to the beach.

Sometimes, progress follows loss. Despair may, too. But the Spirit persists. He persists to the end.

Then. . .New York. Work. Marriage. Sons. Grandchildren. Old age.

I think of William Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up":

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wordsworth was a confidant of Frederick "Faith of our Fathers" Faber, an Anglican cleric who, under the influence of the Oxford Movement, became a Catholic priest. John Henry Newman admired Wordsworth's work, but the great poet, who may have admired Newman, would have preferred to drown in the Tiber rather than cross it. Or, as Michael Tomko writes in a review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of the poet, "for Wordsworth, there was always a flaming sword before the Tiber."

To each his own Eden, I guess.

These t...