“Rainey asked you to visit Christian Life, didn’t she?”

I turn on lights in the den while Sarah reaches down and pats Woogie’s head.

“What’s wrong with that?”

I might as well sell the house and get a motel room.

“You’re supposed to be Catholic. Your mother would be spinning in her grave if she knew you were going to join the Moonies or whatever this group is.”

Sarah’s jaw tightens.

“God, Dad, you’re impossible,” she mutters.

“Rainey wouldn’t join something weird.

Besides, you don’t know anything about Moonies any way, and you know Mom wouldn’t think it was the end of the world like you do.”

I throw myself down on the couch and watch Sarah stroke Woogie’s graying muzzle with her knuckles. I’d even rather she be serious about a boy than get involved with a group like Christian Life. First Rainey, now my daughter. Why isn’t it enough for the women I love to get up and go to school or work and then come home and plop down and watch the brain drain or even read a book? Life is complicated enough without getting heated up about whether some supernatural force is “breaking in” to human history.

Freud, if I remember my freshman psychology course at the University of Arkansas a hundred years ago, said that God is a wish and a pretty infantile one at that. An obvious conclusion if you think about it, given the rest of his psychology. As children, we can’t get enough of our parents; as teenagers we can’t get far enough away;

and in marriage we look for them all over again. If he was correct, we aren’t left with a particularly appealing portrait of the human psyche. But ever since the first ape saw his reflection in a pool of water, he has demanded a more grandiose explanation of his existence, Sigmund Freud notwithstanding. It is surprising he wasn’t strung up by his tongue. If I tried to say something like that, the women in my life would burn me at the stake. Fathers, I have learned in the last couple of years, aren’t supposed to commit heresy. Our job is to pay the bills and keep our mouths shut.