“He’s a big trickster, Cynthia,” he liked to say, putting one hand flat on his large belly as if preparing to laugh but not actually laughing. “He takes the things we want—to be rich, beautiful, healthy, to live forever—and He turns them this way and that like a magician and plays His tricks on us with those things. Sometimes He gives us what we want for a little while, or partly, and then He takes it away and watches to see how we react. It’s like He’s saying ‘Is this what you think you’re here for? Do you think I made you so you can have a nice face and have it forever, and everybody will give you compliments on it, and every time you look in the mirror you’ll have a little puff of pride?’ You think that’s what the whole machine is for? The lungs and heart and skull and blood? I went to all that trouble so you could look in the mirror?” On the day I was scheduled to meet with the archbishop I had reason to remember my late friend’s God-as-trickster theory.
