I dropped in on the Catholic church nearest to me early one Friday evening shortly afterward.

Inside at the front, a small group of people appeared to be getting things ready for a wedding.  Scattered among the pews were maybe half a dozen laypeople like myself.  I chose a place fairly far away from everyone else.
 
After simply sitting quietly in the church for a time, I closed my eyes and began to “mentally speak,” in the way I typically do when praying in public places like airports.  I thanked St. Erlembaldo for all he had done for the people of Milan and beyond, and asked him to help me become more like him, and thereby set a good example for my kids.

Not long after I finished, I had one of those thoughts that didn’t feel like they were entirely my own that I’d had decades before, when I was considering playing a song that might comfort my girlfriend as she dealt with the impending death of her dad.
 
This time, the thought consisted of just two words:  “Stand up.”

It wasn’t the sort of idea that would normally have occurred to me.  I worried a bit about what might come next.  Would I be told to wave my arms around, or start speaking in tongues, or…what?

As I rose from the pew, I felt glad that I wasn’t in an Episcopal church.  Catholics did a lot of physical stuff that we didn’t—crossing themselves, genuflecting, and whatnot—so maybe I wouldn’t get too many strange looks for doing whatever was next on the agenda.

To my great surprise and relief, the next thought-words I “heard” were simply that I should walk back out of the church.

Once outside, I got the sense that I should go home.  I fudged a bit on that, realizing that I needed to pick up some food for dinner, and attending to that first.  But I didn’t get the feeling that by doing so, I might miss out on some sort of short-lived dramatic spectacle of burning bushes, or whatever.

As I pulled up to my driveway, I got a further sense that I should go outside on my balcony.  I went along with that, too.  The condominium complex where I lived was on a bit of a hill, and my unit was on the third floor, so I could see a significant chunk of my own town, as well as others farther to the west, stretching for mile upon mile.  The rooftops and trees spread out before me were bathed in the golden glow of a summer sky not long before sunset.

The thoughts of uncertain origin stopped at this point.