There’s a kind of person who believes he's discerned the face of The Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, and claims to have experienced a miracle.   I'm not one of them.

I’ve had a number of experiences over the course my life, though, that—especially when taken together—seem to shed light on some significant questions.  Among them:

Is there an afterlife?  

If so, is it necessarily tied to some particular religion's view of it?

What about prayer?  Is it possible that its effects are based mainly on natural forces that we just don’t understand yet?

These aren’t exactly the kinds of questions you trot out to make polite casual conversation with, say, your boss’ wife at the company Christmas party.  So you’d think I’d know better than to blurt them out here.

I feel an obligation to share them, though.  If I’ve been fortunate enough to have  some experiences that are rare or unusual, it would seem wrong to me not to let other people know about them—as well as what, after a lot of thought, I’ve come to believe they may indicate. On the other hand, if lots of people have experienced similar things, but are hesitant to speak openly about them, I think it’s time somebody had the nerve to break the taboo.

My dad once told me I had more guts than sense (I think he meant it as a left-handed compliment), so I guess it would be in character for me to step up to the metaphorical plate. 

I’ll have to ask your indulgence, though, in putting up with a few stories that may not seem to have much relevance at the time I tell them.  I promise they’ll come into play…eventually.  Also, since I’m more interested in unraveling some key puzzles than in telling stories for their own sake, there will be times when I deliberately break with chronological order.

As for my formal credentials to take on a subject like this, well, I don’t have any, so I’ll just leave it up to you to evaluate my powers of observation.

It’s probably also worth disclosing that this won’t be the first time I’ve mixed the sublime and the pragmatic into one another to form a kind of weird pudding.  The first time I did so, I was very young.