In churches, I feel as if there are imperative sentences inscribed on each of the foundation stones, and that the fluid of absolute certainty is slowly wicking up through the earthworks and sticking to my shoes like warm tar. It sweats in fat condensation off the cool walls. It's like if I move too slowly, hang out too long admiring a pretty window or image of Mary cradling the deceased Jesus, the stickiness of unwavering moral authority will hold me there. I'll be trapped in a spiritual Roach Motel.

Yet I love churches, not only because they are often beautiful, but because they are the scene of a mystery that I haven't quite figured out. I still don't know what to do about religions' moral imperatives. I'm confused by the concept of faith. All our explanations of its importance seem like shaky post-facto rationalizations. God had to give us free will because only then is our decision to be good or evil truly meaningful. If the existence of God were provable using science, then we would never understand the importance of faith. We often just seem to be making the best of a very bad thing -- that all evidence suggests that we are orphans, abandoned or forgotten by our creator. I keep haunting churches because even though I fear one will ensnare me in its certainty, part of me welcomes the embrace.

When I lived in Senegal, I saw people in villages constructed entirely out of millet stalk and wood save their money to collectively build the first concrete construction in the community: not a school or health clinic, but a tiny mosque. For a long time, this vexed me considerably. Children were dying of curable diseases, women were giving birth in sand-floor huts, and yet the people cared more about a religious building than anything else. Eventually, I came to something like understanding. People need this. We hunger for beauty, for something bigger than we are. Or, perhaps, we are inscribed with the name of God in us and the need to write it in the world we see.

The Basilica in DC was quiet on a Saturday. People drifted in the kind of trance induced by beautiful ceilings. With their heads craned up and their hands at their sides, they looked like they were trying to make themselves thin and invisible to spy planes overhead, or dodging thunderbolts. Over the alter was a large and shining mosaic featuring a remarkably athletic-looking Jesus wearing an expression that couldn't exactly be construed as friendly. This didn't appear to be the peacenik gentle Jesus hyped by the progressive believers I've known, but the firebrand, pissed-off reformer of sterner traditions. He was buff and severe but posed in a slightly rigid posture, as if lifting weights with straight arms. "It's Jack La Lanne as Jesus" I whispered to Susan, and immediately felt the imperatives inscribed on the stones under my feet.

We strolled up to admire the mosaics over the alter. There was a man hunched over in a pew in front of the alter ahead, apparently praying. Suddenly he sobbed violently. His body shook and he held his head in his hands. At intervals, the sounds of wracking sobs came from him and flittered up into the vast marble space under the church dome like sparrows. It seemed ridiculous for us to be standing there as visitors in the desperate zone of his prayer, like tourists in a refugee camp. Failing to truly believe in the powers to which he appealed. Knowingly bringing small, unobtrusive contagion into the sterile environment in which he was healing.

I'm not sure I grasp the importance of faith -- why shouldn't God just emerge from his celebrity recluse period and be a parent again? Remove from us the embarrassing necessity of an irrational leap of groundless faith. Install a high-speed prayer line in every home. Start taking requests on the most powerful radio station broadcast on earth. Put an arm around this poor man and walk him out to face the day.