I broke with my religion in college.

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.

God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.

I have to move away from organized religion. The toxic confusion and anger I was feeling in church had become too great.

Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.