I need a new God. I need somebody to pray to. For a few years now, I’ve been working on emancipating myself from my poisonous Catholic upbringing (a ridiculously belated enterprise which I only undertook in my fifties) and building a new kind of personal integrity, one that allows me, among other things, to be a poet with courage.

But being a human being, I share the religious impulse, the sense of the numinous. I want to avail myself of the benefits of meditation and centering prayer. But who do I pray to?

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