The XYZ Doohickey Company was founded in 1971, and has been providing quality doohickies to the public ever since. Located in Gotham City, XYZ employs over 2,000 people and does all kinds of awesome things for the Gotham community.

Holidays prove a hunch: the world runs fine without us. Our absence is at most a minor glitch in the steady functioning of the organization, a tiny spasm in the smooth ordering of society. It’s not even a hiccup in the rhythms of planetary motions. Things happen, and well, without our hovering and meddling presence. The world does not malfunction if we’re not there to tinker with it. Progress is made without us having to express an opinion.

      I write this in a seaside house on a small island. The house is light-soaked and quiet. It has sprawling cedar decks built to the edge of rocky shoals, and a large dock whose ramp teeters down to it as you walk out on it, a gang-plank-cum-see-saw. Almost every window frames a piece of sea and sky. In the mornings I sit in a window alcove, a fleece blanket draped over my shoulders against the morning chill, and pull things in close with binoculars. Our week here is a gift from good friends, who own the house, and who are themselves sleeping in an Atco trailer down the road to make room for us. My guilt about that is easily assuaged by the pleasure I take in everything: sunlight falling slantwise through windows, sailboats cutting white wakes in dark water, the smell of coffee, the sound of water on rock, the gray sleekness of the heron that perches daily at the dock’s edge, patient and watchful and quick as lightning when it counts.

Sometimes the only motivation for doing anything is that Jesus says so. Otherwise, we’re bankrupt. We simply can’t muster up the vision or energy to try one more time, to care for one more second. The only resolve we can make is to quit. In our eyes, this thing – this ministry, this marriage, this family, this friendship, this job – has come to a shuddering halt. It is over. It is dead. It is a black hole. All our efforts to change it have failed.