Ida Mae, still a true believer, died of untreated cancer. Ed and Larry stopped following Christ if they ever had. I don’t know what happened to the old man but he’s either dead now or has been kept going for the last twenty-five years by means of a feeding tube and respirator.

One moral of this story might be that when God really wants you to die He gives you something that doctors can’t cure. But another is that even those people in our culture who most believe in the soul believe even more in the physical body as the seat of the self. The hypocrisy of Ida Mae’s father might be extreme, but it isn’t unfamiliar.

Almost anyone who has thought about scientific materialism knows that at its objective heart is a void that will swallow up every human dignity, every religious yearning, every thought of honor and virtue and beauty and compassion in the world. But that doesn’t stop people from worshipping it in practice even as they scorn it in principle. Medical insurance takes up a larger and larger portion of our national income, even though what it guarantees for almost half of its beneficiaries is a longer, more painful, less dignified and lonelier death.

I have seen my own students go happily off to medical school, full of hope and idealism and a plan to make the world a less diseased, less tragic place. When I see them eight years later their most fervent faith in the world is in the God of Malpractice Insurance. But most of the rest of us would still rather place our bets on medicine than on any god.

Ida Mae’s father must have felt his own swollen abdomen and suddenly intuited what it must have been like to be Christ in Gesthemane, and headed out the door.

The Idaho writer Vardis Fisher wrote a massive book called Orphans in Gesthemane, which was his and supposedly our autobiography. The last quarter of it details his intellectual quest for meaning in a Godforsaken world. He found it in a kind of good hearted American pragmatism and empiricism—the Cyrus McKormick/Milton Friedman/Thomas Edison end of scientific materialism—but toward the end of his life he quite pragmatically and empirically drank himself to death.

This Godforsaken-ness isn’t simply a post-Nietzchean phenomenon, although Nietzche and World War I, the Holocaust, the rise of Orwell’s bureaucratic nightmare, the A-Bomb, the H-bomb, nerve gas and weaponized smallpox have given the current void a recognizeable shape. I made a joke about post-modernism earlier, which may not have seemed helpful to any post-modernists in the audience. It may not be politic to say that nihilism is as well served by post-modernism as by these other reductions of humanity to ashes. The people who deconstruct the axioms of hierarchy as an exercise in justice are outraged when their own axioms of equality are deconstructed in turn.

They shouldn’t be. The void has come before in the guise of well-meaning destruction. It’s there in Job and Homer and Sophocles. Shakespeare has Richard III and Prince Hamlet and Lear raging on the heath. Here’s Blake, addressing God, or what he can sense of God, in his poem “To Nobodaddy:”