Get Your Soul-Saving Hindquarters Off My Porch

First of all, people, if you want to send strangers around to try to persuade me to join your religion, for goodness' sake, don't send the kind of people who make me think, You know, I really need to start answering the door discreetly armed. I mean, honestly, this guy, sixtyish or so, had the scariest eyes you've ever seen outside of a Southern Gothic movie. Sad, brown bassett eyes, with a deep and perfectly circular crease in the flesh around each one, like he presses coffee cups against his eyes for eight hours a day. I've never seen anything like it, and hope to never again.

He was stocky, this guy, with a heavy overcoat and a narrow-brimmed fedora. Behind him was a bigger, younger, more heavily built guy, dressed in work clothes and a knit cap—I should mention that it was bitter cold—and he had a perfectly round head too small for his body, small, piggish eyes, and that pink complexion that looks permanently scalded. He could have been the muscle for the old guy, I don't know. The old guy hands me a brochure, and of course it's for a church. I take it and thank him briskly.

Now he wants to know if I attend a particular church. Here comes the roping-in part of the pitch! "I prefer not to discuss that with strangers," I say. I mean for this to sound firm and final, and not exactly curt—did I mention it was really cold?—but at any rate the guy leans backward as if my sinful errancy is a fierce wind against which he can barely hold his ground. He's at least got the wit to see there's no sale here. "Well," he says, turning away with a faintly dejected air, "discuss it with the Lord."

I don't know. And I mean that—I really don't. I started doubting the existence of any supreme beings around the age of nine, I'd say. It feels like I have some sort of soul-like substance lurking inside me, but if I do, I don't have the faintest idea what it is, or where it comes from or where it goes. We see through a glass darkly if we see at all, that's clear enough. If there really is a Oneness, a Godhead in which human beings somehow partake, it's almost certainly unknowable to human minds, inconceivable, inexpressible. I think people sometimes sincerely feel that they're in touch with that thing. But to say you know it, to say it takes a certain form and wants us to do certain things and so forth, is, in my own humblest of opinions, a form of sacrilege. It's like saying you can see the whole universe. You may think you can, but in fact your nervous system isn't equipped to.

The breeze just blew a leaf through the air, and the cat, who's sitting on the piano, turned his head to watch it. It's in his nature to watch things that move, because they might be food. And it's clearly in our own human nature to wonder about life, and the universe. But I honestly wonder if we'll ever know more about those topics than the cat knows about leaves. And frankly, I just don't have much time for people who come to my door because they know how things are and they want to tell me about it.

I don't want to come off as any more eccentric than I already do, so I won't be putting a sign on my door explaining all this. But I'd like to. Something like this, maybe:

Hello

I do not need any new magazines, or to have my rugs cleaned, or to receive messages intended to save my soul. If I did I would make the necessary arrangements with someone other than random strangers on my porch. Please spare your knuckles the wear and tear of knocking. Thank you.

P.S. I'm glad you're happy in your certainty. I'm happy in my lack of it.

P.P.S. Have a nice day!

And one last thing: If you're going around to other people's houses doing this, can I make a suggestion? The verb in the sentence "Discuss it with the Lord" is in what grammarians would call the imperative mood. If you want to keep your sales prospects in a good mood themselves, you probably shouldn't, you know, sort of order them to do anything. Just sayin.'