I make odd connections. I don’t do it consciously—it’s accidental rather than deliberate. For example, the neurosurgeon’s adventure into the afterlife, reported in Joseph’s recent post, synched oddly with “Hobbit Day” at a children’s school in Lancashire. The basis of the weird synchronicity may have been “real versus unreal” because it brought to mind an idea I once had long ago, which I dismissed at the time.

It was around the age of twenty or so that I arrived, sadly and sagely, at the conclusion that God was probably not real. Because of the milieu in which I lived, I had to keep that intensely painful conclusion to myself, the secrecy causing my grief to intensify. It was then that this idea came to me: It doesn’t matter. I should make clear that I don’t mean merely that it didn’t matter to me—I knew that it didn’t matter, period. The experience was extraordinary, maybe even a little frightening, and certainly something I kept to myself, just as I’d kept my religious doubt to myself. (Having thoughts of one’s own in that milieu was as frowned upon as having doubts about the reality of God.)

Many years later, in quite a different milieu, where having thoughts was as obligatory as it had been forbidden when I was twenty, there were discussions and arguments about what “reality” is: reality is singular, it’s multiple, it’s illusory, it’s subjective, and of course, the perennial favorite despite its oxymoronic character: it’s “relative.” I participated in all this talk, but I could never take it seriously because, at the back of my mind, I already knew that it didn’t matter.

So, several years ago, when an aggressively atheistic neighbor boasted that he’d “died” during surgery and encountered only oblivion, he found me disappointingly unmoved. I remember shrugging my shoulders. I understood his disappointment in my lack of response—this “confirmation” of his belief that an afterlife is not real mattered to him; therefore, he thought it should matter. A while later, I had a student who was enchanted with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and we had wonderful and enthusiastic discussions about it. Then, during one of our conversations—the last one, actually—he suddenly became very sad and sober. “Oh, Ms. Hunt. It’s not real, and I can’t bear that. I just can’t.” I could only respond with, “It doesn’t matter,” but even as I said it, I knew he wouldn’t believe me. He took for granted the importance of whether the story was “unreal,” so it did matter to him, very much, so much that he stopped reading Tolkien. My atheist-neighbor’s gloating was pathetic, and my student’s loss was tragic. Neither of them knew that it didn’t matter whether Middle-Earth or an experience of afterlife was “real.”

A while back, I tried to watch a famous atheist debate a famous clergyman on the existence of God. The arrogance of the atheist was repugnant in contrast to the earnest defense of God by the clergyman, but otherwise, he seemed piteously credulous: He naively believed that it mattered; the pathos became too painful to watch.

I did try once or twice, briefly, to explain to myself why it didn’t matter, but I couldn’t—because, logically, if what is real versus unreal doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t matter. It may be just another of my odd connections, but I suspect now that my secret grief when I was twenty is somehow connected to my knowledge of the meaninglessness of the concept of real/unreal. In any case, I know that my faith has never been affected in the slightest by anyone’s opinions on the subject. And I suspect that I was given—without my awareness of it at the time—a great gift.