About five years before, after a lifetime of agnosticism, I had come to believe in God. It started as a tentative experiment in prayer. Soon I was praying every day and the experience was undeniably powerful and transformative. I could see that praying had improved my life in any number of ways and so I was committed to it. But there was no system of thought attached to the practice, no church, no documents of any authority—nothing even particularly supernatural, if you except the presence of God himself.
