In other words, there was a physical feeling I’d grown accustomed to experiencing, not only during this trip but during all my trips combined, that had come to represent for me, perhaps without me knowing it or expecting it, the true purpose of the trip, even if there was always, also, another purpose, a more outward or explicit purpose, without which the trip would amount to little more than an exercise in movement.

Eventually I became aware that I was hungry, so I started to pay attention to the billboards that I was passing now and then on the highway, to see which of them were indicating the imminent appearance of fast-food chains or hamburger franchises that would be near enough to the interstate that I wouldn’t feel as though I was going out of my way were I to follow an exit ramp and patronize one of them. Not that I was in a hurry to get to where I was going, or that I was trying to keep to a very strict schedule, but that I’d gone on these road trips often enough to know that I liked to maintain, as much as possible, the directional momentum that is unique to long-distance driving, and that is, perhaps, especially unique to long-distance driving across the United States.

Insofar as a moment can yield that thing, whatever that thing might be.

Which is to say that I am choosing, I suppose, as I write, which moments to gloss over, or summarize, and which moments to take a closer look at, and abide with, until they have yielded to me, and to my reader, whatever thing in them I did not know for certain was there until I sought it, by way of language.

Not that I’m against science and philosophy, I like them as much as I like any subjects. I am merely trying to be judicious, as a writer, with regard to how deeply, or closely, I analyze the observations that I myself am making, as this narrative proceeds.

Then, I don’t know, nothing much happened. I switched the radio back on and found some music. And began to zone out again, and think about whatever. Meaning, I guess, whatever happened to come into my head. Which is a very inaccurate way of describing what transpires when a person does ‘zone out’, but which is perhaps as accurate a description as one can set forth, without resorting to science or philosophy.

After a while I came to. Which is to say I came out of the reverie into which I’d permitted the radio program, and the silence that had followed it (once I’d turned the radio off), to put me; and saw that I was still on the highway, in my vehicle; that the vehicle was moving along steadily, as if of its own accord, though I myself was driving it; and that the landscape outside the vehicle seemed to have changed only a little, if at all. All of which seemed normal to me, and unremarkable, and which I mention only because it was the thing that I remember happening to me next, chronologically, even if it wasn’t really a ‘happening’ in the strict sense of the word, but more like a non-happening. Or, perhaps, like the interim that exists between two happenings that might be related sequentially, but not causally.

But yes, as I was driving along the highway, in the same direction I’d been driving since that morning (when I’d rented a car from one of those rental locations in a neighborhood in the city where I live), I thought for a while about that line from Scripture, from the Gospel of Matthew, the line that Jesus had spoken to the Pharisees, when they’d been questioning him about some thing or another, trying to find a crime of which to accuse him, a crime agains the Mosaic Law, after he’d healed a person on the Sabbath, and had cast out demons from another person. And I did not arrive at any conclusion about it, if ‘conclusion’ is the right word, but simply dwelled on it, and tried to see my own life in terms of it; that is, what my own life had amounted to, so far. Because, as I said, the line itself, the words that Jesus had spoken, seemed to me to be of great consequence. Which I suppose would be true of any of his words, but which was particularly true about those words, for me, at that moment, because they were fresh in my mind, and I’d heard the man on the radio describing them, and putting them into context for his listeners, while I’d been driving and not thinking of anything else.

They are a particular kind of saint, I think, perennially childlike, yet not naive or unsophisticated. The rest of us are ordinary in comparison. Which is fine, I suppose. Or anyway inevitable. Though one should be careful using such a word as ‘inevitable’. Nothing is inevitable where free will is concerned. And free will is at hand in every human situation.

I say “likely”, but not “certainly”. Because there are those rare souls who see the faith for what it is from the beginning, and do not abandon it in any significant sense, ever, but stay with it, and mature in it, even as they are tempted and pressured in the same way that anyone would be.

If they don’t, their faith is likely to remain shallow.

What I’m describing isn’t uncommon, I don’t think, and I would guess that most Catholics, if not most Christians, go through such a stage, to one extent or another, when they are young.

I was that kind of person myself, in my teens and early twenties. Which isn’t something I’m proud of (I’m neither proud nor not proud of it), but which I recall here for what I think it elucidates, or suggests: that I couldn’t recognize the truth of the faith until, for a while, I absented myself from it.

It does not necessarily mean, however, a person who has never questioned that faith, never doubted it, or never turned away from it, for a time, and rejected it.

I am what is often referred to as a ‘cradle Catholic’, which means, most frequently, a person who was born to Catholic parents, who was baptized shortly thereafter, as an infant, and who has been raised and educated in the Catholic faith.

I should say that this was not the first occasion in my life that I’d heard this line from Scripture; I’d read it before many times, on my own, and had heard it read (whenever, for example, it happened to be part of the Gospel reading at a given Mass at which I was in attendance).

But it did occur to me, at least for a moment, before my thoughts moved onto something else, in keeping with the whims of my mind, or imagination, that the thing that Jesus had said, according to the evangelist Matthew (as related by the man on the radio program), was of great consequence, and perhaps of the greatest consequence, if you believed it, and if you looked at it in a particular way.

Which isn’t to say I thought about it long and hard, or something like that. I tend to daydream when I’m driving, and sometimes I’ll intend to think about one thing for a while but will end up thinking about something else.

I’d listened for a while, and then, when the conversation between the man and the host of the program on which he was a guest had moved on to another topic, I’d reached for the dial and had switched the radio off, not because I found their conversation disagreeable, or boring, but because I wanted to think about what the man had been saying, and I needed silence in order to not be distracted.

The reason I was thinking about this is that I’d heard a man on the radio mentioning it, or describing it, while I was driving on the highway after I’d gotten into my vehicle at a gas station and had started the engine and had begun adjusting the dial that tunes in the various stations, or channels.