The Church of Best Guesses

One is always alone in the Church of Best Guesses. If the Church believed in miracles, this would surely be one of them. But the Church considers it blasphemy to designate anything a miracle, which presumes insight into the mind of God, an impossibility for mortal witnesses to any divine plan, if there is one. We can, at best, experience traces, correlations. The physicist posits the strangeness of an interloper in three dimensions on the unyielding flatness of two. The believer in Best Guesses aspires to nothing more than discerning the four regularly spaced circles that could be the legs of a table or an apple’s quadruped base.

The Church is founded on three tenets, also known as The Facts, inscriptions of which edge the portal leading to a given worship space: YOU WERE BORN (left pier); YOU WILL LIVE (right pier); YOU WILL DIE (lintel). Beyond the threshold, the visitor enters what appears to be the aftermath of a raucous party yet to be cleared by the sleeping host. Empty folding chairs face each other in ragged constellations; a coat rack appears in their midst, dragged from its proper place for reasons that elude the sober observer. An unseen radio transmits the musings of a solitary broadcaster, freed by neglect or desperation into extremes of eclecticism: a symphony follows a honky-tonk ballad, bebop segues to ska or drum and bass. Further in, the seats assume an order, however intermittent, as free-standing arcs of varying lengths and widths. Occasionally, two arcs will face each other across an expanse of burnished floorboards; their arms align to form a smooth ellipse or perfect circle. But the pattern is never completed by the anonymous arranger, and even if it were, one can see that the extensions called for would just miss each other.

On closer inspection, the coat rack is hookless, and its dark, glossy wood is in fact an obsidian stone that dulls the loudest knocks of curious hands. The top of the monolith, known as the altar, is too high to be reached by human hands. One of the few regular duties of the Church’s deacons is to monitor news reports, record books, and other relevant authorities to ensure that this is always the case, adjusting height accordingly with a switch installed in what, in a traditional cathedral, would be the apse.

In place of saints and reliquaries is a wall of cork, fixed at regular intervals with cups for pens and pushpins, and small shelves stacked with note cards. The parishioner is admonished never to approach the wall with prayers on behalf of themselves or loved ones. The Guesser endeavors in thought and action to empty all trace of the human from the divine, whose power is stipulated too vast to mind or even perceive the cries of the desperate and dying. A hunter pursues quarry by assuming the shape and color of its territory; similarly, the Guesser will return empty handed if he or she fails to shed the telling essence of mortal expectation.

The wall is reserved instead for correlations, recorded anonymously by visitors who fasten their words without hope or ceremony into the blank cork. A correlation has never been specifically defined in the faith’s founding documents-little is. Models are presented in the hesitant scribbles of previous visitors, who use the cards provided to describe manifestations of the banal bearing imprints of a larger pattern: A sequence of numbers that haunt the observer from waking to slumber; a rain of feathers preceding the successful summons of a taxicab; the arrangement of birds on cables overhead, scoring the sky in alien letters. Whether delusion or divine providence is irrelevant. The faithful marvel at the beauty of the insubstantial, or their humble place in an order that will forever elude them. The visitor is instructed to add a correlation of his or her own before leaving, a sacrament that occurs with surprising expedience the longer one lingers beneath the growing mosaic of prose, verse, drawings, and digital photographs. When the cork is fully covered, its contents are removed-culled of takeout menus, advertising bills, and the gratuitously obscene-and pasted into the relevant volume of Church annals. Excerpts from the Correlation of Birds and the Correlation of Clouds have been published pseudonymously, generating occasional funding for the Church’s modest needs.

The strangest of the faith’s practices is perhaps its most familiar. Good Friday, which is celebrated every Friday, is marked by celebrations with family and friends, to varying degrees of excess. The following Saturday and likely Sunday are observed by sleeping in.