Four women entered my life and sat down in my mind. Gathered only by the fortuity of my occasional raids on the bookstores, what did they have to say to each other and to me? A neurotic Victorian lady who rose from a sickbed to found a church, a devout Anglican lover of mysticism and leader of retreats, an ex-agnostic Jew, and a Southern writer, Catholic in the land of born-again Baptists: beyond their common concern with religion, why bring them together?
But there they were, and the more I considered them, the more they seemed to be participants in the central problem of the religious perspective: how to relate ultimate meaning to the everyday, to find (in Yeats' words) "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor," not only in a stable in Bethlehem (as did Yeats' Magi) but here and now in our mortal condition.
