I read this last week and don't exactly get it. Unless it's that fact that sins of omission are way too easy to commit. Or maybe the irony that re-joining the Catholic Church didn't help the author reach out to a friend in need any better. Maybe even made it harder to reach out. Or the different, almost segregated worlds we move about and among in our personal lives.

But I appreciate, even if it isn't the point of the story, how the two Christians here interact, awkwardly. Like these episodes:

"When he did catch me, I told him that he should try to find a church and get settled — that he could find a social network there which would be useful to him. Well actually, I didn’t say 'social network.' To him, I said 'fellowship.' Furthermore, I told him that 'the Lord put this on my heart for him.' He seemed to take that to heart, even though I was trying to relieve my conscience of him."

"To re-assure him (myself too?) I slipped right back into the Evangelical-ese I had left behind when I came back to the Church and decided to become a writer. 'I’m glad you called tonight John, the Lord is blessing me through you.' Within five minutes, we had nothing to say to each other."

"tried to remember that tomorrow no one I meet will cause me to slip into that almost-cloying language of faith, no one I meet will want me to say, 'I’m praying for you.' In fact, they’d start avoiding me if I did say that."

Yesterday morning, a woman with a dispensational background in a Reformed church now described her friend's death as "the closest thing as a chariot ride to heaven as there is." Now, I understood it was a reference to Elijah - 'though I had distracted with a mental picture of the sun-god Helios. But her expression is not a way of speaking that's familiar to me.

via with a link to wiki's Anonymous Christian, if you aren't familiar with Rahner.