One night when the nurses had thrown me out of Jane’s room to get some dinner, I went for a walk. People had told me about a pathway through the hospital called The Pike that ran from the new section of the hospital for a full city block before it ended in the lobby of the original building.

Jane was in a coma that night–the first of three–and I was about at the end of my rope. She had been making progress, we thought. Her heart was growing stronger. She was having no real trouble with the physical therapy regimen they had set up for her.

But overnight she had become increasingly incoherent and in the morning had slipped into a coma for reasons no one understood.

At the far end of the trip I found a man with a deep faith in God. He told me that night that Jane would be all right but that there would be a time when we would have to weigh her quality of life into the equation: that this was God’s way of getting our attention.

I was reminded of that conversation today as I was flipping through some things on Facebook. A former student had posted a video about the differences between Jesus Christ and the religions that bear his name. And that reminded me of the conversation I had with a priest who was officiating at Jane’s funeral. I had told him that Jane and I were deeply spiritual, deeply faith-filled, but not particularly religious people in the sense that we were in a church with regularity.

I thought he understood what I said.

About a month later I went to that church for a memorial mass for Jane and others in the parish who had died in the previous month. The sermon was about how one could not have faith outside the church.

The spirit calls to each of us in its own way. For some that way is through a church. For others it is through meditation or a solitary walk in the woods. For others it is through the work that is put before them.

Jane and I tried to live our faith every day of our lives. It is a faith based on love–but not love for a god or a religion. Human beings need love more than any god does. They are hurting and hungry, stuck in abusive relationships and ignorance, and suffer from want and ill-health. They are in pain. They are, all of them, our sisters and our brothers, our sons and our daughters, our mothers and our fathers.

Jane’s illness and death changed none of that. It called attention to a group of people we did not know existed, but it could not change the basic thrust of our lives. To us, it never mattered what people believed–if they truly needed help, they got it–to the extent we could give it.

Love one another, Christ said when asked what was the greatest commandment, for in it all the others are summed up.

Neither Jane nor I would argue with that.