At the beginning of Paul Claudel's play, the satin slipper, a Jesuit missionary lies lashed to a mast on the open sea.

His ship has been sunk by pirates, and he now drifts on a piece of wood.

The play opens with his last monologue.

Lord, I thank thee for bending me down like this. It sometimes happened that I found

thy commands laborious and my will at a loss and jibbing at thy dispensation. But now I could not be

bound to thee more closely than I am. And however violently my limbs move, they cannot get one inch away from these.

So I am really fastened to the cross, but the cross on which I hang is not fastened to anything else.

It drifts on the sea.

In his book introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict

the 16th, sees this image as a description of religious believers today.

And so this is quote one on the handout.

Fastened to the cross, with the cross fastened to nothing, drifting over the abyss.

The situation of the contemporary believer could hardly be more accurately and impressively

described. Only a loose plank bobbing over the void seems to hold him up, and it looks

as if he must eventually sink. Only a loose plank connects him to God, though certainly

it connects him inescapably, and in the last analysis he knows that this wood is stronger than the

void that sees beneath him, and that remains nevertheless the really threatening force in his

day-to-day life.

I think those of us who believe in God would recognize the truth of that description.

But Ratzinger continues, it's not only the believer who has such doubts.

The unbeliever, too, can never be completely sure that his empiricism, logical positivism,

or skepticism fully explain the world in which we live.

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