The Amish had Rumspringa, but Methodists had no rite for testing a secular life. I stopped praying, stopped witnessing to kids at school, stopped protecting my temple from poisons like lust and cigarettes at the Waffle House. I expected that I would, like all biblical characters before me, be taught a lesson and return to the fold, but in the meantime there was no discernible God, and without a God—without a reason for life or death—what good was a body? I asked this question. I had no answer.

Hunger was the closest ancillary I had to the rapture I’d felt when I went to the altar as a kid with open palms at weekend retreats, or the nights in silent prayer when I felt—or swore I could feel or needed to believe I could feel—the hand of God resting on my chest, or the mornings in church when I knew every word of the sermon was a message just for me, just at the right moment, divinely sent. Hunger was a pure devotion to the nonmaterial, and its hollow suffering felt like an act of faith, a denial of the world as I waited for heaven.