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“We lit candles. Hema fell to her knees, the flame throwing a flickering light on her face. Her lips moved. She believed in every kind of deity, and in reincarnation and resurrection–she knew no contradictions in these areas. How I admired her faith, her lack of self-consciousness—a Hindu lighting candles to a Carmelite nun in a Catholic church. I knelt, too. I addressed God and sister Mary Joseph Praise and Shiva and Ghosh—all the beings I carried with me in the flesh and in spirit. Thank you for letting me be alive, letting me see this marble dream. I felt a great peace, a sense that coming to this spot had completed the circuit, and now a blocked current would flow and I could rest. If ecstasy meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me” — Abraham Verghese