I wonder how long I can pull off this gig; how long I can get away with writing this blog that “outs” me spiritually while working in an industry like Hollywood that is far more hostile to Christianity than, say, apropos the metaphor, homosexuality.

How long before my fellow writers on a brand new job find out that the closet I come from is shaped like a cross? No matter that they’re a great group on a show whose very subject is the story of King David set in the modern world—do they know? Have they looked me up online and stumbled across these blogs that treat the Writers Guild strike with a title like “Picket Line in Babylon” and the immigration debate with “Who Would Jesus Deport?”

I’ve looked them up, of course, even if only to check their professional credits on the IMDB website. But in doing so I did Google one of them by mistake, and stumbled upon his Wikipedia entry. Have any of them done the same and stumbled upon my blog?

(I have no idea if looking me up online would even get them here in the first place, because for better or worse I have yet to Google myself. Is it me or does the phrase not have a certain perverse ring to it?)

Michael, Julie, Erik, J.J. and Kamren: if you’re reading this right now, you must let me know first thing tomorrow!

Clearly the problem is more mine than theirs. And for this reason I have used the blog at times as a means to “out” myself, to confront the matter of conviction—or lack thereof, in both senses of the word—in a public if mostly passive and isolated way. To be sure, my blogs are not about to get me thrown to the lions anytime soon.

And the problem is not just one of embarrassment in the workplace. I remember the same feeling in a vacuum after my third blog, titled “Back to Work(s),” in which I addressed the daily conflict between time in the prayer closet and time at the desk. Practically the moment I clicked SEND, the feeling washed over me that perhaps I came across as a little too earnest.

So let me up the ante and raise the earnest factor at that, tired as I am of being such a self-conscious you-know-what.

“There is a closet whose streams make glad the city of God,” to nearly quote Psalm 46. There is a closet in the corporate apartment in Los Angeles where I have come for six weeks to start this job, a job that will be based back home in New York starting in mid-July. Unlike the stuffed closets in my family’s apartment in Brooklyn, this is a gloriously empty closet. And in its emptiness I have found the perfect, literal, bona fide place for prayer.

You know what else? Sometimes I go into it naked, for the obvious significance the gesture intends. And just as I’m beginning to feel a bit bald-faced for writing this, all I have to do is think of Isaiah who walked naked for three years through the streets of Jerusalem. Not that I’m about to take to the streets of Burbank….

I can only imagine what the brilliant British critic, James Wood, would make of this piece, having just read his atheistic confessional, “Holiday in Hellmouth,” in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I’m not inclined to challenge Wood in prose, but aside from the fact that he abandoned prayer at the tender age of sixteen, which he fails to note with any regard for the pubescent perils of the teenage mind, his diction betrays a glaring lack of fluency in the phenomenon that he summarily rejects:

“And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel The Way of All Flesh—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.”

Inutility? If Wood had tried to come up with a worse word in the language on which to base his argument, he could have hardly done better. The compelling image of the bee notwithstanding, for all that I myself don’t know about the mystery of prayer, I do know this: the utilitarian approach will get one exactly where it should—that is, nowhere.

Yes, Jesus said, “Ask, and ye shall receive.” But woe to those who kneel (myself included) more for results than relationship.

The great thing about the prayer closet is that the more you come out, the more you need to go right back in.