With the holidays coming up (or already upon us, depending on the holidays you observe), it’s typical that at this time of year our thoughts begin to turn to rituals, worship, and theology more and more. And, as we watch our friends and family celebrate in their own different ways and winter settles in around us, the natural companion to faith weighs more heavily upon us – doubt.

Faith and doubt are funny things. Like us, they behave differently as we grow older. They grow weaker or stronger, and begin obeying new rules as we come to know the world. The rituals and faiths we knew as children both gain and lose significance as the path behind us grows longer. At no other time do we become more keenly aware of this than during the holidays, when every moment is laden with childhood memories of impossible belief, and some moments feel like shadows of lost treasures. We are not who we once were, and the beliefs of our pasts are no longer wholly with us, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.

I’ve heard many friends mention this crisis, however elliptically. I’ve never personally experienced it, since faith and doubt stop mattering at all when faced with simple fact. Which is what I’ve personally experienced.

This is why I always try and tell people who are having these problems that it’s easiest to simply find a god. After that, you can just stop worrying about it.

At this suggestion, they usually try and awkwardly end the conversation or change the subject. I can understand that. I tell them that what I’m trying to impart isn’t any sort of spiritual enlightenment, nor am I trying to convert them. What I’m trying to do is just provide a field guide of sorts, like for birdwatching. Look for the signs and you’ll spot them out there, I tell them, and then you’ll find yourself worrying a lot less.

But they don’t listen. And that’s all right. I can’t blame them. But I thought it’d be best if I try and let you all know some helpful hints and tips to encountering a deity. I can’t say which one you’ll find – and there’s not just one, in fact there seems to be rather a lot – but whichever god you happen to find, you’ll certainly never forget it.

I never have, at least.

The first one I found is probably a good example. It was long ago, when I was still drinking quite a bit, and never thought I’d have property or prospects, or a concern beyond the next paycheck. I’d spend about every other weekday in some bar or another, wandering among pubs and holes-in-the-walls and rundown diners, seeing the same faces, sharing the same greetings and stories. It was a fog of a life where I was unable to see much beyond the next day or so.

Then one day I was told of a place I absolutely had to swing by. Everyone was going there, I was told. It was a place I had to see, out on the edge of town, a place called Milligan’s.

One day I did swing by, and found that for once the rumors were true. Everyone did seem to be at Milligan’s. Everyone and their brother and sister and their aunt. The place was absolutely packed, the crowd spilling out into the parking lot, and I couldn’t see why. It didn’t seem all that special. It was a big, leaning, ramshackle place, an old home that’d been converted to an inn and then into a bar. A faded painting purporting to be of the eponymous Milligan hung above the door with the name in white lettering below. The neighborhood around was nothing to speak of – it was out of the way and there were no other restaurants or bars around. But even as I watched, more people tried to shove themselves into the house, and I couldn’t understand it.

So this is the first tip for finding a god: there will be people. Lots of them. People where there should be none. You know how prophets always find a god while wandering out in the desert? It’s likely it went out there to try and find some quiet, but the pull was too strong, and someone came following. We’re drawn to them, you see, like lightning to the pole.

I went in, and soon found myself wondering why the crowd had to be outside at all. The place was absolutely cavernous inside. It felt like the inside of a mansion. The bar was as long as a battleship, and there were old wooden balconies lining the second floor. As I wandered in I saw many of the faces I’d seen before in my jaunts around the bars and clubs of the city, but they were different – they did not seem so slow and lost now. They seemed cleaner, happier. Sparkling, even.

I hustled up to the bar and got myself a drink and sat down. I chatted with whoever was on my left or right, and they happily obliged. While we spoke I wondered why they seemed to grin so much, but around the second drink I began to feel the same thing they were obviously feeling, and I knew it wasn’t the alcohol that was doing it. It took me a while to figure it out, and it was checking my watch that did it. The first time I checked it was 8:37 PM, but then when I checked an hour later – at least I could have sworn it was an hour later – it was 8:49.

This is the second thing to keep in mind: time does not work the same way around a god. The world moves slower, and – in my experience, at least – the minutes pass with a sense of pleasant warmth. I’ve tried to find substances or experiences that emulate that same warmth, but I’ve had no luck so far. To my regret.

I came back again and again to Milligan’s, and the long drive (and expensive taxi rides home) soon felt like small sacrifice in the face of visiting my favorite bar. Over the weeks, I came to be acquainted with Dunclan, the owner and frequent bartender. He was a short, pot-bellied man whose hard shoulders spoke of wiry strength, and he watched the world through cold, calm eyes that never smiled, or really ever did anything at all. They were set in his hard, lined face like pools of ice, and though we shared smiles and compliments, he was forever inscrutable to me.

Once I asked him how he’d managed to make Milligan’s such a roaring success. Other restaurant and bar owners would surely kill for the secret, I said. But he simply smiled and told me, “The only thing anyone needs is to constantly remember that commerce comes above all. I’m not providing a home, or a living room. I’m running a business. And doing a good job in the hospitality business means making people happy and comfortable so they keep coming back. If you do that, by whatever means necessary, then you’ve got a success on your hands.”

I later asked if he’d be willing to offer me a few specifics, and he gave me some – he pointed out how different sections of the bar were lit and explained why, how the balconies were arranged and decorated, how he had the music and the tables set up to direct traffic, and why he had the drink specials scheduled the way he did. And though these were valid points, they never seemed like the full truth to me.

I often wondered about the truth as I kept coming back. I began trying to look at the specifics he’d pointed out, like how he’d arranged his bar and so on, and as I did I noticed some odd things – besides the picture hanging outside the bar, there were no images of people or animals hanging on the walls inside Milligan’s. No photos, no posters, no advertisements. And no televisions. There were plenty of advertisements featuring words and landscapes, but no faces, and no creatures of any kind. I was surprised that I’d never noticed it before.

This is the third thing about a god: they don’t work well if images of other beings are being observed around them. It doesn’t even matter if the god in question knows it’s going on, or even cares. If there’s attention being diverted to something or someone else, it weakens them, or screws up whatever mojo they have running. And if they’re strong enough, those images will be removed. So, look for curiously blank walls, or photographs that have been strangely faded around the faces of its subjects.

There were other things I noticed at Milligan’s that surprised me, especially in how I’d never noticed them before. Chief among them was how there were no games there. No arcade games, no foosball, no pool, no airhockey. Not even darts. None of the usual diversions at all. I wondered why for some time, until I sat at a table next to a girl who was playing solitaire while she waited for her friends to arrive. She was about halfway through it and had come to a dead standstill, having missed some previous play that would have opened up the game to her, and she was pretty much stumped. She sat looking at the cards for some time, and then reshuffled the deck and tried again. Yet this time, everything was different. Every time she drew a card, it was the exact card she needed. She laughed out loud as she slapped them down, one after the other, wondering how something as simple as a shuffle could have changed anything. When she laid down the last card, completing the game, she punched the air in victory, but then faltered when she noticed something odd about it – some of the cards she’d drawn had already been drawn. Unless our eyes deceived us, she’d drawn three aces of spades, two Jacks of hearts, and seven twos of various suits.

At that Dunclan sidled over and quietly but sternly told the girl that they did not allow cards in Milligan’s, thank you very much. They knew it was an eccentric rule but it was one they’d revered since the original owner had started the bar, and he had not cared for games of any kind, and if she so desired then she could take the card game elsewhere. Which she quickly did.

This is the fourth thing: when a god is around, chance and luck go right out the window. A man can flip a coin five hundred times and get heads each flip when a god is nearby. Their very presence interrupts every rule the known world works by, and this becomes particularly noticeable when games of chance are involved.

I kept coming back to Milligan’s over the coming months, noticing these constant anomalies and vaguely wondering about them. I didn’t think much on them, as I was so caught up in the companionship and good cheer I could always find at the place. But then one December night, not like the ones upon us now, it happened.

I’d been waiting on Dunclan to fill an order, but he’d gone through the old wooden door behind the corner of the bar to get another keg started. Then as I stood waiting a nearby man who’d been drinking for some time stumbled and knocked over an entire table of glasses. Pints and mugs tumbled to the floor, sending dregs of beer cascading everywhere. Several of them smashed, and the din the bar quieted briefly as people turned to look. Then they laughed or gave a quiet ooh as they saw the full scope of the destruction.

Dunclan came hurtling back up. When he saw the overturned glasses his shoulders stooped and he gave a weary sigh. “These fucking people,” he muttered, and then grabbed a handful of rags and rounded the bar to help.

I watched, smiling a little. But then I felt a strange breeze ruffling through my hair, and the smile slowly left.

I turned to look in the direction of the breeze, and found it was coming from the door, which Dunclan had forgotten to shut all the way. The stairs behind it were dark, and I could not see much there. But a breeze was definitely wafting through that crack in the door, one that smelled somehow familiar to me. It smelled of perfume and summer fields and the rich promise of fruit and berries fermenting on the forest floor, of lavender and fresh hay, and somehow it even had the vague, almost nonexistent scent of a cold, clean brook.

This is the fifth thing: all gods have a smell. They will smell like a variety of things, and some may smell unpleasant. But no matter what, the scent will always seem familiar to you.

I stared at the dark crack. It somehow seemed to beckon to me. I was about to look away, and ignore it, as it was Dunclan’s business and none of my own. But then I heard a noise.

Something behind the door was singing. A high, sad song, with no words that I could tell. It sounded strange and beautiful, like cold wind whipping through old canyons. And it seemed like it was singing just for me.

I turned back to look at Dunclan. He was busy mopping up the floor. I stood, walked backwards towards the door as I watched the rest of the bar, and then turned and walked through.

The stairs behind the door were old and creaky and dusty, and so dark I could barely see anything at all. As I walked they groaned loudly, and when they did the singing below faded and stopped. I was not sure if I should continue, but I kept on.

The stairs led to the cellar of the bar. It was as spacious as the bar itself, and was lit by basement windows at the top of the walls which allowed faint starlight into the dark. The floor was smooth concrete, and all along the walls were cases of bottles and dozens of kegs, boxes of napkins and coasters, and in some places I saw where the absent televisions and posters of people had gotten to – they lay stacked in the corner, gathering dust.

I wandered deeper into the cellar, looking for whatever had made that strange sound. I expected to see someone standing down there, waiting for me, but I could find no one, though the scent of hay and summer fields grew stronger.

I almost gave up. But then I saw something in the furthest corner of the cellar. Something on the floor.

At first they looked like severed limbs, somehow. A foot and a shoulder and maybe an elbow, cut off from someone and lying there on the cement, next to a grate in the floor. But as I stepped closer I saw that they were not cut off at all – they were still attached to someone. Someone trapped in the cement, as though it had been poured around them and awkwardly frozen them in place, with only parts of them piercing the surface.

I stared at the figure trapped in the floor. The toes of the foot twitched slightly. Then I realized I heard a hushed breathing, and it seemed to be coming from the grate set in the cement. I swallowed and realized that the grate was positioned just where the person’s head would be.

I walked to the grate and looked into it. It looked in on a shaft set into the cement, and somewhere down the shaft I could see a head of some kind, but it was turned away from me and I could not see a face, not in those shadows. I could tell by the way that it was moving that the person was still alive, and breathing, and unless I was mistaken they were weeping.

I sank to my knees before the grate, and as I did the thing trapped in the cement began to sing again, that high, sad, wordless song I’d heard before. But I could almost understand it now – it sang of horrible sorrow, of years of being trapped in the dark, unable to move and barely able to breathe. It sang of decades of abuse for the purposes of power and greed, and it wondered if the world it once knew was still the way it remembered, or if the sights and tastes and smells it could recall were only dreams, delusions it’d created to survive its imprisonment.

As I listened to the song I began weeping as well, kneeling there in that starlit basement as hundreds of people caroused over our heads. They did not know what had drawn them here, and why. They did not know this horrible violation just below their feet.

That is the sixth and final thing: what a god feels, you feel. Its emotions are broadcast at a frequency you just can’t ignore. Sometimes it hurts just to see them.

Suddenly the singing stopped, and I saw someone standing off to the side. I looked and saw it was Dunclan, and he carried an old bat in his hands and his cold eyes were lit with an awful fury.

“You little nosy shit,” he said softly. “You just couldn’t stop wondering, could you.”

I tried to say something, but before I could he darted forward and the bat came down on my shoulder. I gagged in pain, and before I could even take a breath the bat came down again, this time on my head, and the basement blinkered out for me for a moment. Everything grew hazy and muted. Suddenly I was on the floor, and I saw he was still swinging the bat and knew there was pain somewhere within me, but I could not tell how much or even where.

Finally Dunclan let me be. He staggered away, breathing hard, and let the bat fall from his hands to clatter to the floor. Then he walked to the thing in the cement, and even though my senses were failing I heard him say, “I know what this is. You brought him here, didn’t you. Like you brought all the others. But you wanted just him to see.”

He dropped to his knees, just as I had before. “You fucking thing,” he whispered to it through the grate. “If I’d known what trouble you’d be I’d have figured out how to cut your throat ages ago.”

As if in answer, the singing returned. Soft and high, long, sad notes. Dunclan shook his head, and I saw tears were upon his cheeks.

“Don’t you do that,” he said to it, almost pleadingly. “Don’t you do that. Don’t you make me cry. I won’t have you making me cry.” Then he bowed forward and laid his head on the grate, speaking softly to the thing in the dark, asking it to stop, and maybe asking it for forgiveness. And then things faded for me.

When I awoke I was in an emergency room. The police were there. They told me I’d been found on the side of the street downtown, and I’d suffered a serious concussion along with some fractured ribs. They asked me, somewhat halfheartedly, if I could remember what had happened, or who had done this to me, or why.

I thought about it, and after a while I said no. I could not remember anything. After all, I told myself, it was unlikely if pressing charges would do anything. Dunclan was living quite the charmed life, due to what he had trapped in the basement.

I never went back to Milligan’s, though I understood it was still thriving. In later days I often felt somewhat empty, as though losing that occasional presence I’d felt in the bar meant losing a part of me, losing a light that had made the days more bearable. But I could not go back for that. Not if it was being used for such mean, petty reasons.

Maybe that’s the seventh thing. Maybe we need gods for our own little self-serving purposes. To make the next day feel better, or the next hour, or week. I can’t say. I get by as it is, just running into them occasionally, seeing them do their thing, and then moving on. Losing them and their odd moments as the world streams by me. It’s easier that way.

I used to wonder what could have been done. If I could have helped that thing I’d found imprisoned. But it’s like I said, you stop wondering and worrying about a lot when you finally encounter a god, no matter what condition it’s in. Some things are just beyond you, and you just have to get used to it.