Recently I attended two Victorian-era-inspired holiday events at which the famous letters from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon and the response from Francis Pharcellus Church were read aloud. I had not heard these letters in many years and had forgotten how happy they make my heart. The older I get, it seems, the more willing I am to believe in a beneficent and wondrous world filled beauty, kindness, and happy surprises. I was, in my youth, “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” I clung to the certainty and security that various forms of fundamentalism gave me. But now I realize, along with Mr. Church, that there is far more to this life than what we can see or what