In the moments before he died, Mathias Thompson suddenly understood, with a cerulean certainty of the sky being blue on a cloudless summer day, that there was a God. An immense sadness expanded within him, and he recalled the time his mother took him to walk the Via Dolorosa in the old city of Jerusalem when he was thirteen years old. It had long been his mother’s wish, indeed, her prayer, that Mathias would embrace the faith he had been raised in. At first, it seemed preordained: Baptism, First Communion, Reconciliation, then Confirmation, all within the chaste environment of a rural town in Wisconsin and a prayerful start in the local parochial school. During the daily masses at St. Mary’s Church, from midway down the second pew on the right, there was little doubt in young Mathias’s mind that God existed and that He was good.

The first crack in Mathias’s conviction was the day his father died. The fact that he died on Easter Sunday would seem to have been significant; however, this was negated by the other fact that he had killed himself, with the car, in the garage, and that Matthias had found him upon exiting the school bus that had dropped him at the corner, half a block from the duplex in which he lived. His mother, a medical transcriptionist, wouldn’t be home for another hour. He stood before the garage door, exhaust leaking from where the seal was broken on the bottom, knowing that something bad was on the other side and that his life was about to change. It was an accident, his mother said. He must have fainted, or maybe it was his heart. There was a family history of that, she said, but whether true or not, the final fact was that Mathias could discern no divine purpose in his father’s passing. And in that moment, sitting next to his father in the car, Mathias experienced doubt.

The second crack in Mathias’s conviction followed the first a month later when he entered the public school system and encountered Cindy. It’s not that he was not familiar with girls before—it’s just that they had never seemed to be impediments to his future in the Jesuits, like Father Ryan used to be, until he met Cindy in the seventh grade. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and with a face that could launch a thousand ships like in that story he read, Mathias instantly knew he would never be a priest.

Sensing the emotional distance developing in her son, Mathias’s mother prayed fervently for him to find his way back to God, as well as for her own salvation for the sin she had committed. Despite repeated appearances in dark confessional booths across northeast Wisconsin, confessing the same sin to multiple priests, she was unable to accept God’s forgiveness, which she remembered from Father Ryan’s sermon as being the worst sin of all.

Desperate, and newly rich, Mary Thompson took her son on a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group from the parish of her parents who did not know her and led by a priest she had managed to not confess to. It was the fourth day of the Pilgrimage when she and Mathias walked the Via Dolorosa, the fourteen stations of the cross, singing over and over the words of the good thief who was crucified on Jesus’s right, spoken before he died. Those were the words that came into Mathias’s mind in the moments before he died.

It was inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, at the 12^th station, Jesus dies on the cross, where Mary finally found her salvation, on her knees, her arm in the small opening beneath the altar placed there by the Greek Orthodox Church. When she touched the rock of Calvary, she again began singing the words of the good thief, even though everyone else had already stopped outside the church. Her voice lifted up from beneath the altar, filling the entirety of the space above. She was crying and singing both, like a most beautiful Gregorian Chant in a strange language, yet still understood by everyone there. Mathias, standing in line behind his mother, was embarrassed by the attention she was drawing, so he bent over and, taking care to keep her from bumping her head on the altar, he gently helped her stand. Further embarrassed by the hot tears on his own face, he led her away, forgetting to touch the rock of Calvary himself.

The third and final crack in Mathias’s diminishing conviction occurred years later during an elective at Oxford with Richard Dawkins in his sophomore year. This was perhaps the most severe insult to his impressionable young mind, for the attraction of the intellectual argument presented by such a respected personage as the good professor. The three cracks that had accumulated over time in the soul that was Mathias Thompson coalesced into a cavernous fault, such that any remaining conviction fell away. All that was left was doubt, a required feature of faith, but then that residue of doubt quickly underwent a transfiguration, not even into an absence of belief, but rather into a belief in the absence of God. Mathias had become an atheist.

This was Mathias’s state of spirituality, or rather, his absence of spirituality, when he boarded the 737, fatigued from a licentious night of adulterous behavior. However, he remembered to text Cindy, between taking his aisle seat in the last row of First Class and the stewardess bringing him a Manhattan.

Geese don’t fly at 36,000 feet, so it is difficult to say what destroyed the portside engine. The flames and smoke were clearly visible to Mathias in the formerly bland blue oval of the window as he stood in the galley, visiting with the stewardess before her mandatory trip down the aisle to deliver beverages, cookies, and pretzels to the proletariat in the back of the plane. Regardless, the sudden lurch, followed by the weightlessness of a jet plane dropping at 32ft/sec/sec, made it abundantly clear to Mathias, as he fell up to the ceiling, that he was going to die.  His mind expanded with the memory of the Via Dolorosa, his mother’s song, and he understood that God existed. There was a complete absence of doubt. It became the central truth in his mind, the flaming engine outside the window becoming Mathias’s burning bush.

The plane landed on a farm field in Michigan between Baldwin and Ludington. The left wing snapped in half, then the right. The fuselage broke into two as the plane carved a black furrow in the earth before coming to a rest. There was only one death in the forward section, the sole unrestrained passenger. In the back, from the 10^th to the 30^th row, all lived. The airline credited the relatively positive outcome to seat restraints and the pilot and crew, but the survivors knew it was because of who they described as the man in front. Every passenger in the rear section described him as looking at them, as if each were the only one.

The video shot on an iPhone by the woman in 11C at a 0.5 wide angle went viral, becoming the most viewed TikTok video of all time, replayed over and over and over again. From the air, drone footage revealed the burned husk of the plane in the shape of a cross, and in a cerulean sky on the day of the accident, clouds in the shapes of angels. The Michigan Miracle, as it came to be known, was recognized by the Archbishop of Detroit, which meant that Mathias, theoretically, had the requisite one miracle required for beatification.

In the video, amidst the screams and cries of passengers and the metal-rending roar of a jet engine dying, a man falls from the ceiling in the aisle of the ninth row. He lands on his feet and stands, his arms outstretched, hands braced against the luggage bins on either side. He does not appear fearful. He is not screaming.  Instead, his eyes are filled with sadness. Tears are on his cheeks. Then, he begins to sing.

“Jesus, remember me, when You come into Your kingdom.”

With the plane in a steep dive, he continues. One by one, the passengers join in until, up and down the entire cabin, the air is filled with song that overcomes the terror and harsh roar of engines. “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom,” they sing.

Just before the plane strikes the ground and splits in two, the nose lifts, and the passengers are thrust back in their seats with a sudden, inexplicable, and gentle deceleration. The video’s last shaking, unsteady image is of Mathias with his arms outstretched, his head lifted, his face filled with a grace and peace not previously there.

“Jesus, remember me,” he sings, before disappearing in a brilliant flash of light.