In bed with Cathie Adams!

George W. Bush has worked a miracle. He has gotten me in bed with Cathie Adams.

He is asking Cathie and me to trust him. “Trust me,” he keeps saying.

Trust him to what? Have the brains God gave a doorknob? Fine. Trust him that Harriet Miers will make a good Supreme Court Justice? Cathie and I have a problem with that.

For me, the problem is trusting George W. Bush. When I think about trusting him, I see him peering out the window of Air Force One at the Katrina landscape the third day after the storm, and then flying on to Washington, instead of turning the plane around and landing at Baton Rouge and being presidential. Here was a man proving once and for all that he couldn’t lead fleas to a dog, and now he is asking me to trust him?

For Cathie Adams, the problem is Harriet Miers. She may not be conservative enough for Cathie, who is a Phyllis Schlafly conservative and president of the Texas subsidiary of Schlafly’s “Eagle Forum.” Cathie expected Bush to nominate a potential Supreme Court justice with a proven conservative track record. Why he chose an unknown like Harriet Miers was a blow.

So now he says to Cathie and me: “Trust me.” But I can’t, and she can’t. Cathie told The Washington Post: “President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in God.”

So here are Cathie and me in bed together, two Americans who could not be farther apart in what we believe to be true, and neither of us having the slightest bit of faith in the President of the United States. How on earth did we come to this?

First, I have to get Cathie Adams out of my bed. She is a dead person walking. She has no faith in things unseen. My whole existence is faith in things unseen. I am in the 57th grade. This year I will learn things I didn’t know last year, in 56th grade, and next year in 58th grade I will learn things I don’t know now.

What will those things be? I have no idea. They are things unseen. But I know what I have faith in. I have faith in a spirituality that isn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again.

These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.

Faith in things unseen? My God, that’s all there is. In my life, anything is possible, and that makes tomorrow such an awesome mystery. But Cathie Adams wants to establish tomorrow before it gets here. And she represents the political base that put George W. Bush into the White House, with the serious expectation that he turn America into a dead land of faith only in things seen.

But now he has betrayed her! What can I do but shower him with gratitude? It is a most confusing time. Talk about things unseen. Never in my life did I expect I would become politicized, but knowing now that Cathie Adams is out there, 57th grade looks like it could be the year.