EMILY REID/Arizona Daily Wildcat

Why are we compelled to ponder the nature of the universe through mathematics? What kind of worldview does it take to be married to God in the Christian sense? Here, we look at faith not just as a strictly religious compulsion, but as a source of peace, in just a few of its infinite interpretations.

Mary got married young. When she was a teen-ager, she felt that there was something missing in her life. She remembers being at a dance with some boy, looking over his shoulder and thinking, "There must be something more than this."

So Mary did what a lot of people do. She finished college, and at 22, she settled down and changed her name.

Fifty-two years later, now called Sister Delores, she is a small woman whose delicate feet struggle to touch the ground when she is neatly seated in a rocking chair. She wears a black, shin-length skirt, black, flat shoes and a light, black sweater with a heavy silver cross sewn into the collar.

EMILY REID/Arizona Daily Wildcat

Delores answers the doorbells and the telephones at the nearby Benedictine Sanctuary. Every few minutes, the phone in the other room rings loudly, and she jumps up to answer it. Moments later, her voice goes out on the intercom, calling Sister Catherine or Sister Anne Marie to pick up on line one. When Sister Delores hangs up, she doesn't say "bye," she says "God loves you."

At 74, Delores does not settle easily into the idea that she is a bride of Christ. She has often seen Jesus as a difficult friend rather than a husband. But, she says, he is sometimes a lover, too.

"He doesn't change," Delores said, "but I do."

I ask if she thinks that her faith, that any faith, has to be in something unchanging. She answers yes without thinking. She tells me that in this way, it is like a marriage, it has to have the same sense of something solid. When I ask about faith in other things, numbers for instance, which are also solid and unwavering and can also lead you to new and profound truths, she frowns.

"Numbers can be messed with," she said.

I don't mention that God, at times, has been messed with as well.

I ask her if she has found what she was looking for, if that "something missing" she found in her teens has been resolved. She tells me that it has, but what she was looking for has changed.

"It's been so long I can hardly remember what she was like," Sister Delores said about the 22-year-old girl who entered a Benedictine convent more than half a century ago.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, the nuns in the convent get together, they laugh and drink beer. In a lot of ways, Sister Delores' life is not so unique. She was restless and searching as a teen-ager, and over the course of her life she has found some peace. Every morning, Sister Delores praises the day that is.